Why all the bobbing and weaving on affiliation with a party? Yeltsin did not offer a reason during his years as president. In an interview in the privacy of retirement, he offered this comment:
The CPSU had left a belch in the air. I had an extreme reaction against the word “party,” an allergy against all of this stuff. So I had no wish to join any party and I did not join one, and I am not a member of any party today. . . . I had a very negative attitude toward [the creation of] a unifying party. . . . [I felt I should] be above the interests of any party. I was the president. He should respect every registered party and every tendency in society; he should help them and listen to them. That is it. If I had been a member of one of the parties, I would have had to concern myself with lobbying for that party. That would have been incorrect. . . . I did not want to give up on this preference of mine, that was a credo for me. . . . The president should be above all these things.19
Having chafed at the ruling party in the past, Yeltsin was pleased to be unbound from it and from anything that reeked of its subservient culture. For the present, he considered the president to be above the fray and representative of the whole nation, very much in the spirit of his constitution. The not caring to “lobby” for any organization was what registered most in the political elite. As one former activist in the Interregional group observed, from the turn of the 1990s onward Yeltsin “did not want any structure that might force upon him the necessity to coordinate his decisions with others.”20 From this perspective, a party was harmful less for constraining followers than for constraining the leader. Yeltsin had seen Gorbachev labor to steer both the CPSU and the Soviet state, while he as an oppositionist had flexibility after he walked out of the party in 1990. He was not sure how agreeable Russia’s untrammeled political elite would be to reimposition of partisan discipline in any form. And he knew that party organizations in open or semi-open political systems provide opportunities for subleaders to excel, and that subleaders can become rivals to the alpha leader if his grip slackens. In 1995 Yeltsin desired Our Home Is Russia to do well in the Duma campaign but not so well as to make Chernomyrdin a credible pretender to the presidential suite. Chernomyrdin would say in an interview that Yeltsin’s Kremlin entourage “feared that Chernomyrdin would get too strong, with 1996 coming up.”21 It would not have taken such a position without the president knowing.
Yeltsin’s allergic reaction to the party form was in keeping with his style of acting and governing—visceral and charismatic rather than cerebral and institutional. As with his reluctance to act as propagandist for Russia’s transformation, he was overcompensating for aspects of the totalitarian past. At times when he saw salvation in hooking up directly with the people, a permanent party machine might have posed hurdles. But a party can work for a leader and a cause: by supplying a brand with which citizens can identify, sharing responsibility for making choices in government, and acting as a repository of ideas. With no party at his side, Yeltsin, as Oleg Poptsov wrote, had difficulty answering the question, “Who is the president with?”22 Charles de Gaulle in France, who had slighted the Fourth Republic as a “regime of parties” that divided society, came to see the merits of an integrating, pro-presidential quasi-party, the Union for the New Republic, in his Fifth Republic. Yeltsin never drew the same conclusion in Russia.
And who was with Yeltsin as the 1996 election train pulled out of the station ? Public opinion surveys in 1995 showed not very many unqualified supporters remained and that as few as 5 percent of citizens had the firm intent of voting for him if he were to run.23 Observers frequently gave him no chance of prevailing and forecast a sweep by Gennadii Zyuganov of the KPRF. Yegor Gaidar was typical in a statement in February: “No matter how you arrange the possible coalitions, it is hard to imagine that the president will win.”24 But the polls also showed that a goodly portion of the electorate was undecided and that the attitude of roughly 40 percent of Russians was ambivalent: They were disappointed in Yeltsin but not unalterably against, they hoped he might do better in the future, or they preferred him to the available alternatives, as the best of a bad lot. These numbers, and the two-stage electoral format, which would allow a candidate into a runoff round, were one to be needed, with well under half of the votes, held open the possibility that Yeltsin would be able to turn things around on the campaign trail.25
Yeltsin firmed up his choice to seek a second term in late December 1995, a month in which his political allies suffered defeat in the parliamentary election and he endured his third coronary in a half-year. Naina Yeltsina and their daughters were moved to tears by the very suggestion. Physicians had reported that the rigors of an electioneering marathon might kill him or shorten his life and leave him incapacitated.26 Not for the first time, Yeltsin overrode family and medical science.
