Yeltsin

CHAPTER ELEVEN Falling Apart, Holding Together

When inducted as national leader, Yeltsin intended to stick to economics and treat the structures of government with benign neglect. In retrospect he described this behavior as a mistake: “I probably erred in choosing the economic front as my principal one and leaving governmental reorganization to endless compromises and political games.” It put the economic program itself at risk, since, “without political backup, the Gaidar reforms were left hanging in midair.”¹ He soon reconsidered: In order to use the state for his ends, he had to hold it together, and in a way that gave him and not others the steering power.²

His constitutional options in 1991 were not rosy. An attempt to reorder Russian institutions, at the moment Russia was unscrambling itself from the Soviet Union, was sure to strike many as distracting and incendiary. Yegor Gaidar, for one, was dead set against it. In any such move, Yeltsin would have bumped foreheads with other loci of authority, starting with the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, where his majority was precarious. Even were he somehow to force new parliamentary elections, voters, he admitted later, might not have elected “other, ‘good’ deputies.”³

The Soviet reflex was to consign almost any human problem to an administrative department of government. The liberal approach, flaunted by the youthful reformers and by the Western powers and organizations whose advice Yeltsin sought, posited solutions to lie outside of government. Had he acted strictly in this spirit, he would have chopped the post-communist state and pushed it out of the way of nongovernmental actors. Measured by the size of the bureaucracy, this was not quite obtained, as the workforce in the federal, provincial, and municipal governments drifted up by about 10 percent (from 2,682,000 to 2,934,000) between 1992 and 2000.⁴ But these figures exclude the host of Soviet factory-level managers who were struck from the rolls during the change to the market. Shock therapy and price decontrol reduced officialdom’s directive and regulatory grip on Russian society. And privatization, from the vouchers of 1992–94 to the loans-for-shares initiative of 1995–97, reduced its monopoly over resources.⁵ Yeltsin lent support to it at almost every step and believed that when it was over only electric power, atomic energy, the military-industrial complex, and the railroads should be left on the state ledger.⁶ In loans-for-shares, first authorized by Decree No. 478 on May 11, 1995, the government turned twelve large properties, mostly with high-value petroleum and mineral assets, over to private banks to manage, in return for forgivable loans from the banks. The banks were allowed to run stock auctions in which they themselves could place bids on the shares deposited with them as collateral for the loans. The auctioneer or an affiliated business won every auction of the state shares—a spectacular act of selfdealing. Formal title to them was reassigned a year later.⁷

The paring in governmental scope, while desirable, raised difficulties. Preeminent among these was the lack of clarity about boundaries between the public and the private realm and about responsibility for seeing to it that the state in its entirety did not go to smithereens. Shifting boundaries meant shifting options for individuals. Consumerism and affluence, forbidden fruit under the communists, were now smiled upon, but the seam between these licit wants and illicit avarice was not well demarcated. The short-range thinking bred by high uncertainty made many officeholders greedy, for feathering one’s nest was one way to hedge against an unascertainable future. As the trenchant Oleg Poptsov noted, “When [authority] is transient and when society is poor and has lost all basis for guarantees, the danger rises a hundredfold that someone will take advantage of power in order to live well after a stay in office.”⁸

The ambiguity of limits was only the half of it. Emulation of foreign models was the rage in Moscow, and it bled into things political. It could manifest itself in trivialities—such as the electric golf carts purchased for Barvikha-4 after Yeltsin saw George Bush tooling around in one at Camp David in February 1992—but it was not limited to them. Copycat and wishful thinking impelled Yeltsin and his peers toward institutional inventions (a presidency and vice presidency, a constitutional court, and so forth) that often were underspecified and unsynchronized with the surrounding scene. As Yeltsin was to observe mordantly in Notes of a President, “there arose beautiful structures and beautiful titles with nothing behind them.”⁹ Beneath the surface, the very infrastructure of government was buckling. There was marker after marker of it: a doubling in rates of violent crime, to levels comparable to those in Colombia, Jamaica, and Swaziland; spreading corruption, especially after privatization; porous borders; tax evasion by the business class and a yawning budget deficit; a torn social safety net; and demonetization, the flight from the inflation-devalued ruble into dollars, money surrogates, and barter.¹⁰ The army, the crown jewel of Russian governments since Ivan the Terrible, plunged from 2.75 million men under arms in 1992 to a million in 1999; officers and enlisted men huddled in tents after the post–Cold War efflux from Eastern Europe; the pay of a majority of the officer corps was in arrears.¹¹ And the Communist Party, whose hierarchical apparatus and mass membership base had kept the Soviet state intact, was gone.

Inside the machinery of Russian government, Yeltsin was faced with an enfeeblement of discipline and accountability, as comes out in his anecdote about two reformist members of his first cabinet. Eduard Dneprov, the education minister put into office in 1990, wanted curriculum changes in the schools. He was able to implement some, having had “the luck to work things out under the old regime, when people still listened to the bosses.” Academician Andrei Vorob’ëv was commissioned minister of health in late 1991, and made no headway with his advocacy of a role for private physicians and clinics: “Vorob’ëv’s system immediately fell into disorganization. No one understood it or wanted to do a thing about it for one reason only—the staff of the ministry had simply ceased to function.”¹² For Yeltsin the mutineer, remember, being a steely “boss for the bosses” had been a selling point. Now the compliance of bosses and underbosses was a question mark.

Boris Yeltsin’s predicament had an international dimension. Governments the length and breadth of Eurasia faced problems of staggering complexity. In fourteen of the fifteen post-Soviet capitals, there was the silver lining of freedom from foreign—Russian—domination. It was a unity elixir and bought reformers a blame-free startup period. In Moscow, there was no silver lining. The Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Georgians had attained statehood and membership in the global community. What Yeltsin and the Russians got was less of what they had before—a diminished state struggling to maintain regional influence, let alone the USSR’s say in global affairs. About three in four Russian citizens in 1992 accepted the expiration of the Soviet Union as an accomplished fact; two in three were sorry that it had happened.¹³ Once the divorce was final, little about it redounded to the political benefit of Yeltsin. “I was convinced,” he testifies, “that Russia had to rid itself of its imperial mission.” Once nationalized, it “needed a stronger, tougher… policy in order not to lose its significance and authority altogether.” Greater authority, however, did not come to pass in the post-Soviet space. Yeltsin himself bewailed the hole in the heart of the deposed ruling nation: “We [Russians] seem almost to be embarrassed by the fact that we are so big and incoherent, and we don’t know what to do with ourselves. We are tortured by a certain feeling of emptiness.”¹⁴ If the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet Union made the United States the solitary superpower, it made Russia the solitary ex-superpower. One had a superiority complex, the other an inferiority complex for which no curative was offered.

Yeltsin was not overdrawing when he said “the specter of discord and civil war” hung over Russia and the ex-USSR in the first half of the 1990s.¹⁵ Gorbachev rates praise for self-restraint and the prevention of a bloodletting. Yeltsin deserves more and has not always received it. The celerity of the parting of the ways after Belovezh’e was preferable many times over to an endeavor to salvage the union state through violence. At home, Yeltsin dampened Russian revanchism, jingoism, and nostalgia for the Soviet Union. In the “Near Abroad,” he reached understandings with the majority of the non-Russian fourteen, repatriated troops, did not employ ethnic Russians as a fifth column, and helped float their economies by supplying oil and gas at discounted prices. The most combustive of the potential altercations in the region involved lands over the Russian frontier and populated mostly by ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers, a list that for some nationalists included northern Kazakhstan, Trans-Dniester in Moldova, and the Donbass, Sevastopol and all of the Crimean peninsula, and Odessa area in Ukraine. Yeltsin never pressed claims to these territories. Russia’s military involvement as a peacekeeper in three fragile states (Moldova, Georgia, and Tajikistan) shaded over into tampering and patronage of pro-Moscow districts, but these were the aberrations that proved the rule.

