Yeltsin
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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
&
nbsp; 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:
It’s been a grueling time since June 12, 1991, grueling in every respect—for you, for the people of Russia, for the president. We have gone onto a completely different road. We have thrown off the yoke of totalitarianism. We have thrown off the yoke of communism. We have taken the path of a civilized country, a civilized democracy. For those whose toes we have stepped on, this is inconvenient.
The national-democrats [Russian ultranationalists] and the has-beens [communists] . . . are going all out in order somehow to destroy Yeltsin—if not to destroy him physically, then to remove him. (Cries from the audience: “We will not allow this!” “Yeltsin, Yeltsin, Yeltsin!”)
I . . . am taken by the simple statement that Varennikov [Valentin Varennikov, the hard-line general in August 1991] has made from Matrosskaya Tishina [prison]: “The only person Gorbachev couldn’t handle was Yeltsin.”
You know what our congress is like. (Someone cries out, “We know!” A few shouts are heard.) . . . It is not for these six hundred [deputies] to decide Russia’s fortunes. I will not yield to them, I will only yield to the people’s will. (Cries
from the audience, applause. A wave of “Yeltsin, Yeltsin, Yeltsin!”)49
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