Documentary : The Battle of Moscow: Behind the Lines : Amid the blood and chaos, reporters find normal people swept up by an abnormal event, and an eerie casualness.

MOSCOW — His name was Sergei, a young riot cop sitting on a curb in the shadow of the White House, the long besieged Parliament headquarters. His hands were bloody and his eyes teary.

In a daze, he said that he had just carried away from the front lines the body of his wounded commander, who had taken a shot in the back from opponents of President Boris N. Yeltsin during Sunday’s riots. The only way he could have stopped the crowds breaking through his line to the White House that day was to shoot, he said.

“Did you have orders to shoot?” asked Times staff writer Sonni Efron.

He looked back, uncomprehending. “I am a normal person,” he said.

For three bloody days in Moscow, Times correspondents and reporters encountered normal people caught up in an abnormal event. Not for decades had gun battles echoed across the city--for all the brutality of the Soviet regime they lived under, Muscovites are still having trouble coping with Western-style street crime, much less violence on this kind of military scale.

Things had begun fairly quietly on Saturday, with pro-Communist demonstrations that have become familiar elements of the local political landscape. At first, it was striking how self-contained those demonstrations appeared.

The trouble on Saturday seemed to erupt out of nowhere, like a squall. That morning Yeltsin himself had appeared at a 500th anniversary festival for the Arbat, the stately old street that is Moscow’s oldest. Once the home of the poets Alexander S. Pushkin and Mikhail Y. Lermontov, it now features a pastel-painted series of souvenir shops, a Baskin-Robbins and a McDonald’s.

At the western end, organizers had erected a bandstand for the festival. And young couples, many pushing baby carriages, had already gathered when the first demonstrators, hauling a red Communist flag, arrived at the other end of the Arbat, in Smolenskaya Square.

Almost within moments they were fighting with troops of the dreaded OMON riot police, wearing black berets and purplish camouflage outfits, and wielding clubs. The demonstrators fought back with iron tubing ripped from the stage.

Staff writer Michael A. Hiltzik arrived soon thereafter, when a few hundred demonstrators had already thrown up barricades across the Garden Ring Road, a major highway that circles central Moscow and which on any workday is normally choked with traffic. Fires were burning at points along the barriers. Demonstrators dismantled a truck for armor and siphoned off its gas for Molotov cocktails.

The riot police stood in disciplined lines opposite the barricades, doing nothing to stop demonstrators from crossing in either direction. Two young Russians walked along one line carrying a case of greenish bottles. “Pivo! Pivo!” (“Beer! Beer!”) called one, laughing. In fact the bottles were filled with gasoline.

“What are you going to do about these guys?” one police colonel was asked. “We’ll act, of course,” he said.

“You have orders?”

He shrugged. “Poka nyet. “ So far, no.

In fact, the standoff--a microcosm of the political stalemate taking place half a mile away at the White House--lasted eight more hours. By then, at 10 p.m., a chilly night had descended on the city and political operatives within the barricades were vastly outnumbered by young drunks and revelers. From the remains of the bandstand, Ilya Konstantinov--one of the more eloquent, and for that reason frightening pro-Communist legislators--delivered a final nighttime exhortation.

“Go home and conserve your energies,” he shouted through a bullhorn, “for tomorrow’s meeting.”

That demonstration was set for 2 p.m. Sunday at October Square, at the foot of a towering statue of V. I. Lenin, coattails streaming behind, that has been a favored rallying point for Communist sympathizers since the August, 1991, hard-line coup attempt.

Drawing a lesson from the previous day’s stalemate, police had arranged a massive presence at the square, determined to keep the protesters from seizing ground and again throwing up breastworks.

Still, the police were outnumbered as much as 10 to one. And they were inexperienced at crowd control on this scale, protest rallies having disappeared from Soviet popular culture for some decades before reappearing in 1991. Efron considered them curiously tolerant, given the potential for trouble.

Efron had arrived in Moscow on May 1, the date of a similar demonstration in the same place. Since then there had been so many rallies that some of the faces in the crowd had become familiar.

This time, incited by a string of hortatory speakers, the crowd surged onto the Garden Ring Road, about two miles from the site of the previous day’s events, overwhelming the police line like a tank over a hedgerow. Quickly the scene shifted to the White House, the hub of the parliamentary standoff.

There Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi was playing--perhaps overplaying--a dangerous hand. As the government militiamen who had surrounded the building for days looked on uneasily, Rutskoi communicated the October Square triumph to his own listeners, numbering in the thousands.

Emerging behind the White House, ringed by television cameras, he urged the crowds to go to the broadcasting station at Ostankino to seize state television.