Let us not forget Yugoslavia, communism’s other multiethnic federation, in those same years. It was a school picnic compared to a possible conflagration in the middle of Eurasia, where the Russians would have been cast as the xenophobic and irredentist Serbs and Yeltsin as Slobodan Milošević. The Russians outnumber the Serbs fifteen to one, and a war of Russians against non-Russians in the former Soviet Union, or of all against all, would have been fought on territory larger than the South American continent and housing millions of soldiers, trainloads of atomic arms (many of them not initially under Moscow’s control),¹⁶ and a thousand tons of fissile material. Yeltsin’s foreign minister from 1990 to 1996, Andrei Kozyrev, knew the Balkans well and often hashed over with him a Yugoslav scenario for Russia. Gaidar, who had lived in Belgrade as a boy and graduated from secondary school there, had similar conversations with the president.¹⁷ The range of comparisons would include partitions and intercommunal wars in the Indian subcontinent, North Africa, and Indochina. Without hyperbole, the historian Stephen Kotkin underlines what Yeltsin avoided: “The decolonization of Western Europe’s overseas possessions had been drawn out and bloody. The Soviet land empire… could have unleashed a far nastier bloodbath, even an end to the world” through thermonuclear holocaust.¹⁸

For diplomacy with the world powers, the man from Sverdlovsk was at first woefully unprepared. Kozyrev shopped around in Washington and West European capitals the message that their leaders should personalize their relations with him and appeal to his better instincts.¹⁹ Yeltsin took to addressing his opposite numbers by their first names, often prefaced by “my friend” (my friend George, my friend Bill, my friend Helmut), no easy thing for a stolid Russian male. A mutual admiration society with Robert S. Strauss, the American ambassador to Moscow in 1991–92, helped groom him for the relationship with the United States.²⁰ Yeltsin was a quick study. On his first official visit to Washington, D.C., he announced in Reaganesque words to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on June 17, 1992, that Russia “has made its final choice in favor of a civilized way of life, common sense, and universal human heritage…. Communism has no human face. Freedom and communism are incompatible.” Referring to an agreement he and Bush had just concluded to trim nuclear arms by the year 2000, Yeltsin pointedly told Americans that it was in the West’s as well as Russia’s interest for his Great Leap Outward to succeed: “Today the freedom of America is being upheld in Russia. Should the reforms fail, it will cost hundreds of billions” to mop up.²¹

The hope for a deep partnership with Western governments and institutions, and for buttressing the post-communist Russian state from without, proved evanescent. In 1991–92, as price reform bit and living standards sank, never did the United States, the European Union, or the G-7 really consider forgiveness of Russia’s foreign debt—a liability, incurred by the regime the reformers were trying to put behind, whose impact has been compared to that of World War I reparations on Weimar Germany.²² The U.S. Freedom Support Act, passed in October 1992, earmarked about $400 million for technical and humanitarian assistance to all the post-Soviet countries, a drop in the bucket of need if there ever was one. Under the Clinton administration, American bilateral assistance came to $2,580,500,000. Two-thirds of those dollars were spent in 1994, and Russia’s slice of the pie, with no ethnic lobby to fight for it, slouched from more than 60 percent in 1994 to less than 20 percent in 1999.²³ From 1993 to 1999, American aid would come to $2.50 annually per Russian man, woman, and child. It totaled about 1 percent of the U.S. defense budget in the year 1996, or one-quarter of the cost of a single Nimitz-class aircraft carrier—at a time when the evisceration of the Soviet threat let the United States draw down military manpower by 30 percent—and the money flowed primarily to American contractors, not to Russians or Russian organizations. Multilateral assistance siphoned through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (the IMF, which Russia joined in June 1992) was larger in volume, yet was belated and took the form of repayable loans. “In spite of requests for support from radical reformers of whose goals it could only approve… the Fund was slow in giving meager support on stringent terms.”²⁴ Not inaccurately, Bill Clinton was to adjudge the effort as “a forty-watt bulb in a damned big darkness.”²⁵ In the security sphere, the Cooperative Threat Reduction program (sponsored by Democratic senator Sam Nunn and Republican senator Richard Lugar) funded the decommissioning of nuclear arsenals in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan and enhanced the safety of all. In Yeltsin’s and Russia’s estimation, and in mine, this gain paled before the loss caused by the policy of mechanically expanding the NATO military alliance eastward to take in former republics and dependencies of the USSR but not Russia itself.

At Camp David in 1992, Yeltsin pressed President Bush for reference in the communiqué to Russia and the United States as “allies.” Bush refused. For the time being, “transitional language” about “friendship and partnership” would have to suffice.²⁶ The transitional idiom persisted, even as neocontainment put Yeltsin on the defensive. Western governments never saw Russia’s transformation as an urgent task for them and never found or tried terribly hard to find a niche for Russia in a new security architecture for Europe and Asia. For his part, Yeltsin more than once couched Russia’s policy in the ethic of prickly self-reliance that he preached for individuals. In 1991–92, when the case for debt relief was strongest, he did not set about drafting a formal request for it. Meeting Clinton the presidential candidate in June 1992, Yeltsin stressed that Russia was “a great power” and was “not asking for handouts.” At the first meeting with Clinton as president, in Vancouver in April 1993, Yeltsin solicited outside help, “but not too much,” since a big subsidy would open him to criticism for making Russia dependent on outsiders.²⁷ In early exchanges, Yeltsin was more than willing to play with Russia someday joining NATO, although, again, his government never articulated it as policy. Yeltsin told Clinton in January 1994 that the post-Soviet countries should enter NATO as a bloc, after an acclimation period, and he repeated this to reporters in August. By December of that same year, as Washington and the alliance moved toward selective admission, Yeltsin informed Vice President Al Gore in Moscow that it would never add up for Russia to join, since it is “very, very big” and NATO “quite small.” “Yeltsin put Gore in the bizarre position of trying to persuade him that Russia might actually someday qualify.”²⁸ Future conversations were infrequent and unlinked to current decisions.

Most of the post-communist states in Europe were panting for admission to the European Union more than to NATO. This entryway, too, was closed to Russia and its leader. The union was of the view, as one review of the 1990s put it, that Russia was “simply too big, too complex, and too backward to be considered for EU membership.”²⁹ A ten-year cooperation agreement Yeltsin signed in Corfu’s Venetian fort in June 1994 was as close as he got to a meaningful association. Although Russia applied for membership in the Council of Europe, a medium for legal and human rights, and acceded to it and its parliamentary assembly in February 1996, Yeltsin had no strategy for buying into the much more dynamic and rigorous EU.³⁰

Domestically, post-Soviet entropy was nowhere more of a threat than in center-periphery relations, the reef on which the USSR’s empire of nations had shipwrecked. The showdown between Russia and the Soviet leadership provoked competitive appeasement of the constituent provinces of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and mostly of its republics (known until December 1990 as autonomous Soviet socialist republics), delimited as the homelands of “titular” nationalities such as the Tatars and Bashkirs. Somewhat privileged in communist ethnofederalism, they were the gravest threat to the unity of post-communist Russia. Yeltsin’s pronouncement in Kazan about the titulars taking as much autonomy as they could guzzle was an expression of his propensity for decentralization, a jab at Gorbachev in the Russian-Soviet context, and, in the intra-Russian context, an attempt to fight fire with fire and to keep the minorities within whatever state entity survived. While playing to enlightened self-interest, he said geopolitical realities would have to be put on the weigh scales as well. The union republics of the USSR were placed around the Russian lands, but, he noted at Kazan University in 1990, “You [the Tatars] are located in the center of Russia—and you have to think about that.”³¹ On that same trip, “Yeltsin privately warned local leaders not to go too far in their assertions of local autonomy,” U.S. intelligence reported.³²

