Yeltsin
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The most urgent item on the presidential agenda was Chechnya, where fighting had resumed right after the electoral runoff. On August 6, 1996, Chechen units commanded by Aslan Maskhadov attacked Grozny. The Russians under Konstantin Pulikovskii counterattacked, and the city was ablaze as Yeltsin took his oath of office. On August 11 he made Aleksandr Lebed, the electoral rival whom he had brought into his administration in between rounds of the election, his personal envoy to the republic and ordered him to hammer out an agreement that would honor his pledge to put a stop to the war and bring the boys home. With General Pulikovskii’s troops encircled and running short of supplies, Lebed and Maskhadov signed an armistice at Khasavyurt, Dagestan, on August 30. Yeltsin may have been able to push around the Chechen delegation in the Kremlin in May; on the field of battle, the superior morale and mobility of the rebels gave them the edge over the Russian conscripts. Khasavyurt deferred determination of the province’s final status until 2001 and made provision for the exodus of all army and MVD forces. Yeltsin and Maskhadov, by then the elected president of Chechnya, would formalize the agreement as a treaty on May 12, 1997. The Chechens had won de facto recognition, the expunging of all Muscovite influence, and a promise of economic aid. Yeltsin had bought peace, at a heavy price but one that public opinion at the time wanted paid.
Dissension over Chechnya between Lebed and Anatolii Kulikov, the free-spoken interior minister who had helped talk Yeltsin out of canceling the presidential election, and who was on close terms with Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, broke into the open in September 1996. Kulikov, not without reason, felt the Khasavyurt terms were ambiguous and that it was only a matter of time before the war restarted. Lebed further antagonized him by reproving the MVD troops under Kulikov’s command and, says Kulikov, by scheming to institute a “Russian Legion,” a crack military force that would report to Lebed as national security adviser and would be reinforced by 1,500 Chechen guerrillas. Anatolii Chubais publicly backed Kulikov and drew counterfire from Lebed.43
As Yeltsin saw it, the general in mufti was after bigger game than Kulikov or Chubais. It was no coincidence that Lebed had picked this moment to strut his stuff: “All that went on in the Kremlin during those months was closely connected with one specific circumstance—my illness.” Yeltsin disliked Lebed’s pugilism about everything under the sun and, worse, his transparent attempt to come across as the alternative to an infirm civilian leader: “With his demeanor, he was trying to show that the president is doing badly and I, the general-politician, am ready to take his place . . . [and] I alone know how to communicate with the people at this trying moment.” The last straw was when Lebed had the impertinence to call on September 28 for the president to step down from office until he was fully recovered from surgery. Yeltsin stayed his hand for several weeks because, interestingly, Lebed “someways reminded me of myself, only in caricatured form.”44 On October 17 Yeltsin came out of preoperative quarantine to fire Lebed and found the strength to shoot a clip about the decision for the evening news, in which he compared Lebed, not to himself, but to another politicized general, Aleksandr Korzhakov.45 Lebed had made it through nearly four months on the job. As was his way, Yeltsin did not further punish the defrocked comrade. Lebed spent the coming year networking and raising funds; in May 1998 he won election as governor of the Siberian province of Krasnoyarsk.
A further spinoff from the just-concluded presidential campaign was the accord reached with Aleksandr Lukashenko in April 1996 to form an interstate community between Russia and Belarus. Details were left to be negotiated. As Yeltsin convalesced that first winter, Dmitrii Ryurikov, his presidential assistant for foreign policy, worked out a treaty of “union,” a deeper association than Yeltsin had in mind. Like Lebed, Ryurikov, confident he was free to act, got too far ahead of himself. He had the document approved by the Belarusians and by Gennadii Seleznëv, the communist speaker of the Russian State Duma, and, before sharing it with his boss, informed the press that Yeltsin had agreed. The draft treaty would have fathered a bicameral union parliament (with equal representation for Belarus, a nation of 10 million, and Russia, with more than 140 million), a rotating presidency, and a ratification referendum within three months. Its neo-Soviet and pan-Slavic harmonics pleased Lukashenko, as did the possibility of a political presence within Russia, where he had built a provincial following since taking over in Minsk in 1994. Yeltsin was not a bit pleased. The draft was impossible to reconcile with his constitution (it would bring into being a second legislature and budget and open up bothersome questions about the federal structure), and sharing executive powers with anyone else was the farthest thing from his mind. It would have midwifed “a new country,” he told his chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev, and he had done that once before in the 1990s.46 On April 4, 1997, Yeltsin unceremoniously dismissed Ryurikov, who was soon appointed ambassador to Uzbekistan. A vague and saccharine agreement was agreed to and signed by the two presidents in the Kremlin on May 23.
