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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 transgression
s, 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:
In exchange for loyalty or even for neutrality, Boris Yeltsin often gave the governors a free hand, not hindering those who carried out reforms, others who imitated them, or a third group who, as the adage went, wanted “to uphold the gains of socialism in one oblast” [a joking reference to Stalin’s catchword of “Socialism in One Country”]. Not infrequently in the arguments of the federal government with the regions, the president took the part of the latter and would come out as the lobbyist of several of them, supporting their requests for supplementary budget allocations for this or that purpose—which badly nettled the reformers in the cabinet. Most often Yeltsin preferred to distance himself from these questions, considering that life itself would show who was right. Mind you, he took an understanding attitude when the government used unorthodox methods of influencing the regions, such as reallocation of financial resources. He would look at such methods in the context of preserving the balance. Knowing from his own experience how heavy was the burden of leaders on the spot, he in any case saw to it that some limit in the relations between the center and the regional leaders was not crossed.97
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