The immediate effect of the RSFSR’s declaration of sovereignty and the sermon in Kazan was an outpouring from the minorities. Between the Russian parliamentary resolution on June 12, 1990, and Kazan on August 5, North Ossetiya in the North Caucasus was the one republic to declare sovereignty. In the two months after August 5, the legislatures of Tatarstan (formerly Tatariya) and five other republics came forth with resolutions; in the two months after that, ten more, including Bashkortostan (formerly Bashkiriya), followed them; the four remaining did between December 1990 and July 1991.³³ Many centrists and conservatives in the republics bent to agitation by nationalist movements. In Tatarstan, for example, leader Mintimer Shaimiyev, a former CPSU first secretary, had fought against protégés of Yegor Ligachëv in the late 1980s but backed the August 1991 putsch against Gorbachev—and only after its defeat did he defect to the Tatar cause.³⁴ The radicals in the Ittifaq movement until then wanted Tatarstan reclassified as the sixteenth union republic of the USSR, as Tatar nationalists had favored since the 1920s; after August 1991 they wanted unalloyed independence and held almost daily demonstrations in Kazan to press their claims.³⁵

In so unsure an environment, there was no reason a priori why Russia would be vaccinated against the infection that killed off the Soviet Union. Many of its provinces were comparable in magnitude to the smaller of the union republics that hived off in 1991. Wrote Aleksandr Tsipko late that year, “It is difficult to explain to the Ossetins and Chechens,” constituent peoples of Russia, “that they have fewer rights than the Moldovans,” whose union republic on the Romanian border was making good its exit from the USSR. The fever was contagious, Tsipko observed, as non-republics populated by ethnic Russians now plugged for equality with the minority areas. Yeltsin “awaits the fate of Gorbachev or of the queen of England, who does not rule anything.” Unless a pan-Soviet federation were salvaged, which was soon shown to be impossible, the only way out, he apostrophized, would be for a Russian leader to recentralize and de-democratize: “Under conditions of ongoing disintegration, the pendulum of public attitudes will swing to the other extreme, and this time it is the democrats who will come under fire.”³⁶

Yeltsin got down to work in 1990 on a “federative treaty,” kindred to the never-to-be-consummated union treaty for the USSR, which all of Russia’s regions were intended to sign as a reaffirmation. Negotiations were stepped up in the autumn of 1991, with Gennadii Burbulis responsible to the president for protecting the federal government’s interests. On March 30, 1992, three texts were contracted in Moscow: for the twenty-one republics, the fifty-seven nonethnic territories (most of them oblasts), and eleven lowerranking subunits. Yeltsin hailed the treaty as codifying “a prudent balance of interests.” At the same time as it “put an end to the ascendancy of the… Moscow bureaucracy,” it would “defend Russia against chaos, impotence, and an orgy of localism.”³⁷

The subtreaty for the republics acknowledged republican sovereignty and said they and other ethnic subunits, which had about 17 percent of the total Russian population, would get 50 percent of the seats in the parliamentary upper chamber in a new constitution. Several republics in effect blackmailed Yeltsin to make further concessions. Sakha (Yakutiya), on northeast Siberian permafrost, was given a large portion of the profits from the bankable diamond industry there; Bashkortostan, the most populous republic, got an appendix giving it dispensations. Two republics would not sign on the dotted line at all. Chechnya had declared its independence from Moscow on November 1, 1991. Tatarstan on March 21, 1992, organized a referendum on the proposition that Russia was an abutting state and relations between the two could be set only through state-to-state treaties; 61 percent voted in favor. One of the reasons Burbulis was demoted in April 1992 was that he misgauged the Tatarstan problem and encouraged a referendum on the premise that it would fail. As defeat in the referendum came into view, Yeltsin considered an economic blockade or even military intervention—Shaimiyev says the night before the vote was the scariest of his life. In 1992–93 Chechnya, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Sakha, and Tuva led the pack. In varying combinations, republics legislated language laws, skipped Russia-wide referendums, withheld tax payments, and declared republic laws and constitutions preponderate over Russian ones.³⁸

Although non-republics could not marshal the fervency of the minority homelands, they noisily aired their concerns and tried to extract benefits from the Kremlin. In the August 1991 power vacuum, Yeltsin appropriated the authority to appoint provincial leaders and presidential representatives in the given region, a power confirmed by parliament in November.³⁹ He looked the other way at the election of presidents in the republics; Shaimiyev in Tatarstan had been the first, running unopposed in June 1991.⁴⁰ The ethnicity-blind oblasts seethed over their second-string status, economically and constitutionally, and wanted to be able to elect their chief executives, most of them now called governors. Yeltsin did not concede this until April 1993, when he permitted votes for governor in eight provinces. Several Russian oblasts tried the nominative cure of declaring themselves republics and ringing up the rights of a Tatarstan or a Tuva. Vologda, north and east of Moscow, was the first to do so, in May 1993. In Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin’s stomping ground, where he had made his promotee Eduard Rossel head of the executive after the 1991 putsch, the oblast council ruled to this effect in July 1993 and invited the nearby areas of Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Orenburg, and Perm to fall in. Projects to create single- or multiprovince republics sprang up in provinces from the Baltic littoral in the northwest to the Volga basin and on to central and east Siberia and Vladivostok.⁴¹

A second institutional crisis blossomed forth in Moscow, under Yeltsin’s nose. It matched his executive branch, beefed up by the creation of the presidency, against the legislative branch he had chaired in 1990–91. Its roots were in the indeterminacy of the rules. The constitution of the RSFSR was chock full of loopholes, having been written under Leonid Brezhnev in 1978 and tinkered with repeatedly. A two-thirds vote in the Congress of People’s Deputies was all it took to change the constitution. Several hundred amendments carried between 1990 and 1993, and 180 were on the order paper when congress gathered in December 1992; the constitution of the United States, by comparison, has been altered only seventeen times since 1791. Dissentious clauses in the charter garmented the president and the congress with supreme authority in the state. The two branches, independently elected by universal suffrage, had overlapping powers. The Supreme Soviet could strike down a presidential veto by simple majority, and two-thirds of the members of congress could impeach the president if they found he had violated his oath of office. President Yeltsin was in charge of the armed forces but had no right to resolve a deadlock by ending a session of parliament and forcing new elections.⁴²

Deadlock was what Yeltsin’s Russia had as it entered the reform era. Crosscurrents between organizational and policy issues polarized politics as badly as they had in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi and many high bureaucrats sided with the foes of Yeltsin in parliament, and the congress was not monolithic, but majority sentiments in the two branches were ever more discrepant. Attempts to craft a post-communist constitution were all for naught, as each camp sought one biased in its favor. On reform issues, the parliamentarists were more statist and the presidentialists much more pro-market. The peculiar two-tier legislature—the RSFSR was the only union republic to mimic the USSR in this regard—added another element. The sessions of the thronging congress, televised live and numbered like unique events, were circus-like. Both the congress and the smaller Supreme Soviet lacked a stable majority, with remnants of the Democratic Russia bloc and the regrouped communist faction having to compete for the affections of small-fry groups.

An enmity between Yeltsin and Ruslan Khasbulatov, who had replaced him as legislative chairman in October 1991, further aggravated the situation. Khasbulatov had more strength on the back benches than the legal scholar Sergei Shakhrai, Yeltsin’s first choice for the position. A pipe-smoking professor of international economics from a Moscow institute, Khasbulatov had been elected to represent Groznyi, the Chechen capital. Like Rutskoi, an air-regiment commander in Afghanistan until 1988, Khasbulatov was one of those political figures who had caromed out of obscurity during the transition. Yeltsin made no secret of his view that Khasbulatov and Rutskoi should defer to his lead on policy. He did not ask the counsel of either on the Belovezh’e negotiations, which they heard about from others.⁴³ But the parliament was a world unto itself in the early 1990s, and showboating and inconsistent voting by the lawmakers provided the chairman “with the ability to manipulate the agenda for his own purposes.”⁴⁴ He and his presidium emitted hundreds of administrative edicts and formed a guard squad. At the “sixth congress” that refused to confirm Gaidar as prime minister in December 1992, Yeltsin raged that they were thinking not about society or reform but “only about how to dictate their will.”⁴⁵ After the session, Yeltsin took Khasbulatov off his telephone hotline and had him cut off from information about the president’s schedule; not to be outdone, Khasbulatov sent Yeltsin barbed letters and made gratuitous references to his drinking.