The final case of overreach by a refractory subordinate came again from the field of national security. In July 1996 Yeltsin, having let Pavel Grachëv go with the Korzhakov-Soskovets group, appointed Igor Rodionov his second minister of defense at the strenuous recommendation of Aleksandr Lebed. Rodionov was a four-star Soviet general whose career had been wrecked when soldiers under his command killed twenty civilian protestors in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1989. Since then he had been commandant of the General Staff Academy and branched into military doctrine and organization, which is what won Lebed’s respect. Yeltsin asked Rodionov to come up with a design for “military reform”; the desiderata were a gradual switch from conscript to professional troops (as Yeltsin had agreed to do during the election campaign), holding the line on defense spending, and development of airborne and mobile forces. Instead, Rodionov sat tight on conscription, clamored for a budget increase, and tried to transfer airborne regiments to the infantry. Yeltsin was most affronted by Rodionov’s speeches and media leaks, feeling they were intended to put pressure on him through popular opinion, and by what he saw as the minister’s going back on his word to do army reform on a shoestring.
In September 1996, in an effort to limit Lebed’s influence as secretary of the Security Council, Yeltsin created a separate consultative board, the Defense Council, which he put under Yurii Baturin’s management as executive secretary. It was the Defense Council that Yeltsin chose as the place to clear the air on May 22, 1997. The scene in the General Staff’s white marble quarters on Arbat Square has been set down by Baturin and his coauthors of The Yeltsin Epoch:
Yeltsin . . . was cold, stern, and forbidding. He said hello and gave the floor to the minister.
“You have fifteen minutes for your report.”
“Fifteen minutes is insufficient,” replied the minister.
“Fifteen minutes,” the president snapped.
“If we want to talk seriously about reform, I need fifty minutes,” Rodionov stated.
“We are losing time, let us begin.” Yeltsin’s voice was getting sterner.
“In that case, I refuse to make my report,” the minister declared.
Yeltsin called on [General Viktor] Samsonov: “Chief of the General Staff, please go ahead.”
“I also refuse.”
“Igor Sergeyevich Sergeyev,” the president said, misstating the patronymic of the commander-in-chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces (which is Dmitriyevich).
Sergeyev stood up and, thinking he was supposed to report, moved toward the desk where the president was sitting.
“Hold on,” said Yeltsin, stopping him. “Will you take on the duties of minister of defense?”
“Very good, sir!” Sergeyev retorted curtly.
“Viktor Stepanovich Chechevatov,” the president went on in the same self-assured voice. For some time, he had known and respected this general, who had gone up the service ladder to commander of [the Far Eastern] Military District; in the summer of 1996, Yeltsin had received him in the Kremlin as a candidate
for defense minister. “Do you agree to take the position of chief of the General Staff?”
“If you don’t mind, Boris Nikolayevich, I would like a private word with you when the session of the Defense Council is over, and I will give you an answer then.”
“Fine, sit down.”
The president turned to the secretary of the Defense Council [Yurii Baturin], seated at his left hand, and uttered a single word: “Decrees.”
Baturin left to phone the State Legal Directorate, which was responsible for composing presidential decrees. While Yeltsin was delivering an irate and not exactly fair speech berating the generals, several alternative draft decrees were brought over from the directorate—alternatives, since there was no clarity about the chief of the General Staff. Having had his say, the president headed off to the defense minister’s office for the talk with Chechevatov. All of a sudden, on his way there, he handed his aide a form on which he had written, “Call in [Anatolii] Kvashnin [the commander of the North Caucasus Military District] for a chat.” Yeltsin had made up his mind that Chechevatov was not to be chief of the General Staff. If he had not agreed to the offer right away, so be it. The president does not offer twice. He almost never made exceptions to this rule of his.
