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 taken 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.