Gazing back at it all a decade later, Khasbulatov told me Yeltsin “backed himself and me into a corner” and that, as the junior man (he was born in 1942), he always expected to make the most concessions in any settlement.⁴⁶ Yeltsin did go for total victory in September–October 1993; until then, he was ready to compromise. In December 1992 he proposed a national referendum for January, to ask the population whether they trusted him or the congress and soviet to solve the political crisis. The deputies said no, and the next day Yeltsin, with egg on his face, withdrew the idea.

President and speaker were at each other’s throats for the next four months. Khasbulatov drew up plans to send a congress-drafted constitution to a referendum; he threw them over in March. On March 20, determined to play his trump card, public opinion, Yeltsin divulged that he was instituting an undefined “special rule” (osobyi poryadok upravleniya) until a referendum on president versus parliament on April 25. Rutskoi balked at countersigning the decree and wrote an open letter to Yeltsin against it. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin desisted from comment until Yeltsin “literally compelled him to declare support,”⁴⁷ and the justice minister, Nikolai Fëdorov, resigned.

The congress’s riposte was to deliberate impeachment, which had been provided for in the constitutional amendments instituting the presidency in 1991. Meeting Yeltsin, Chernomyrdin, and Valerii Zor’kin, chairman of the Constitutional Court, in the Kremlin on March 24, Khasbulatov gave Yeltsin his conditions for gagging the process: a coalitional government of national accord, restrictions on presidential decrees, recall of Yeltsin’s representatives in the provinces, and criminal prosecution of the drafters of the March 20 order. Yeltsin, seeing acceptance as tantamount to straw-man status, rebuffed them.⁴⁸ Zor’kin backed Khasbulatov.

Hours before the congressional vote, on the evening of March 28, Yeltsin came before a floodlit rally on the apron of land connecting St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Moskva River. His speech drew on principles and personalities, formulating the latter in peppery, testing mode:

The voting in the congress was done by hand, anonymously. Yeltsin later said it was low ebb for his eight years as president. “Impeachment was my worst moment. I really suffered through it… I sat and waited through it… I sat and waited for the votes to be counted.”⁵⁰ Six hundred and seventeen disaffected deputies voted for the motion, seventy-two short of the 689 needed for the prescribed two-thirds majority. Had it passed, Rutskoi, in the legislators’ interpretation, would have taken over as president, in which case the face-off that took place in September would have come six months earlier. According to Aleksandr Korzhakov, the security chiefs had a plan, approved by the president on March 23, to read out a decree dissolving the parliament and to smoke the deputies out by placing canisters of tear gas on the balconies of the hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace.⁵¹

After the vote, Yeltsin and Khasbulatov agreed that the decree on special rule would be ditched and a four-point referendum to clear the air held on April 25. The four questions would be about (1) trust in Yeltsin, (2) approval of his social and economic policies, and early elections for (3) president and (4) the parliament. Yeltsin campaigned hard for yes votes on questions one, two, and four and a no vote on question three, trying as before to brand Khasbulatov and the congress as ultraconservative, which not all of them were. Khasbulatov struck back by calling Yeltsin a plaything for shadowy power brokers, as Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra had once been for the mystic Grigorii Rasputin. Yeltsin’s threats to take decisive action, he said, amounted to “the strong gesture of a weak man” who was “tragically illequipped” for his office. “This person degenerated before my very eyes. He stopped being a leader and converted himself into a kind of puppet of those who have been called a ‘collective Rasputin’… adventurers… ignoramuses.” Yeltsin’s project was to build a “semicolonial regime” in which a “wild, criminal, and semifeudal” capitalism would be in bondage to foreign interests.⁵²

When the ballots were tallied on April 25, Yeltsin had prevailed. Fiftynine percent of Russians expressed trust in him, 53 percent approved of his reforms, those wanting an early presidential election were just short of 50 percent, and 67 percent approved of an early parliamentary election. The results were nonbinding, but the pattern, and the surprising vote on the reform course, in particular, was a moral victory.⁵³

Khasbulatov, having said earlier that the initiators of a referendum should resign if they lost out, stayed on. Yeltsin did not press the point and moved at a leisurely general pace, telling Richard Nixon in late April that Khasbulatov and Rutskoi were “midgets” he need not bother with.⁵⁴ In May he appointed a 762-member Constitutional Conference to circumvent the constitutional committee under the Supreme Soviet. Yeltsin addressed the conference on June 5, harkening to the tradition of “free Novgorod,” whence the Yeltsins had moved to the Urals centuries before, and of Peter the Great and Alexander II. Khasbulatov was drowned out by clangor from the floor and had to recite his remarks from a stairway outside the meeting hall. The conference approved a draft on July 12, though without agreement on the federal system. Khasbulatov and the Supreme Soviet quashed a spate of presidential decrees, and Yeltsin vetoed parliamentary bills. Clashes between them burgeoned on privatization, social policy, and foreign relations. “It was widely assumed in Moscow… that another attempt to impeach Yeltsin was imminent and would be launched at the end of September or the beginning of October at the latest.”⁵⁵

Yeltsin decided in late summer to lower the boom. Huddling with advisers on August 10, he said that the stalemate on the constitution and on future elections “is pushing us toward the use of force.”⁵⁶ There was a broad hint on August 31: He flew by helicopter to the army’s two armored formations in the Moscow area (the Taman Division and the Kantemirov Tank Division) and to the 106th Airborne Division stationed in Tula, where he rakishly donned a paratrooper’s beret. At the Taman garrison, he attended a tank exercise and dined in an officers’ mess with Defense Minister Pavel Grachëv; the men drank to his health and gave him a soldierly “Hurrah!” The point was not to check up on the military’s loyalty, in which he had complete faith, but to flaunt it before the press and his opponents.⁵⁷ In the early days of September, Yeltsin “suspended” Vice President Rutskoi and his Kremlin pass. He also took away Justice Zor’kin’s bodyguards and transportation. Zor’kin had been testing the waters for a presidential campaign of his own, on the speculation that Yeltsin would step down as part of a constitutional pact. One of his supporters was Vladimir Lukin, the Russian ambassador to Washington, who was promised the position of foreign minister in a Zor’kin government and who arranged a visit by him to the United States in late summer.⁵⁸ Around September 9 Yeltsin gave his aides Viktor Ilyushin and Yurii Baturin some scrabbled notes and told them to prepare a presidential edict. Decree No. 1400 was promulgated on Tuesday, September 21, at eight P.M. Yeltsin shared it with the nation in a telecast. Before recording it, he found some gallows humor in proposing that the Kremlin staff pose with him for a good-bye photograph, since, if he were to fail, “We will sit together [in prison].”⁵⁹

As he did at Belovezh’e Forest, Yeltsin had sliced through a Gordian knot with a freewheeling decision of debatable legality. The unilateralism and extraconstitutionality of his fiat caused him some grief. As he wrote a year later, “Here I was, the first popularly elected president, violating the law—bad law… yet law all the same.”⁶⁰ But Decree No. 1400 stood. Its main articles laid to rest the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet and ordered the election on December 12 of a bicameral Federal Assembly comprising a State Duma (the name Russia’s first parliament bore from 1905 to 1917), to represent individuals, and a Federation Council as the upper house, to represent the provinces. The first assembly would sit for a two-year term, and its first item of business would be to adopt a new constitution.

Yeltsin and Khasbulatov had baited and blustered since the winter of 1992–93, and both lowballed the danger of the other party following through. Yeltsin had no detailed battle plan, sure that “political methods” and threats would get the parliamentarians to relent; and Khasbulatov said that “until the last minute, I did not believe he [Yeltsin] would take such a step” (the abolition decree).⁶¹ When the step was upon them, Khasbulatov and the deputies made a last stand. In a midnight session at the White House, the Supreme Soviet passed a resolution to remove Yeltsin from the presidency, which the congress had not done in March. Minutes later, Rutskoi was sworn in. That same night he began appointing ministers of defense, the interior, and security to a provisional government. The congress met on September 23 and passed a skein of measures against Yeltsin and his government, which Khasbulatov now called a “fascist dictatorship” (Rutskoi dubbed Yeltsin Russia’s Führer). It also approved capital punishment for failure to carry out the orders of the new government and president.

