I imagine the historical debate about the events of last September and October will circle around one question -- did Boris Yeltsin dissolve the last parliament to speed up democracy or did he set back the democratic process?


There are plenty of pointers in the first direction but for a depressing dose of the second theory you can do no worse than pick up a book on last autumn's events, entitled Ploshchad Svobodnoi Rossii, or Free Russia Square, after the square outside the White House.


The book is a collection of published and unpublished eyewitness accounts of the events. Many are from the opposition press, Pravda and Sovietskaya Rossiya, but they are balanced out by material from pro-Yeltsin papers like Izvestia and Moskovsky Komsomolets.


What comes across loud and clear is that last fall was a victory, above all, for intolerance.


The police, in a broadcast to the White House defenders the night before the storming of the building, spit abuse at those inside: "we'll take no one alive," "we'll hang them on the flagpoles on every lamp-post," "cockroaches," "dead men" and a lot more that is unprintable.


On the other side of the barricades was an equally repellent collection of graffiti calling Yeltsin and his team Zionists, Fascists, masons and murderers all at once. Men with swastika armbands swaggered round the corridors of what the leadership of the Supreme Soviet was calling "the defense of the constitution."


In this carnival of hatred the Jews got it both ways. On the inside we heard that it was all a Jewish plot: Andrei Kozyrev is actually named Friedman and takes all his orders from Tel Aviv, etc.


And yet here is Oleg Rumyantsev, the bearded deputy, describing how he came out of the building: "a drunken character grabbed me by the beard: 'come here, face of a Yid.'" Then, he says, the OMON, the Interior Ministry troops, kicked him in the testicles, made him kneel and fired shots over his head.


Up until the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet both sides in the power struggle had veiled their personal loathing for each other with talk of constitutionality and legitimacy. Now the sores had burst and the rabid dogs of Russian politics were let off the leash.


Both camps essentially relied on their thugs -- men trained in the brutal schools of the Soviet security forces on the one side and a group of scary hardline extremists on the other. In one account in the book, which sounds almost too like a Greek tragedy to be true, White House defender Gennady Portnov stumbles out of the building virtually straight into the arms of his brother, a sergeant in the Moscow OMON. Both sides were cut from the same cloth.


Not that we should be too judgmental about them. These were the men who got killed after all, carrying out the orders they were given from higher up.


Then in the state of emergency that followed Oct. 4, the OMON stayed on the streets; only the targets changed.


By a spectacular leap of logic, that would have made an Einsteinian physicist proud, the crackdown in the state of emergency was suddenly directed against lits kavkazskoi natsionalnosti, Moscow's Chechen, Georgian and Azerbaijani communities. The provincial policemen who were sent to Moscow to hunt down neo-fascist snipers ended up doing work they will have found much more congenial -- kicking and beating anyone with a brown skin and black eyes.


Another article in the collection, from the weekly Obshchaya Gazeta, tells the story of Vladimir Klebanov, a dissident trade unionist who spent 20 years in detention in the 1960s and 70s. Last year he was a member of the constitutional assembly, which tried to hammer out a draft constitution that was to the liking of both president and parliament.


On Oct. 16 Klebanov was arbitrarily arrested, beaten up and thrown in a prison cell for the night with a group of unlucky Caucasians for company.


When he showed the police his pass to the constitutional assembly they told him it had been disbanded along with the Supreme Soviet. "You were in the same company as them, you should be deported to Tel Aviv," they said.


It's all depressing reading, particularly if you reflect that today the country has a constitution affirming human rights, but still no functioning constitutional court. We can all heave a sigh of relief that the White House rebels lost a year ago. But it looks as though the liberals, the constitutional democrats and the non-Russians lost too.