His motivations, as always, were a jumble. In political terms, the neo-communists he so detested were now the main enemy and would gain the most from a failure to stand and fight: “The idea that I myself would facilitate the communists coming to power was more than I could bear.”27 In personal terms, the stacking of the deck against him made the challenge seem especially worthwhile. As he met staff after New Year’s to inform them of his decision, he took umbrage at reports that pollsters hired by the Kremlin found his popularity at a record low: “I am being stuffed to the gills with sociology, but I myself know sociology better than the whole lot of you.”28 His memoir selfportrait of those weeks might be captioned “King Lear Makes a Comeback.” “My whole life was buffeted by all manner of storms and winds,” he wrote. “I was on my feet but almost knocked over by the gusts.” His health was bad, power was slipping through his fingers, trusted comrades were letting him down, and the people would not forgive him for shock therapy and Chechnya. “It appeared as if all was lost. But this was one of those moments when a sort of clarity comes over me. With a clear head, I said to myself, ‘If I run in this election I am going to win it without any doubt.’ This I knew with certitude, regardless of all the forecasts, all the polls. . . . Most likely, I was saved by my imperishable passion and my will to resist.”29 Yegor Gaidar in his memoirs was to call up a Russian cultural trope: “Our Il’ya Muromets had finally roused himself.”30
Yeltsin left Moscow’s Vnukovo field on February 15 to make the official announcement in old Urals haunts. Aides and ministers had been summoned to the airport. “With his storied stare, he looked around at all the functionaries there to send him off and asked with great sincerity, ‘So tell me, do you think it’s not worth it for me to get mixed up in this business?’ And the answer that rang out was, of course, a simultaneous chorus of voices: ‘How can you say such a thing, Boris Nikolayevich, what is this all about? You must!’” “If I must, then I must,” Yeltsin replied.31 His speech in Yekaterinburg was in the same Youth Palace where he had dialogue with local students as first secretary of the Sverdlovsk obkom fifteen years before. Battling laryngitis, he portrayed himself as ready to learn from his mistakes but not to turn back the clock: “I am for reforms but not at any price. I am for a correction in course but not a return to the past. I am for basing Russian politics not on utopia and dogmas but on practical utility.” He struck an inclusive note, suggesting that he shared the people’s concerns about the road taken since 1991, yet reproved reactionaries who rejected the trajectory. “We,” he proclaimed, “are stronger than those who for all these years have put a spoke in the wheel and have impeded our motion toward a great and free Russia. . . . We are stronger than our own disappointments and doubts. We are tired out but we are together, and we will win.”32
The “we” at the head of the uphill effort was an open-ended category. On January 15 Yeltsin put Oleg Soskovets, the powerful first deputy premier and friend of Aleksandr Korzhakov, in charge of his re-election headquarters. In the past year, Yeltsin had spoken several times to Soskovets of the possibility of Soskovets in due course succeeding him as president. What with Soskovets’s high position in Moscow, this talk was bound to be ta
ken more seriously than the fleeting conversation he had with Boris Nemtsov in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1994. Yeltsin now conceived of the assignment as a tryout: “I saw it this way: If Oleg Nikolayevich had political ambitions, let him display them. Let him show what kind of politician he was and what kind of political will he possessed, and then we would see.”33 Loading up the nascent campaign with a secondary objective was a mistake Yeltsin would soon regret. The drive to gather signatures for his nomination papers (one million were required by the 1995 law on presidential elections) was badly bungled. Railway and metallurgical workers were instructed by government officials to sign nominating petitions before collecting their pay at the wicket, and some governors were ordered to deliver signatures on quota.