Frenetic attempts by Zor’kin and Patriarch Aleksii to mediate foundered over the next ten days. At the White House, several hundred hard-line deputies dug in with radical nationalists, racists, and diehard communists. On Sunday, October 3, Yeltsin went briefly to the Kremlin, and on the ride in, “for the first time in my life the thought drilled into my head—had I done the right thing, had there been any other option?”⁶² That day, after he returned to Barvikha-4, skirmishes on the streets spun out of control. Yeltsin decreed martial law in Moscow and rushed to the Kremlin as armed fighters, stirred up by Rutskoi, went at the mayor’s office and the Ostankino television tower with Molotov cocktails, grenades, and Kalashnikovs. National television screens went blank for several hours. In the black of night, Yeltsin, exasperated that army troops had not penetrated mid-Moscow, as the Defense Ministry said they would, drove to the Russian Pentagon on Arbat Square and, with Viktor Chernomyrdin at his elbow, demanded action by first light. The generals skulked and explained that some of their men had been busy with the fall harvest, leading him to conclude that his military “was being pulled into pieces, and everyone was yanking on his part.” A lawful government hung by a thread, “but the army could not defend it: some soldiers were picking potatoes and others did not feel like fighting.” Minister Grachëv, who had been hopeful that police forces could manage the disturbances, said he would comply, on the condition that he be given written orders from the commander-in-chief—the kind of explicit authorization Mikhail Gorbachev never brought himself to give in his hour of need. Yeltsin was galled by the request but went back to the Kremlin, signed the order, and sent it to Grachëv by courier. It made all the difference to the officers, who proceeded to discharge their duty.⁶³

The dénouement was swift and brutal. Thirteen hundred servicemen flooded inside Moscow’s in-city ring road on Monday, October 4. Armored cars scrunched through the barricades in front of the White House at about seven A.M. At 10:00, four T-80 tanks on a bridge over the Moskva broke into a cannonade. “With a thunderous roar that echoed heavily through the nearby streets, the tanks opened fire on the upper floors…. Chunks of the marble façade shattered and flew into the air, and the huge clock in the center of the White House froze with its hands at 10:03. Windows were blown out of their frames, and thousands of sheets of paper, flung out of the building, spun slowly in the air like a flock of birds hovering in the sunshine.”⁶⁴ Yeltsin had warned Khasbulatov to vacate and get to safety before the shooting started. Khasbulatov was not in his tenth-story office when it was one of the first to be slammed by a round. Commandos stormed the structure, emptied it and other occupied buildings, and stamped out the street mayhem.

The footage of tanks lobbing 125-mm. shells over the spot where Yeltsin had peacefully defied the putschists in 1991—upright on a T-72 from the very same Taman Division—and of Khasbulatov and Rutskoi being bused off to Lefortovo prison, was a graphic contrast to happier days. During the victory gathering, Yeltsin was handed Khasbulatov’s tobacco pipe; he examined it and dashed it on the floor.⁶⁵ The official death toll was 187, none of them elected deputies, and 437 wounded; about three-quarters of the deaths were in and near the White House and about one-quarter at Ostankino.⁶⁶ Several anti-government organizations were banned, thirteen communist and rabidly nationalist newspapers were closed down, and editors were told to present articles to censors. After repair of the blast and flame damage by a Turkish contractor, the White House was to go to the Russian government for office space.

The pride and joy of the Yeltsin scheme was the long-awaited post-Soviet constitution to tie the state together and encode the norms of representative government, separation of powers, primacy of the president, and federalism. Its inculcation through even partially democratic means ought to be counted as an achievement, as should the normalization of political life it made possible.

The tactic of having the newly elected Federal Assembly rule on the constitution was as much of a gamble as any Yeltsin made as president, for no one could be sure that it would go over as legitimate, that the assembly would adopt a satisfactory constitution, or that it would approve any constitution—if not, he would have lopped off the limb on which they all rested. After the shootout in Moscow, he reconsidered. He decreed on October 15 that the constitution would go to a plebiscite on election day.⁶⁷ His Constitutional Conference resumed its labors, and on November 8 Yeltsin approved a draft that largely parroted earlier renderings. Putting it before the electorate was another roll of the dice: What would occur if voters turned thumbs down? For stability’s sake, Yeltsin made one more adjustment. On November 6 he rescinded a slapdash pledge he made in September to advance the date of the next presidential election by two years, from the summer of 1996 to the summer of 1994. Even were constitutional ratification and the parliamentary election to come a cropper, he would have a leg to stand on.⁶⁸

The 137-article draft was inserted in national and regional newspapers and affixed in public places. Yeltsin’s pitch to the people was binary. It was either him and his constitution or perdition. He promised Russians both democracy and an individuated authority consistent with the needs of reform, with their traditions, and, he said overweeningly in an interview in Izvestiya, with their limitations:

On December 12 the constitutional blueprint was approved by a 58 percent majority. A Constitutional Conference delegate had foreseen that citizens in the plebiscite “will vote for or against the president, and that will be it.”⁷⁰ This at root is what they did. Fewer than half of the “yes” voters had read the document. More than to constitutional issues, narrowly conceived, most responded to Yeltsin, his market economy, and their like or dislike of the Soviet regime.⁷¹ The constitution went into effect on December 25, two years after the winding down of the Soviet state.

Yeltsin, therefore, got his legal cornerstone, and, imperfectly and inelegantly, the crisis of the state in its white-hot form was allayed.⁷² Western specialists, comparing Russia to other post-communist countries, commonly characterize the constitution of 1993 as “superpresidential.” Gennadii Zyuganov, the leader of the reborn communists, liked to say it gave the president more powers than the tsar, the Egyptian pharaoh, and a sheikh of Araby put together. A correspondent for the pro-presidential Izvestiya asked Yeltsin in November 1993 if he were not laying claim to “almost imperial” powers. An emperor, he replied, would have no need of a constitution, and a tyrant like Stalin would have a merely decorative one. He, Yeltsin, could act only within the law, he was limited to two terms (his second term would be four years, a year less than the first), and parliament could reverse his veto or impeach him.⁷³

It was equally true that Yeltsin got most of what he had wished for. Of the ministers in the government, only the prime minister was to be confirmed in office by the Duma. As head of state, the president was going to function as guarantor of the constitutional order, lay down “guidelines” for domestic and foreign policy, and have the power to dissolve the Duma for cause.⁷⁴ Two-thirds majorities in both houses of parliament were needed to override a presidential veto, and the president was not compelled to give a reason for using the veto power.⁷⁵ Article 90, on the power to issue binding decrees at will, was the benchmark for Yeltsin. In the final draft, he stroked out the caveat that presidential decrees and directives be only “in execution of the powers conferred on him by the constitution of the Russian Federation and by federal laws.”⁷⁶ The constitution was echoed in the insignia of state—in the Presidential Regiment and Presidential Orchestra (instituted as the Kremlin Regiment and Kremlin Orchestra by Stalin in the 1930s), the chain of office and Presidential Standard, the two presidential yachts, the new Kremlin chinaware (emblazoned with the double-headed eagle in place of the Soviet coat of arms), and the grandiloquent state protocol written up by aide Vladimir Shevchenko, who was one of the few Gorbachev associates Yeltsin kept on.⁷⁷

