Nonetheless, as the first term wore on, Yeltsin communed person-to-person with his fellow citizens less and less. Security tightened during the 1993 constitutional conflict and when the Chechen war made him an assassination target. Some governors discouraged him from making appearances when in their regions. A tour in the spring of 1995 was aborted after one stop because of lack of interest in the events.9 Yeltsin’s extemporaneous contacts with the masses, the press corps noticed, were getting to be more perfunctory. “He preferred to go up to the crowd, slap it on the back . . . and get away,” is how Tatyana Malkina, a beat reporter for the newspaper Segodnya, recalls it. Yeltsin, she said, was losing sight of “people” (lyudi) and starting to see only “the people” (narod).10
As the 1995–96 election season approached, it was equally apparent that Yeltsin lacked a key resource that leaders and aspiring leaders have in the retail politics of mature democracies: an effective party. Post-Soviet Russia was a petri dish for political parties and protoparties (there were 273 of them registered in 1995), and they were found in every ideological hue, from fascist to feminist. Quality, admittedly, did not match quantity, and many of these organizations were jerry-built, personality-driven, and transient.11 Nonetheless, a party or mass movement of his own would have given Yeltsin a chance to advance positions, build organizational capacity in the parliamentary election arena, and utilize them in a presidential campaign.
There had been no want of schemes for hatching a Yeltsin party. Early on in his administration, advisers Gennadii Burbulis, Sergei Stankevich, and Galina Starovoitova pushed a broad-based national party—an August Bloc, they suggested calling it, in honor of the turning back of the coup. In March 1992 Yeltsin received the representatives of several dozen liberal organizations and said he was for creation of a pro-reform Assembly of Russian Citizens. All that came from it was a charter meeting in April, chaired by Burbulis. The plan revived in June 1992 as an Association in Support of Democracy and Reforms, bracketing forty-three reformist groups. In consultations, Yeltsin gave it his imprimatur, said that in principle he might lead it, and even expressed a preference for a name with the words “people’s” or “democratic” in it. This endeavor, too, trailed off into nothingness. Then, after the April 1993 referendum, Burbulis and Stankevich thought they had won Yeltsin over to an overarching League of the Twenty-Fifth of April or an April Alliance in the same mold. All over again, they were unable to get him to act.12
Russia’s Choice in the 1993 Duma election was a Yeltsin-friendly electoral formation that did get into the air. Without his assistance, it gathered together government ministers and reformist intellectuals, all in the hopes of a symbiosis with their hero: “Our bloc makes no bones about who is its leader—it is President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.”13 Yeltsin indicated to Yegor Gaidar, who headed up the list of candidates, that he would throw his weight behind them. On his journey to Japan in October, he promised Gaidar to address the bloc’s convention and back its list. But he never did. Pouring all of his energies into making and ratifying the constitution, Yeltsin determined at the eleventh hour not to attend the meeting, withheld sanction, and did not take issue when cabinet minister Sergei Shakhrai formed a separate electoral list, the Party of Russian Unity and Accord. A planned post-Tokyo meeting with Russia’s Choice panjandrums became a presidential soliloquy on Asian affairs.14 Gaidar estimates that a Yeltsin statement would have swung 10 percent of the vote to Russia’s Choice and made it the undisputed winner of the election.15
Sergei Filatov, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, was behind the next party-building maneuver in 1994 and into 1995. He and Aleksandr Yakovlev founded a Russian Party of Social Democracy, dedicated to democratic values and a mixed economy, and registered it in February 1995. Filatov and Yakovlev felt they had a commitment from Yeltsin to help it with financing, back it in the next Duma election, and chair it after that.16 Despite assurances, Yeltsin went off on a tangent. Prodded by Shakhrai, the spoiler from 1993, he gave license for not one but two pro-presidential electoral groupings. Our Home Is Russia, headed by Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had sat out the 1993 election, was right-of-center programmatically (right in the sense of favoring the market over government control); the bloc struck by Ivan Rybkin, the Duma speaker, was left-of-center (left in the sense of partiality for government direction over the market). On April 25, 1995, Yeltsin jumped the gun to unveil plans for the two blocs to journalists and to blubber that they would stride coordinately in “two columns,” implying that they were apologists for the status quo. After that, he did not bestir himself to help either organization, although he did go on television on December 15 to speak out against the command economy and plans to restore the Soviet Union. Rybkin assumed he was at liberty to rebuke the prime minister and the government, only to find that, whenever he did, Chernomyrdin complained to him and Yeltsin; he also was strapped for campaign funds.17 On election day, December 17, Rybkin scraped together 1 percent of the popular vote. Our Home Is Russia far exceeded him in resources and had thirty-six governors on its national list, yet Yeltsin made slighting comments about its drawing power and it was not able to claim that it spoke for the president. Chernomyrdin noted both these points to Korzhakov. “I said to him right away [after Yeltsin made his comments in September], ‘Boris Nikolayevich, this is not my personal initiative only, it is necessary to all of us.’” Yeltsin was unmoved. “And then the governors would ask me, ‘Are you together or not together?’ I would say, ‘What are you talking about, why don’t you want to understand?’ [And they would reply], ‘We’re not able to figure it out, and that is it.’”18 On December 17 Our Home Is Russia finished with a puny 10 percent. The winner in the popular vote (with 23 percent) and in seats was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the KPRF, which was ferally opposed to Yeltsin.
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.