Around February 1, Yeltsin asked his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, age thirty-six, to sit in on meetings of the Soskovets group. Other than transcribing speeches and canvassing in his early campaigns, this was her first involvement in her father’s politics. She was smart and resolute like her father but soft-spoken and unassuming like her mother. She had felt unfulfilled in the defense-related institute where she had worked for a decade and where she turned down a suggestion in the mid-1980s that she join the Communist Party (she said she did not know enough about politics and did not consider herself “worthy”), and in the bank where she was on staff in 1994–95: “My character is such that I for some reason tend to have inflated expectations of myself. And then it seems that each time I do not quite live up to them.”34 This time she was willing to heed her father’s request.
Dyachenko was soon saying to Yeltsin that something was out of whack with the Soskovets effort.35 But at first nothing much came of her efforts. It was then that Yeltsin’s need to reconnect with the mass electorate intersected with the process of connecting differently with players at the elite level. Come what may, he had to empower a functional campaign staff and to appease other public politicians. A new presence in post-communist politics—the leaders of the nonstate business class that was beginning to amass fabulous wealth in the market economy—showed both tasks in a new light.
The Russian moguls were mostly in their thirties and forties, had been nobodies under Soviet power, and until the year before Yeltsin’s re-election were mostly financiers who made money out of currency speculation, arbitrage, handling governmental deposits, and buying high-interest state debt. On August 31, 1995, Yeltsin had his first meeting with a group of them, about reserve requirements and other banking issues, and referred to the banks as having a political role. “Russian bankers,” he told ten representatives, “take part in the country’s political life. . . . The banks, like all of Russia, are learning democracy.”36 The loans-for-shares auctions in November–December 1995 allowed the more conspicuous of “the oligarchs,” as they were now known, to reposition as captains of industry. Initially dreamt up by Vladimir Potanin of Oneximbank, this privatization scheme was backed by Chubais but also by Kremlin conservatives like Soskovets, who was the one to get Yeltsin’s signature on it.37 At bargain-basement prices, Potanin picked up Norilsk Nickel, the world’s number one smelter of palladium and nickel, and he, Mikhail Khodorkovskii of Menatep, and Boris Berezovskii acquired the oil giants Sidanco, Yukos, and Sibneft. Two oligarchs also had extensive media interests and were bound to figure in the 1996 campaign: Vladimir Gusinskii of Most Bank was de jure the proprietor of NTV television; his rival Berezovskii had been de facto the moneyman behind the ORT network (formerly Ostankino) since 1994. Relations between Gusinskii and Berezovskii had always been testy, but they were willing in 1996 to set differences aside in order to protect their gains.
The one business figure on the Soskovets board was the hyperactive Berezovskii. He more than any of his colleagues was out to build status and influence in the political realm, to which end he had added to his portfolio the quality newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta, the TV-6 entertainment network, and a one-third share in the Ogonëk publishing house. He had frequently offered advice, solicited and unsolicited, to Soskovets and Korzhakov, and lobbied for advantage. His path had crossed Yeltsin’s in November or December 1993, when he and Vladimir Kadannikov volunteered to underwrite publication under the Ogonëk imprint of the Russian edition of volume two of Yeltsin’s memoirs, in which Yeltsin was advanced 10 percent against the domestic royalties. Berezovskii first shook the president’s hand when he went to his office to sign the contract. (The foreign rights, which brought in four or five times the revenue, were handled by the British literary agent Andrew Nurnberg.) In 1994 he was the first businessman to join the Presidential Club.38 Berezovskii also knew Tatyana Dyachenko, though not yet much less cursorily than he knew her father. Korzhakov was to write in his 1997 memoir that at some time in 1994 or 1995 Berezovskii made her a present of two cars: a Russian-made Niva wagon and a Chevrolet Blazer. The claim was claptrap and is controverted by both Dyachenko and Berezovskii.39 But the two were acquainted and had as a friend in common Valentin Yumashev, who had prepared both volumes of Yeltsin’s memoirs for publication. In his professional life, Yumashev was deputy editor of Ogonëk magazine from 1991 to 1995 and director general of the Ogonëk company in 1995–96.40