But the parliamentary election of 1993 did not break Yeltsin’s way. On October 18 martial law in the capital and most restrictions on political activity were lifted. While the ban held on three extremist parties and twenty-one persons, Zyuganov’s KPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) was reinstated and registered. Half of the Duma’s seats were to be filled by national lists and half in territorial districts. Yeltsin stoutly maintained, and with reason, that the ambit of choice in the election was without precedent. “The spectrum of political positions taken by the participants [in the campaign] is uncommonly wide,” he said to the Council of Ministers on November 2. “I don’t think there has been a thing like it here since the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1917,” before that democratic body’s suppression by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.⁷⁸ Most forecasts were of a victory for the Russia’s Choice movement, the torch carrier for Yeltsin chaired by Yegor Gaidar; also on its slate were Anatolii Chubais and Sergei Filatov, who had replaced Yurii Petrov as head of the executive office of the president. There were predictions that it would get 50 or even 65 percent of the popular vote. But “the party of power” (partiya vlasti), as it was known, never got a Yeltsin endorsement and did not prevent other reformist politicians, including cabinet members, from entering the contest under different banners. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin admonished his ministers to campaign only “outside of working hours.”⁷⁹ On December 12 the Russia’s Choice list ran a dispiriting second in the national poll, with 16 percent of the votes, and came in with sixty-five deputies out of 450. Many reformist votes were diverted to the smaller parties headed by Grigorii Yavlinskii, Sergei Shakhrai, and Anatolii Sobchak of St. Petersburg. The party-list vote was won by the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia of the flamboyant Vladimir Zhirinovskii, whose message was one of chauvinism and inchoate protest; the LDPR took 23 percent of the ballots cast and finished with sixty-four deputies. The neocommunist KPRF was third, with 12 percent of the national vote and fortyone seats, and five lesser parties were also seated. Ivan Rybkin of the Agrarian Party, a moderate leftist offshoot of the KPRF, was made speaker of the Duma in January.

The constitution did not give Yeltsin the dictatorial “throne of bayonets” he had charged the GKChP with wanting to construct in 1991. Aleksei Kazannik, the Siberian lawyer who in 1989 gave up his seat in the USSR Supreme Soviet to Yeltsin, accepted appointment as procurator general of Russia on October 3, 1993, promised by the president that he could go ahead with investigations with “a maximum of legality” and “a maximum of humanitarianism.”⁸⁰ Yeltsin then demanded that he press murder and complicity charges against some of the jailed perpetrators, which Kazannik would not do, saying the evidence of homicidal intent was lacking and the worst they could be indicted for was “organizing mass disorder.” Kazannik also told Yeltsin that he was considering prosecution of executive-branch officials for failing to negotiate in good faith with the opposition, and he was to say later that he might have indicted Defense Minister Grachëv and Interior Minister Viktor Yerin.⁸¹ One of the Duma’s first legislative acts, on February 23, 1994, was to pass, by 252 votes to sixty-seven, a bill of amnesty for Rutskoi, Khasbulatov, and the Supreme Soviet leaders, and some supporters, sixteen people in all. Yeltsin, who fervently dissented from the motion, ordered Kazannik not to comply. Kazannik, finding the Duma’s decision profligate but constitutional (under Article 103), informed Yeltsin he would carry out the decision and then leave office. “Don’t dare do it,” Yeltsin threw back at him.⁸² Kazannik did dare. On February 26 the prisoners were freed and Kazannik resigned. Clenching his teeth, Yeltsin did not pursue the matter further.

All members of the 1990–93 Supreme Soviet were permitted to keep the housing that had been assigned them. Khasbulatov, for example, retained the oversize apartment on Shchusev Street in central Moscow once occupied by Brezhnev and reverted to his professorship at the Plekhanov Economics Institute.⁸³ Rutskoi organized a new political party called Derzhava, or Great Power. Even Viktor Barannikov, the former security minister who deserted to the opposition, was treated with kid gloves.⁸⁴ The February 23 law amnestied the organizers of the 1991 coup attempt, and not only Yeltsin’s opponents from 1993. They had gone to trial in April 1993, but the proceedings had been delayed and no judgment yet given. Only General Varennikov, the most radical of the GKChP conspirators, who refused to accept the amnesty, was not released. He stood trial and was acquitted by the military panel of the Russian Supreme Court on August 11, 1994. Varennikov was to be elected to the Duma in 1995, as a communist, and to chair its committee on veterans’ affairs. Other political enemies of Yeltsin from bygone days, such as Yegor Ligachëv, also sat in the Dumas formed in 1993 and 1995.⁸⁵

Parliament, limited in the oversight function, still had the power of the purse, and that gave it bargaining chips with relation to the budget and to fiscal and macroeconomic policy. And it had the power to legislate, which it soon did with far greater productivity than analyses treating it as a fig leaf would imply. It adopted only six laws in 1994; in 1995, despite the continued lack of a stable majority, it adopted thirty-seven; in the first half of 1996, after another parliamentary election, it adopted eight.⁸⁶ Yeltsin still had to resort freely to the decree power, though somewhat less frequently than before the constitutional reform. In 1992 and 1993, he had published an average of twenty-four rule-making decrees per month. They were to average seventeen per month in 1994 and twenty per month in 1995.⁸⁷

Constitutional gridlock in 1993 gave Yeltsin both the necessity and the chance to rejig relations with the subunits of the federation. As before, the ethnic enclaves were the nub of the problem. In the April referendum, the governments of two of the twenty-one republics, Chechnya and Tatarstan, refused to participate, and in twelve republics confidence in the president was lower than 50 percent. (In the sixty-eight non-republics, Yeltsin stacked up majority support in fifty-four.) Yeltsin left no stone unturned in trying to secure provincial support. On August 12–14 he met in conclave in Petrozavodsk, Kareliya, with the heads of the republics and representatives of eight interregional associations, treating them to a full-day sail in a presidential yacht on Lake Onega. Yeltsin’s proposal to co-opt all of the regional leaders into his Federation Council irked republic leaders who preferred special treatment.

In many places, Decree No. 1400 met with a glacial reception. Several dozen provincial legislatures, among them those in twelve of the nineteen republics with functioning assemblies, passed motions of solidarity with Khasbulatov and Rutskoi. Yeltsin retaliated on October 9 and 12 by disbanding all of the non-republic soviets, ordering the election of more compact assemblies between December 1993 and June 1994, and advising the republics to do the same. The governors and republic presidents were less incautious than the legislators. Fifteen of them indicated hesitancy about Decree No. 1400. Four governors opposed it fervidly, and Yeltsin gave them the axe. A fifth case was Sverdlovsk oblast’s Eduard Rossel, who did not support Khasbulatov but proclaimed his Urals Republic on November 1. Yeltsin abolished the republic on November 9 and dismissed Rossel on November 10. Of the presidents of the existing ethnic republics, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov of Kalmykiya, in the North Caucasus, joined the defenders of the blockaded White House and issued anti-Yeltsin declarations. Once the parliamentarist forces had been subdued, Ilyumzhinov “capitulated and made the rather remarkable proposal to eliminate Kalmykiya’s status as a… republic… [and] abolish its constitution.” Yeltsin allowed him to stay in his post, only much more compliant with Moscow than before.⁸⁸

The constitutional plebiscite on December 12 seemed at first to portend more fireworks. Majorities went against the presidential draft in eight republics and ten other regions. The 1993 conjuncture, however, was a bottoming out for Yeltsin and the federal administration. The masterstroke for recovery was his consolidation of power at the center, which showed regional leaders, to put it crudely, who was king of the mountain. On the local scene, aping Moscow, the republic presidents emerged more potent than their legislatures. The muting of political competition made them better able to withstand nationalist pressures, and these pressures simmered down. “Yeltsin’s centralization of power altered Russia’s entire institutional environment, shifting power from republican parliaments to executives and eliminating the massive central state weakness that had made possible republican challenges to federal sovereignty in the early 1990s.”⁸⁹ There was similar momentum in the non-republics. Yeltsin felt strong enough in November 1993 to disclaim the line in the federative treaty of 1992 that would have given the ethnic reserves half of the seats in the upper house. The new Federation Council gave all territories two places apiece. Yeltsin further lessened the inequality between the republics and the non-republics by consenting to gubernatorial elections in selected oblasts and making them universal practice in December 1995. After two years in which Federation Council members were elected, it was agreed at the end of 1995 that each province’s two seats would be assigned ex officio to its head executive and legislator, bringing the regional leaders into the central political establishment.⁹⁰

