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:
I will not deny that the powers of the president in the draft really are significant. But what else would you want to see? [This is] a country habituated to tsars and chieftains; a country where clear-cut group interests have not developed, where the bearers of them have not been defined, and where normal parties are only beginning to be born; a country where discipline is not great and legal nihilism runs riot. In such a country, do you want to bet only or mostly on a parliament? If you did, within a half-year, if not sooner, people would demand a dictator. I can assure you that such a dictator would be found, and possibly from within that very same parliament. . . .
This is not about Yeltsin but about people being knowledgeable of the need to have an official from whom they can make demands. . . . The president of Russia [in the new constitution] has just as many powers as he needs to carry out his role in reforming the country.69
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.
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