It took only several meetings of the Soskovets group for Berezovskii to conclude that not all was well. From February 2 to 5, he and seventy other Russian capitalists and officials attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where they were upset by the polite reception given to Gennadii Zyuganov, who had a bulge over Yeltsin in the polls. At Berezovskii’s suggestion, Viktor Ilyushin arranged for Yeltsin to host an unpublicized Kremlin luncheon for six businessmen—Berezovskii, Gusinskii, Khodorkovskii, Potanin, Aleksandr Smolenskii of SBS-Agro Bank, and Vladimir Vinogradov of Inkombank—and Chubais, who had been Yeltsin’s deputy for privatization until Yeltsin threw him to the wolves in January as a result of the Duma election. The meal was held about a fortnight after the Davos forum, in Shrovetide on the Russian calendar, and the chef served traditional fare for the season: pancakes with garnishes and drinks.41 Yeltsin had thought the diners wanted to speak with him about campaign finance, since “they had nowhere to go and would have to support me,” but the conversation was about the hopelessness of the Soviet-style effort under Soskovets. “I had not expected such tough talk,” he was to write in Presidential Marathon.42 Gusinskii and Chubais held nothing back. “Boris Nikolayevich,” Chubais stated, “your popularity rating is zero.” As usual when he was confronted by unlovely news, the meeting was marked by a long silence from the chair. One of the visitors, Khodorkovskii, thought “the tsar was thinking about whether to send of us all to the execution block”; another, Smolenskii, said in 2003 that “the pause was so loud that I hear it to this day.”43 The frank comments gave every appearance of shaking Yeltsin out of his apathy. Hesitating to catch his breath, he asked what they recommended. He promised after forty minutes of discussion to think about ways to energize the campaign and to involve Chubais and associates of big business in it. Berezovskii stayed to chat with Yeltsin briefly after the group dispersed.44
It is important to realize, though, that the dialogue with the magnates had no immediate effect.45 Almost a month after the Kremlin meeting, on March 14, Yeltsin’s political assistant, Georgii Satarov, and a group of consultants sent him a blistering memorandum noting that the campaign was still a shambles:
[Soskovets] is not a specialist on public politics or electoral technologies, as immediately revealed itself. But this has not been offset by the possible merits on which you apparently were counting.
Soskovets has displayed no organizational ability: The headquarters has not yet begun to work normally. He is unable to make contact with people who have a different point of view but are necessary to the campaign. His influence on the regional leadership has been exercised through vulgar and vain officiousness, which not only compromises you as president but turns off possible allies. The same methods are being employed, with the same result, with government agencies and with representatives of the mass media and of
commercial and banking circles. The weirdest thing is that Soskovets has not resolved the problem of mobilizing in a short span of time the financial resources needed to wage the campaign. . . . More than a month has been lost.
Satarov urged Yeltsin to redo the organization while there was still time.46
I have no doubt that Yeltsin did not reorganize in February for a reason—because he had not yet resolved the bedrock dilemma of whether there should be a presidential election at all. The detonator here was a nonbinding resolution by the newly elected State Duma on March 15, 1996, to renounce the Supreme Soviet vote of December 12, 1991, on the Belovezh’e accord. Sponsored by the KPRF caucus and passed by a majority of 250 to ninety-eight, the vote asserted in effect that the Soviet Union and the legislation undergirding it still had legal force. Yeltsin reacted with indignation to an “attempt to liquidate our statehood” that “casts doubt on the legitimacy” of the new Russia and its political system.47 Within twenty-four hours, the Korzhakov-Soskovets group, fearing a loss to the communists in the forthcoming election and sensing an opportunity to prevail in the palace struggle—where Korzhakov had not yet persuaded Yeltsin to make Soskovets prime minister and thus to put him in the line of succession—had come up with a proposal to postpone the presidential election until 1998, ban the KPRF, and shut down the Duma so as to rule by executive decree for the two years. The proposal took the postponement project entertained by Moscow democrats in 1994–95 and linked it to radically anti-democratic ends.48
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