The innovation in relations between center and periphery was Yeltsin’s espousal of custom-built power-sharing “treaties” with many of the provinces. This was not a new concept: He had lofted it on the same 1990 sortie to Tatarstan when he urged it to take all the sovereignty it needed.⁹¹ The first bilateral treaty was struck, appropriately, with Mintimer Shaimiyev of Tatarstan on February 15, 1994. Yeltsin traveled to the republic in May. He made appearances at the spruced-up Kazan kremlin, the Mardzhani mosque, an Orthodox church, several factories and farms, a children’s hospital, and a press conference. “They beat me up and denigrated me for the treaty with Tatarstan,” he said, standing beside Shaimiyev, “but nonetheless I have been proven right…. Tatarstan has taken as many powers under the treaty as it can. The rest that remain with the federal government are enough to satisfy us.”⁹²

Neighboring Bashkortostan and Kabardino-Balkariya in the North Caucasus came to understandings with Moscow later in 1994, four republics did in 1995, two in 1996, and, after Yeltsin’s second inauguration, one in 1997 and one in 1998. In 1995 Yeltsin was to extend the practice to nonethnic provinces, with Viktor Chernomyrdin’s native Orenburg and Yeltsin’s Sverdlovsk first. Eventually forty-seven of eighty-nine federal subunits were to have their treaties. The sweeteners were mostly economic—provisions allowing signatories to hold some federal taxes collected locally, for instance, or giving them a fixed share of revenues from sale of oil and other natural resources—but some ancillary agreements touched on environmental issues, conscription, and linguistic policy. Yeltsin held the signings in the gilded and chandeliered St. George’s Hall, the most resplendent in the Grand Kremlin Palace: It measures 13,500 square feet, and has a fifty-seven-foot-high ceiling. It did not go unnoticed that the statues on the eighteen monumental pylons, by the nineteenth-century sculptor Ivan Vitali, stood for regions ingested by the Russian state from the 1400s to the 1800s. It was the room Gorbachev had reserved for the signing ceremony for the USSR union treaty in August 1991.

The Russian “parade of treaties” was a consensual and eminently defensible means of keeping the federation together. Through them, Yeltsin traded concessions to particularistic interests for recommitment to the federation and to his policies. The first several were the most generous. Beginning with Sakha in June 1995, “style and content shifts from a recognition of distinctiveness to agreement to conformity with established rules and jurisdictions.”⁹³ Aspects of the agreements breached the 1993 constitution and federal statutes. Moscow winked at these and other constitutional transgressions, notably by the republics—a policy that was to be reversed in the next decade.⁹⁴

Yeltsin also took a hands-off stance toward regional development, enjoining local leaders to solve their problems self-reliantly with minimal tutorship from Moscow: “We have said to the Russian republics, territories, and oblasts, Moscow is not going to give you commands anymore. Your fate is in your hands.”⁹⁵ He acknowledged that the provinces’ revenues would swell in relation to central revenues (they went from 41 percent of the Russian total in 1990 to 62 percent in 1998) and that interregional inequalities unacceptable under Soviet rule would emerge. The squeaky wheel was oiled, in that regions that voted against Yeltsin and his allies or that were hard hit by strikes and social unrest were given financial transfers and tax breaks.⁹⁶ The logic again was that of tacit reciprocity of support:

Immanent in the principle that regional leaders would not serve anymore at Yeltsin’s pleasure was sufferance of incorrigible communists and of politicians with whom he had been at loggerheads, such as Eduard Rossel (returned to power by the Sverdlovsk electorate in August 1995) and, more dramatically, Aleksandr Rutskoi (elected governor in Kursk in October 1996). He was willing to let bygones be bygones: “I forget such things. It is better for the health.”⁹⁸ With the more obliging provincial barons, Yeltsin cultivated human ties. He kept in contact with officials he had known through the nomenklatura or in the USSR and RSFSR parliaments, and went on a charm offensive with others. Anatolii Korabel’shchikov, a trusted aide out of the CPSU apparatus, was his contact man for the regions and had unrestricted entrée to him on his provincial tours. Yeltsin invited groups of fifteen to twenty governors to his ABTs compound on Varga Street in southwest Moscow (taken from the KGB in 1991) for discussion and a dinner. A select few were fêted in the Kremlin or at Zavidovo and were telephoned to consult on decrees and political trends. The pleiad of regional leaders with whom the president had a confidential relationship took in Dmitrii Ayatskov (of Saratov), Vladimir Chub (Rostov), Nikolai Fëdorov (Chuvashiyia), Anatolii Guvzhin (Astrakhan), Viktor Ishayev (Khabarovsk), Nikolai Merkushkin (Mordoviya), Boris Nemtsov (Nizhnii Novgorod), Mikhail Prusak (Novgorod), Mintimer Shaimiyev (Tatarstan), Anatolii Sobchak (St. Petersburg), Yegor Stroyev (Orël), and Konstantin Titov (Samara).⁹⁹ With one of the youngest and the brightest of them, Nemtsov—born in 1959, trained as a nuclear physicist, and the leader of an environmental protest movement before Yeltsin appointed him governor in 1991—Yeltsin developed a father-son relationship. To a local audience in August 1994, Yeltsin said he could see Nemtsov as the worthiest successor to himself as president. The central media picked up the statement.¹⁰⁰

“The danger of Russia falling apart has passed,” Yeltsin stated boisterously the same month as the lovefest with Nemtsov. “This does not mean,” he said in qualification of his good cheer, “that all difficulties are behind us.”¹⁰¹ Little did he know that he was about to get into a fratricidal war that bore out this admonitory note.

Chechnya, a swatch of North Caucasus uplands fringed on the north by plain, had as many grievances against the Russian state as any region. Its people, incorporated into the empire against their will in the nineteenth century, raised revolts against tsars and commissars. From 1944 to 1956, they lived in exile in Central Asia and Siberia, having been deported by Stalin on the charge of sympathizing with the German invaders. Although their troubles were not unique,¹⁰² their sense of deprivation and an ingrained willingness to take up arms were a flammable combination. The Chechens follow Sunni Islam and are organized into clans that drive off higher authority, be it Russian or Chechen.

The Brezhnev-era leadership of the republic was not changed until June 1989, when Moscow replaced an ethnic Russian first secretary with Doku Zavgayev, a Chechen partocrat. Nationalist and reformist ferment flared in 1990, and that November republic sovereignty was duly declared. The next month Djokhar Dudayev was chosen to chair a national congress, an alternative legislature working in collaboration with street-level activists. In August–September 1991 his congress and paramilitary overthrew Zavgayev, with some loss of life, and on October 27 Dudayev was elected president in a procedurally flawed contest. On November 1 he declared Chechnya fully independent of the Soviet Union and the RSFSR. The Moscow authorities fled the territory and left behind thousands of heavy weapons—the only province of Russia where they did so.

The proximate cause of the Chechen horror show was leadership failure. An air-force officer by profession, Dudayev was the first ethnic Chechen to make general in the Soviet military and had commanded six thousand men in a strategic bomber wing in Estonia—a force that in the event of war with NATO would have rained nuclear bombs on Western Europe. Except for a few weeks in babyhood, he had never lived in Chechnya until 1991. Between him and Yeltsin there were certain parallels: The two were model servants of the former regime, broke with it, and succeeded politically as populists. But there the similarities ended. Where Yeltsin was a risk-taker who knew his limits, Dudayev was a narcissist influenced by the Chechen mountaineers’ cult of the jiggit, the madcap or knight who proves himself in armed forays and lives on in heroic songs if he falls on the battlefield.¹⁰³ And Dudayev was more beguiled by the trappings of power than by its utilization—“much more interested in the idea of calling Chechnya independent than in the practicality of making that idea work.”¹⁰⁴ He had a weakness for cinematic costumes and pageantry. Of a commemoration in Grozny where Dudayev took the platform in a leather trench coat, epaulets, and jackboots, one observer writes that “he looked like nothing so much as a bad copy of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Dictator, toothbrush mustache included.”¹⁰⁵ Unlike Mintimer Shaimiyev, who flirted with separatism and then did a workable deal for his republic under the Russian tent, Dudayev scorned the via media and a Tatarstan-type accommodation. As was once said of Yasser Arafat, he rarely lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity. Dudayev’s Chechnya was an economic basket case, at the mercy of political cliques, smugglers, counterfeiters, local mobsters, and Russian businessmen and officials who valued it as a haven and transit point. Between 1992 and 1994, nearly 200,000 people, or one-fifth of the population, left the republic as refugees; most were ethnic Russians.

