appealing at the last moment for a vote in favour of his proposed Constitution and his preferred parties, looked uncomfortable in his addresses to the public on television.
By contrast Zhirinovski, having conjured up funds to buy time on the broadcast media, showed panache. He was the only politician who could speak the language of the man and woman in the street. His vulgar aggressiveness appealed to those Russian citizens who had suffered from the effects of Yeltsin’s policies, especially the provincial industrial workers, the middle aged and the serving officers. Zhirinovski was not the only threat to Yeltsin’s plans. There was also Zyuganov and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Zyuganov was an unprepossessing speaker and a writer of some of the stodgiest prose in the Russian language. And yet like Zhirinovski, he exposed the political and economic dislocation that had occurred in 1991. His charisma was negligible; but his party stood well with those sections of the electorate which were discomfited by Russia’s separation from the former USSR, her decline in global power and her inability to guarantee general material well- being.
The surge of support for Yeltsin’s adversaries was hidden by the ban on the divulgence of public-opinion surveys in the last weeks of the electoral campaign. But the talk in Moscow on 15 December, when voters went to the polls in the mildly snowy weather, indicated that Yeltsin was in trouble. Although he won sanction for the Constitution, he was troubled by the other results. To his consternation, the State Duma contained sixty-four deputies from the Liberal-Democratic Party and 103 from the block led by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation under Gennadi Zyuganov. Russia’s Choice supplied only seventy deputies. There had been much unfair manipulation before voting day and probably there was downright fraud in the counting of the votes; but still the results were compiled with a sufficient degree of fairness for a snub to be delivered to Boris Yeltsin.
27
The Lowering of Expectations
(1994–1999)
Yeltsin had adopted democratic ideas late in life and in a superficial fashion. The electorate’s unhappiness with the results of his reforms quickly induced him to go back to more authoritarian habits. Surveys of popular opinion in the early 1990s made depressing reading for him and his government. Citizens of the Russian Federation had started by welcoming political democracy and being willing for market economics to be given a try.1 As real average incomes went into steep decline, people resented the top stratum of an elite which had become rich and powerful beyond the wildest dreams of officialdom under communism. As Yeltsin’s popularity waned, so nostalgia grew for the safe and stable conditions remembered from the years before 1985. Brezhnev’s rule began to be recalled with enthusiasm.2 The disintegration of the USSR was regretted. People were bewildered by the denigration of military, economic and cultural achievements of the Soviet period. The floor was giving way beneath the Kremlin reformers, and Yeltsin found it difficult to introduce his policies without extensive consultation with the representative bodies — the State Duma and the Council of the Federation — which had been established by his own new Constitution.
He stuffed his successive governments with politicians who lacked qualms about this approach. The dogged Viktor Chernomyrdin was retained as Prime Minister, and Yeltsin never attempted to bring Gaidar back to power. Nevertheless Yeltsin treated Chernomyrdin pretty shabbily, frequently indicating dissatisfaction with the government’s performance; but it was not until March 1998 that he risked replacing him with an economic radical in Gaidar’s mould. This was Sergei Kirienko, still in his mid-thirties, from Nizhni Novgorod. The financial collapse of August 1998 did for Kirienko and the State Duma’s intransigence induced Yeltsin to appoint Yevgeni Primakov to the premiership. Primakov’s willingness to have dealings with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation irked Yeltsin. Equally annoying was the Prime Minister’s high standing in popular opinion. In May 1999 Primakov was dropped and his post was given to former Minister of the Interior Sergei Stepashin. But when Stepashin refused to keep the state anti-corruption investigators away from the Yeltsin family’s affairs, he too was removed from office. In August 1999 the obscure Vladimir Putin, ex-head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), became Prime Minister. It was a giddying carousel on the fairground of Russian governance.
Yeltsin’s hands at the controls grew ever shakier, apart from when it came to decisions about sacking his associates. He was resorting extravagantly to the comforts of the vodka bottle, and in Berlin in 1994 he drunkenly snatched a conductor’s baton and led an orchestra through a rendition of the folksong ‘Kalinka’. His drinking aggravated a chronic heart ailment. Suffering a collapse on a flight across the Atlantic in the same year, he was too ill to meet the Irish Taoiseach at Dublin airport.3 For the duration of the 1996 presidential electoral campaign he had to be pumped full of palliative medicines. Afterwards a quintuple cardiac bypass operation proved necessary.
Neither Yeltsin nor his governments retained much support in the country. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin formed a party, the archly named Our Home’s Russia, to contest the Duma elections of December 1995. He had a huge advantage over the opposition since the new party had unrivalled financial resources and powers of patronage and secured unobstructed access to TV news programmes. Yet Chernomyrdin took only 65 seats out of 450. The lacklustre Gennadi Zyuganov and his Communist Party of the Russian Federation obtained 157, and the allies of the communists — the Agrarian Party and Women of Russia — added a further 23. This made Zyuganov the leader of the largest block in the Duma. Yeltsin, however, refused to compromise with him and insisted on keeping Chernomyrdin as Prime Minister. Zyuganov, filled with new confidence, denounced both Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin. The Duma elections, he declared, supplied a popular mandate for a reversal of the whole reform agenda. The USSR should never have been abolished. Economic privatization had reduced millions of households to poverty. The country’s assets and interests had tumbled into the grasp of Russian plutocrats and the IMF, and Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin were the agents of this denouement. Zyuganov made the case for a government of communists to restore well-being in state and society.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation had been widely thought to be at death’s door since it drew its support mainly from pensioners and from workers in the decaying sectors of industry. Yet there was a tenacity about Zyuganov, and his increasingly Russian nationalist statements continued to attract popular approval. His party comrades in the Duma, moreover, were well-organized and one of them, Gennadi Seleznev, became its Speaker. Despite having equipped himself with abundant powers under the 1993 Constitution, President Yeltsin had to let his governments come to terms with Zyuganov whenever the communists stirred up controversy in the Duma about his behaviour, health or policies. Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin continued to trim back the project of reforms. The headlong rush into capitalism was slowed. The inclination to perceive Russia’s national interests in international relations as identical to those of the leading Western powers faded. The chaotic relationship between the centre and the republics and provinces in the Russian Federation began to be regularized. Yeltsin more and more rarely devoted his speeches to the theme of the communist totalitarian nightmare between 1917 and 1991.4
Although these adjustments came easily to the opportunistic President, he did not want to concede more than was absolutely necessary. He and his coterie were determined to hold on to power. In spring 1996, when Zyuganov was beating him in the national opinion surveys, he contemplated a plan to suspend the presidential election. His aide and chief bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov encouraged him, arguing that a communist restoration had to be prevented at all costs. A ‘red scare’ atmosphere was fostered in newspapers and on television. A decree of suspension was drafted. Not until the last moment was Yeltsin persuaded that he would do more damage than good by trampling on democratic procedures.5 Not that he stopped being devious. He agreed a secret deal with Boris Berezovski and a handful of other exceptionally wealthy businessmen who were commonly known as ‘the oligarchs’ whereby they would receive a lucrative stake in state-owned mining enterprises in return for bailing out the state budget and financing Yeltsin’s electoral campaign.6 He also came to an agreement with rival presidential candidate Alexander Lebed. With his booming voice and confident comportment, Lebed had a substantial following in the country. As reward for urging his supporters to vote in the second round for Yeltsin, Lebed was to become Secretary of the Security Council and principal negotiator for the Russian side in the conflict with Chechnya.
Zyuganov had started the electoral campaign with advantages. Even though he fought it with obsolete techniques, he was confronting an incumbent whose health problems were acute. Nevertheless the second round of
