The Soviet general, the black-clad beat poet and the constitutional pioneer. Three defenders of the White House have mixed feelings remembering the siege of the Russian parliament building a year ago.


Vladislav Achalov, Eduard Limonov and Oleg Rumyantsev represented three very different strands of the opposition. After President Boris Yeltsin dissolved the Supreme Soviet last September they came together under one roof. But the bombardment by Yeltsin's tanks on Oct. 4 scattered them, and with them the dream of a united opposition in Russia.


Some of the White House defenders chose compromise. Ivan Rybkin, a communist deputy in the Supreme Soviet, stayed the siege to the end only to become speaker in the new State Duma and strike up a good working relationship with Yeltsin.


Others, such as former vice president Alexander Rutskoi, have taken the road of outright confrontation, swearing revenge for the bloodshed of Oct 3 -4.


Achalov, 49, who was made defense minister in the shadow government inside the White House and jailed on Oct. 4, gave up active politics after his release from prison in February under the State Duma's amnesty.


The storming of the White House had a special taste of irony for him because two years prior he had drawn up plans for the coup plotters of August 1991 to attack the same building, then the center of Yeltsin's resistance. But he said he had imagined 1993 would end differently.


"No one believed, no one expected that the president would resort to that, to the shedding of blood," Achalov said.


The burly, ruddy-faced general, a veteran of Soviet crackdowns in Tbilisi, Baku and Vilnius headed the defense of the White House from an armor-plated 13th floor bunker. But when the tank-shells started raining into the building he was safely down below.Achalov said he now thought the decision by the opposition to stay together inside the besieged White House in 1993 was a strategic mistake: "It gave them the chance to blockade us completely, cut off all connections, deprive us off all information."


Limonov, the former emigre writer, 51, was also to be found on the 13th floor, revelling in the crisis. A lover of armed conflict who fought in Abkhazia and with the Serbs in Croatia, he took part in the battle at the Ostankino television center on Oct. 3.


"It was damned from the start," Limonov said of the stand in the White House. "There's no doubt about it, it was damned because so many forces participated, there wasn't one leadership and the leadership we had was weak and indecisive."


The slim writer, who dresses entirely in black and sports tinted glasses, was once most famous for his homo-erotic novel "It's Me Eddie" written in New York. Now he said he has given up his home and literature to become a radical revolutionary.


"I live everywhere, like a conspirator," Limonov said.


The third White House defender, Rumyantsev, 33, looked more and more haggard and weary as he sat out the siege in his spacious second floor offices. He was badly beaten up when he emerged from the White House on Oct. 4.


Rumyantsev was a leading member of the democratic movement in the Gorbachev years and wrote the parliament's draft constitution. But he said he had no regrets about staying in the same building as the neo-fascists and radical communists.


"I made a big sacrifice," said Rumyantsev. "I paid for the mistake I made in 1990 and 1991 when I was a radical democrat. I thought that if Russian and Western public opinion saw that the there were people in the White House like Rumyantsev they would understand that it is a genuine parliament."


Rumyantsev said that the storming of the White House had been the end of Russia's political innocence.


"All the beliefs people had in fairness of power, in democracy, their imagination were crushed by the tanks," he said. "Now they feel the deepest disbelief and despair."


A year on the opposition is still groping its way. Most crucially it still has to find an undisputed leader -- or agree that it wants one at all -- despite the way former vice-president Alexander Rutskoi has anointed himself in the role.


"We ought not to choose a leader," Rumyantsev said. "Rutskoi has big potential, but big drawbacks. He is much too outspoken, he needs to be part of a team, not on his own. I don't want him to be Yeltsin No. 2."


Achalov acknowledged that the opposition suffered from a "cult of leaderism," with too many candidates for the top job, but he preferred not to comment on them.


Limonov, the self-confessed extremist, has no worries about offending anyone.


"We had many forces arrayed against the Yeltsin regime, but no unity," he said. "A year later we have a split. I am against the false nationalist Zhirinovsky and the false patriot Rutskoi."