Yeltsin was not at the top of his game, either. It was he who had said the minorities should take all the sovereignty they could swallow, and here was a minority that said it wanted every last crumb. As Aleksandr Tsipko had pointed out, it was no walkover to explain to the Chechens or anyone in their position that they had no title to the independence that the fifteen union republics of the USSR—one of them Russia—asserted in 1991. In 1995, when the war was in full swing, Yeltsin was to imply that there was a limit the Chechens should have known not to cross: “I have said, ‘Take as much sovereignty as you can.’ But a very profound meaning sits within this word ‘can.’ As much as you can—meaning, Don’t take more than you can. And if you do, you will crack up, like Chechnya did.”¹⁰⁶ After the fact, the Chechens’ crackup was instructive to the others, but at the time it was not foreseen.

Racked by indecision, Yeltsin entrusted policy on Chechnya to a revolving carousel of advisory groups. The attitude stiffened after Vladimir Zhirinovskii led the polls in the December 1993 parliamentary election. The sole Chechen with authority in the Russia-wide political arena was Ruslan Khasbulatov. Released from prison under the amnesty, he set up shop in the Chechen village of Tolstoy-Yurt in March of 1994 and offered his good offices as a broker. Yeltsin, however, warned his former adversary off, thus ruling out of court one potentially nonviolent outcome.¹⁰⁷

A flag-waving group headed by Nikolai Yegorov, the former governor of Krasnodar province, led in defining Kremlin policy once he was appointed minister of nationality and regional affairs in May 1994. Attempts to arrange a meeting between Dudayev and Yeltsin were to no avail. “Beside the powerful historical and sociopolitical currents, the Chechen conflict… was decisively rooted in personal and emotional influences that cannot be explained in the usual categories of positivist causality.”¹⁰⁸ Yeltsin informed Shaimiyev in the early summer that he was thinking about a meeting; he hardened his position when, apparently in reaction to an assassination attempt, Dudayev contemned him on Russian television as an unfit leader and a dipsomaniac. Yeltsin as a result “crossed Dudayev off the list of… politicians with whom it was permissible in any way to communicate and raised him to the rank of a primary enemy. ”¹⁰⁹ The patience of Job would have been required to work things out with Dudayev, and that was a quality Boris Yeltsin lacked. Dudayev gave journalists a glimpse of the patience needed at press conferences called to publicize the Chechens’ policy. The pattern was that he would lead off with a rational statement. “Then, however, he would rapidly degenerate into hysterical insults and… philosophical, racial, and historical speculations, almost as if possessed by some evil demon.” Anatol Lieven, the Briton who made this observation, also recalls Dudayev in interviews before the war ranting at Yeltsin and the Russians as Nazis, totalitarian, satanic.¹¹⁰

What made the case for a military response irresistible was the shared hubris of assuming that the army was capable of prevailing in a surgical strike. The Defense Ministry questioned only the feasibility of doing it rashly and in mid-winter. Pavel Grachëv believed the republic could be secured in ten days, and showed Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin on a map how the advance would go.¹¹¹ Oleg Lobov, the Sverdlovsk apparatchik who by this time was secretary of the Security Council, the coordinating body for national security (rather like the National Security Council in Washington, D.C.), is reported to have boasted to a lawmaker in November 1994 that there would be “a small, victorious war” in Chechnya, which would “raise the president’s ratings” as, he said, the U.S. intervention in Haiti had helped Bill Clinton’s.¹¹² Lobov in an interview with me in 2002 said he never made the statement, while confirming that he had thought the war would go more swimmingly than it did.¹¹³ As for Yeltsin, although there is no evidence that he linked Chechnya to his approval ratings, he had a pollyannaish view of Russian military capabilities and was now of the opinion that independence for a Chechen statelet would be “the beginning of the breakup of the country.”¹¹⁴

The Kremlin first attempted covert action to overthrow Dudayev in league with local anti-government militias. When this did not work, Yeltsin had his Security Council sanction a military operation. On November 30 he signed Decree No. 2137 authorizing the army and the MVD to “restore constitutional order” in Chechnya. Three columns of troops and armor tore across the provincial border on December 11. On December 31, without proper intelligence or infantry cover, tanks entered Grozny, which the tsar’s Terek Cossacks had founded as a fortress in 1818. Chechen squads mowed down many of the crews and hid in housing and office buildings. Russian guns and airstrikes within weeks made a moonscape out of the city and created a humanitarian catastrophe. The Russian contingent numbered 40,000 by January 1995 and 70,000 by February. By some estimates, 25,000 civilians and 1,500 Russian troops had died by April 1995. As early as January 4, Yeltsin was demanding to know at a Kremlin meeting why so many had been killed in the blitzkrieg. “Russia at this moment,” he was to write in his memoirs, “parted with one more exceptionally dubious but fond illusion—about the might of our army… about its indomitability.”¹¹⁵ He and the country had paid a prohibitive price for the illusion and for being drawn into what he confessed in 1996 had been “the most botched war in the history of Russia.”¹¹⁶

Chechnya has been called Yeltsin’s Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, or Iraq. It was a sorrier trial in one sense—its firsthand feedback into national life and politics. The butchery and squalor seen on the television news were not in some distant land but in a corner of Russia. The vox populi turned against the war in the spring of 1995, even as federal battalions chased the Chechen warriors out of the urban areas and into the hills. But on June 14, 1995, Shamil Basayev, a former firefighter, computer salesman, and airplane hijacker—who claimed he had been in the crowd defending Yeltsin at the Russian White House in August 1991—opened up a home front using the foreign weapon of terrorism. Basayev and his gunmen drove three trucks untouched into Budënnovsk, Stavropol province, and took 1,400 patients, medical personnel, and others hostage in a hospital, demanding a Russian pullout from Chechnya. Yeltsin ill-advisedly took off for a meeting of the G-7 in Halifax, Canada, leaving Viktor Chernomyrdin to negotiate with Basayev (and save lives) for two days of the crisis. By the time it was over on June 18, 126 townspeople had been executed or killed in the crossfire and the Chechens had escaped. On June 21 the Duma for the first and only time voted (by 241 votes to seventy-two) no-confidence in Yeltsin’s government, after which he fired the Stavropol governor and three cabinet members: Interior Minister Yerin, Minister of Nationality and Regional Affairs Yegorov, and the head of the security service, Sergei Stepashin.

The military thrust in Chechnya wound down after Budënnovsk. On July 30 Moscow signed a protocol with the guerrillas calling for a cease-fire, a disarming of the Chechen formations, and a drawdown of army units. In late 1995 it went through the motions of returning Doku Zavgayev as head of the republic and staging an election. But militants in the countryside continued to ambush the federal forces and their local clients, kidnapping and piracy went on unabated, and few weapons were turned in. Dudayev’s death in April 1996 had little effect on the Russians’ growing yearning for a way out. The presidential election of the summer of 1996 (see Chapter 14) was to force the issue.

If any consolation is to be taken from the Chechen fiasco, it is that Yeltsin did not put it to use to asphyxiate debate or political liberties. He pats himself on the back in Presidential Marathon: “If during those… critical days we had gone for extraordinary measures and had limited freedom of speech, a split would have been unavoidable” between state and society.¹¹⁷ It is no idle boast. At one of the low points of his administration, struggling to keep the state together with the bluntest of instruments, he could have attacked democratic freedoms in the name of protecting the state, but elected not to.