Soon [on May 23] Anatolii Kvashnin was appointed chief of the General Staff. And Yeltsin was to work well with the new defense minister, Igor Sergeyev, and always respected him greatly.47
Yeltsin had evidently all but made up his mind to dismiss Rodionov before the meeting. The flow of it confirmed his decision and then had unexpected knock-on effects in the General Staff.48
Out of uniform, Rodionov turned to forming a lobby organization for retired officers; in 1999 he was elected to the Duma on the KPRF ticket. Like Lebed and Ryurikov, he may have had reasons to feel abused on the substance of policy, and he and Samsonov (and the poor Chechevatov) had more reason than the others to dislike the way they were disciplined.49 All, however, had brought this penalty on their own heads by misreading Yeltsin and poaching on presidential turf. As the saying goes, when the cat’s away, the mice will play. The cat was back from limbo, though not for too long.
Right after his second-round victory over Gennadii Zyuganov, Yeltsin tested the turbid waters of cultural and symbolic politics. Speaking laboredly at a reception for several hundred campaign workers on July 12, 1996, and presenting them with wristwatches as souvenirs, Sverdlovsk-style, he thanked them for their assistance and asked them not to twiddle their thumbs now that the election had been won. The new Russia, he said, in contradistinction to the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union, lacked a “national idea” or “national ideology,” “and that is too bad.” He asked them to give it some thought and promised to ask for a report by one year later, saying it would come in handy then or when his successor was elected in 2000.50 Yeltsin appointed an advisory committee chaired by his Kremlin assistant for political affairs, Georgii Satarov, and the government newspaper Rossiiskaya gazeta offered 10 million rubles (about $2,000) to the reader who produced the best essay on the topic, in seven pages or less.
The project fizzled on the launching pad. Satarov denied that Yeltsin meant to enact some Soviet-type ruling doctrine. No, what was being proposed was a consensual process to discover an idea that already existed in the minds of Russians, as opposed to inflicting one on them: “A national idea cannot be imposed by the state but should come from the bottom up. The president is not saying, ‘I’m going to give you a national idea.’ On the contrary, he is asking, ‘Go out and find it.’”51 Rossiiskaya gazeta made a preliminary award in January 1997 to Gurii Sudakov, a philologist from Vologda province, for an essay on “principles of Russianness,” by which time it was apparent that the exercise would be about navel-gazing and vaporous futurology. The newspaper never did decide on a grand winner and discontinued the essays in mid-1997. To the panel, Satarov commended as a model postwar West Germany, where an economic miracle was complemented by an outlook of “national penitence” after Nazi totalitarianism. Few members agreed, and the group was no better positioned to enunciate a nonexistent societal consensus than Yeltsin or Satarov would have been on his own. On the anniversary of its establishment, Satarov published an anthology of papers of liberal and centrist coloration. He then called it a day, and the commission fell into disuse.52
Yeltsin, knee-high in other concerns, did not weigh in and ignored his one-year target date. It is unlikely he could have salvaged much from the process, since it flew in the face of his own efforts to debunk Marxism-Leninism and of the very concept of “propaganda for the new life.” Intellectual critics of the idea of a national idea sounded like no one more than Boris Yeltsin. “It is intolerable to cultivate and instill in public consciousness something that has not formed spontaneously,” one of them wrote. “The banefulness of such experiments was evidenced by the socialist system,” which had a moral that reminded him of an alcohol-free wedding “where mineral water sits on the table and under the table they are pouring liquor.” Were post-communist Russia to be capable of working out a unifying idea at all, it could not possibly be done in one year or in several, and the hardships of daily life put no one in the mood for trying: “Ideologies come and go, but people always want to eat.”53 Yeltsin’s silence in the face of these strictures tells me that he came to realize he quite agreed with them.
