It was a painful sight for all who watched – whether behind the police barricades leading down to the Moscow River or on CNN. Artillery shells blasted gaping holes in the walls of the Russian parliament building where several hundred supporters of Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi and Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov were defying President Yeltsin's decree to disband and submit to new elections. Thick black smoke billowed from the windows of the upper floors, blackening the white marble facade. A Russian woman, watching in disbelief remarked, “This sort of thing doesn't happen in civilized countries.”

At the root of the crisis between President Yeltsin and the Russian parliament that resulted in the violent confrontation at the White House in October 1993 was the conflict over the fundamental constitutional structure of the new Russian state. Constitutions, by their very nature, establish political institutions and allocate power among them. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the necessity of ratifying a new Russian constitution became a matter of utmost urgency. The demise of the Union left a ramshackle array of institutions and laws, some left over from the Brezhnev era, and others the product of Gorbachev's turbulent reforms.