He stabbed with his index finger in the direction of the Mir (Peace) Hotel, a government hostelry across the square, and the building housing the mayor’s office, an adjacent high-rise designed to look like an open book.

“Go to the Mir Hotel where their main forces are, take away their weapons!” shouted the ex-major general. “They are getting ready to storm us! The soldiers are demoralized. We must be more daring and courageous!”

Then, having set this particular Russian troika rolling uncontrollably down the hill, he turned on his heel and went back inside. In his wake, the crowd surged into the Mir and overwhelmed the guard between the White House and the mayor’s office. Seizing a government truck, they ran it through the latter building’s plate-glass wall and flooded in.

In a northern suburb, Times Moscow bureau staffer Andrei Ostroukh was staring apprehensively as truck after truck came up the street toward the state television center, where he was stationed. Waves of people rolled out of the vehicles, many carrying firearms, some even with axes. He thought many were drunk.

One truck rammed the station entrance and was answered by two shots from government grenade launchers. That was followed by a full-scale defense fusillade, answered sporadically by the attackers.

Later, at 2 a.m., Ostroukh and Hiltzik returned to the site in a Moscow bureau car for an update. Red tracer bullets streaked across the sky and ricocheted off neighboring apartments--Moscow is a city where every district is residential. A full-scale cross-fire was in progress and a line of ambulances stood parked on the leeward side of a long granite building, their crews in the road watching the shooting.

“Are there lots of victims?” they were asked.

“Of course, lots,” a nurse answered. “What would you think?”

Monday brought another brilliant Indian summer daybreak, coinciding with a tank advance over a downtown bridge.

“A full-tilt battle in the heart of Moscow,” thought Times staff writer John-Thor Dahlburg. Was this the first time since the Russian Revolution? The Napoleonic invasion? He couldn’t make up his mind, but knew that in his nearly seven years as a Moscow correspondent it was the most awful, dismaying event of all.

He was running down a Moscow River embankment past a 1930s-vintage factory, maybe 150 yards from the White House when he heard the nasty snap and whistle of a passing bullet. Sniper, he thought immediately.

Monday’s events in Moscow far outdid in violence and carnage the failed August, 1991, coup d’etat, which collapsed after three Russian boys died in an altercation with Soviet armored units on the Garden Ring Road. As Dahlburg watched, stretcher after stretcher carrying the dead or wounded was carried out of the White House.

Troops loyal to Yeltsin hit the Parliament with machine guns, grenade launchers, tanks, artillery shells and semiautomatic rifle fire. Dahlburg relied on the Russians around him for that detailed information, since in a country that long had universal military service for males, any man can dissect the sounds and smoke puffs of weapons with the eye and ear of a connoisseur.

“Ah, there’s a grenade launcher,” one middle-aged man with sunglasses said. “Also, you hear those Kalashnikov bursts?”

One tall and bald Russian approached Dahlburg with a transistor radio. “It’s you Americans who are responsible for this,” he said, rather politely considering the circumstances. “You’ve equipped Yeltsin.”

“Those are Soviet-made tanks he’s got, not American,” Dahlburg observed.

“I mean, you’ve given him lots of money.”

Dahlburg spent three hours on the riverfront outside the International Trade Center, which commands a view of the front of the White House and which is known to Western residents of Moscow simply as the “Mezh,” an abbreviation of the Russian word for “international.”

The center, built by the late Occidental Petroleum Chairman Armand Hammer, once had the only sushi bar in town, the Sakura. Where an Italian supermarket now stands there once was a Soviet, hard-currency Beriozka that was one of the few places foreigners could find good meat and a fresh vegetable or two in winter.

The Mezh became a sideshow to Monday’s battle. There was at least one sniper in the upper floors of the office tower, where British Airways and Delta Airlines have their Moscow ticket counters. After the gunman opened fire, a detachment of OMON anti-riot police, fitted out in Soviet army helmets and bulletproof vests, screeched up in jeeps and cars, and opened up with their submachine guns on the two higher floors, shattering the windows.

The sniper kept moving around the top floors and shooting, exasperating the OMON troops. An officer suddenly noticed the small knot of people Dahlburg was with and started running at them.

“Get over there, quick!” the officer bellowed, and loosed a burst from his Kalashnikov over their heads. They ran back toward the barge Alexander Blokh, home to a floating restaurant, and away from the White House. The OMON troops kept shouting and lowering the barrels of their weapons.

“Guys, I can sense we’ve worn out our welcome,” Dahlburg said. “I’m going to look for a safer vantage point.”