If he felt free to orphan his national-idea initiative, Yeltsin did not wash his hands of myth making and the reckoning with the past. In his first official act after reclaiming statutory powers on November 6, 1996, he signed a decree renaming November 7, the celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, as the Day of Reconciliation and Accord, and unveiling a Year of Reconciliation to last until the following November. The edict was composed by Kremlin staff under Anatolii Chubais, who was of the belief that the vehement anti-communism of the re-election campaign had to be muzzled and that it was more important to get the KPRF-controlled Duma to approve progressive economic legislation than to refight 1917 or 1991 ad infinitum. Yeltsin supporters who were more interested in political change, like Satarov, were against the renaming but lost the argument.54 The pronouncement might be interpreted as an enhancement of pluralism or, alternatively, “as profoundly uncritical, in the sense that it embraced all perspectives on the past without acknowledging the contradictions inherent in different views.”55 It was, as a matter of fact, a smidgen of both, and Yeltsin’s ambivalence on historical questions continued throughout his second term.
One piece of the past where his views evolved only slowly concerned Mikhail Gorbachev, the last head of the Soviet state. Yeltsin stroked Gorbachev’s name off the guest list for his second inauguration and made it hard for associates to maintain friendly relations with him. The president of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, Askar Akayev, bid welcome to Gorbachev in his capital, Bishkek, and honored him at a public event in July 1997. Yeltsin, a friend since they were deputies in the Soviet congress in 1989–90, refused to shake Akayev’s hand for the next year, asking him at one point, “Askar, how could you?” He did not apologize to Akayev until 2004.56 Yeltsin did relax the hostility some by inviting Gorbachev to attend a number of state functions in 1997, 1998, and 1999, but Gorbachev never accepted.57 When Raisa Gorbacheva took ill and died of leukemia in a German clinic in September 1999, Yeltsin sent condolences and had a government airplane return her body to Moscow for burial. Naina Yeltsina consoled Gorbachev at the graveside service. Boris Yeltsin did not attend.
The second-term Yeltsin did continue to rehabilitate visual markers of pre-Soviet Russia. The biggest architectural project was the restoration of the Grand Kremlin Palace, a building to which few Russians ever gain entry. It was reopened in June 1999. Several blocks away, workmen constructed a carbon copy of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, designed by Konstantin Ton as the largest church in Russia, which Stalin had dynamited in 1931. Yeltsin gave it his approval and laid the keystone, but the moving spirit, and the one to profit politically, was Yurii Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow
.
An issue that would not go away was what to do with the body of Lenin in his shrine on Red Square. Yeltsin’s stance was a reprise of his first-term position. In May 1997 several aides gave him a plan for raising the issue afresh and bringing it to a “revolutionary resolution.” He agreed to the advice and to recast it as an ethical choice, and requested Patriarch Aleksii in a private audience to get the Orthodox hierarchy behind it.58 Aleksii, with some reluctance, spoke out directly and through lesser clergy, pointing out that prisoners had once been executed in Red Square and that it was now being used for rock concerts, and so was unsuitable to be a graveyard. On June 6 Yeltsin poured fat on the fire at a meeting in the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. While Lenin and communism were part of the tapestry of Russian history, it was indecent, he said, for any person not to be buried in the ground. That autumn he called for a national referendum to settle the question: “Let the people decide whether to give him a Christian burial or to leave things the way they are.” The president did, though, deviate from the depoliticization line, saying with some relish that the communists would be opposed: “The communists, of course, will fight it. No need to worry, I know all about struggling with them.”59 Polls in 1997 showed Russian popular opinion to be evenly divided, but the numbers fluctuated over the next two years.60 And the intensity of feeling was greater among the enemies of reinterment, who took their cues from the KPRF and from the closest relative of Lenin’s to survive, his niece Olga Ul’yanova.61 Some threatened to use lawsuits, protest, and even violence to prevent the mausoleum from being emptied.
As had happened before 1996, Yeltsin was unwilling to chance it. “There was not enough time” to prepare Russia for the move, he said in an interview in 2002, and the social tension raised by holding the referendum or moving Lenin without a vote would have been intolerably high. He pointed out that those still queuing to view the body were mostly pensioners who were raised in Soviet days to revere the founder—“and it is hard to accuse them of anything.”62