Tret’yakov’s editorial came out on May 7. Seventy-five million participating voters had their say on Sunday, June 16. Yeltsin took 26,665,495 votes. It was some 19 million fewer than he had received in 1991 but still put him in first place, with 36 percent of the ballots. Zyuganov had 32 percent, Lebed 15 percent, Yavlinskii 7 percent, and Zhirinovskii 6 percent. Everyone else trailed with less than 1 percent. In his final indignity at Yeltsin’s hands, Mikhail Gorbachev took one-half of 1 percent—386,069 votes. While bleeding strength compared to 1991 in every macroregion of Russia, Yeltsin carried forty-six of the provinces and Zyuganov forty-three. Yeltsin did better than average in the northern and northwestern sections of European Russia, Moscow, the Urals, and Siberia; he was weakest in the red belt south of Moscow and in the North Caucasus.
And so Yeltsin and Zyuganov found themselves in a sudden-death second round, with voting to occur on Wednesday, July 3, a workday. The strategy of the Yeltsin camp, aided by the electoral format, was simple—to distill everything to the toggle choice of forward on the historical continuum or backward. At the level of tactics, it dichotomized the decision as expertly as a fisherman filleting a trout. The choice could not be clearer, he stated on June 17. “Either back, to revolutions and turmoil, or ahead, to stability and prosperity.” 103 National television obliged by airing documentaries about the Gulag, the hounding of dissidents, and economic stagnation under the Soviets.104
Two political melodramas unfolded overtly in the seventeen days between ballots. On June 18, as agreed in May, the third-finishing Aleksandr Lebed issued a statement endorsing Yeltsin. The price had gone up, as he was offered and accepted the position of secretary of the Security Council and assistant to the president for national security. Yeltsin relatedly dismissed his defense minister, Pavel Grachëv, who had once been Lebed’s commanding officer, and replaced him several weeks later with Igor Rodionov, an older general in whom Lebed had confidence. On June 20 a funding scandal pushed relations between Yeltsin and the clique around Aleksandr Korzhakov to the breaking point. The day before, officers in Korzhakov’s guard service had arrested Sergei Lisovskii and Arkadii Yevstaf’ev, two staffers to the Chubais team, on the steps of the White House and confiscated a half-million dollars in cash that was part of the funding stream for the campaign. When Chubais and Tatyana Dyachenko intervened, Yeltsin fired Korzhakov, Oleg Soskovets, and Mikhail Barsukov, a move that accented his decisiveness and innovativeness.105
Another drama, playing out covertly, was about the incumbent’s medical condition, which had been abraded by stress, travel, and twelve-hour workdays. On June 23, midway between the two halves of the election, Yeltsin was hit with chest pains while on a whistle stop in Russia’s Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad. On June 26, resting at Barvikha-4, he was stricken with a fourth heart attack. His presiding physician, Anatolii Grigor’ev, was in the room and revived and medicated him. The seizure was kept secret and Yeltsin’s disappearance written off to a head cold. NTV’s president, Igor Malashenko, knew Yeltsin was in a bad way, if not the details, yet kept information about his condition out of the news. As he told me, he would have preferred “the corpse of Yeltsin” to Zyuganov alive.106 On June 28 Yeltsin somehow bulled ahead with a meeting with Lebed on Chechnya. The klieg lights were shining and television cameras were whirring, but the scene was staged by staffers in a room of the Barvikha sanatorium, with them and the medical attendants edited out of the videotape.107 All campaign appearances were canceled. Viktor Chernomyrdin read out a greeting to several thousand farm workers in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, who had gathered to hear the president. It did not sit well, and by Chubais’s estimate Yeltsin was losing 1 or 2 percentage points in the polls every day.108 On July 3 it was all Yeltsin could do to take several steps with his wife and hand in a ballot slip at the polling station located in the sanatorium.
Irrespective of the fears, voting in the runoff went very much as planned. Yeltsin received 40,208,384 votes, about five million fewer than in 1991 but enough to outpoll Zyuganov by 54 percent to 41 percent. He carried fifty-seven of eighty-nine provinces, bettering his 1991 numbers in scattered oblasts and a number of the minority republics, losing strength in the red belt and the Muslim republics of the North Caucasus, and holding his own elsewhere. In between rounds, Yeltsin’s share of the popular vote went up 19 percentage points and Zyuganov’s by only 8 points. Division around the question of returning to communism or escaping it was more complete than in the opening round: 90-plus percent of those who favored the new political system voted for Yeltsin; 80 percent of those who wanted to re-create the communist system went for Zyuganov. Healthy majorities of the first-round supporters of the non-communist candidates other than Zhirinovskii went for the president now that their top choices were out of the game: 57 percent of the Lebed voters, 67 percent of Yavlinskii voters, 30 percent of Zhirinovskii voters, and 57 percent of those who had voted for the lightweight candidates.109
Yeltsin had rejuvenated himself politically just as he was failing corporeally. He entered his second term as Russia’s leader under contradictory stars, one of them encouraging and the other pointing in a discouraging direction. The night of July 3, family and friends gave him teary hugs and flowers. He had accomplished “a fantastic, surprising victory.” He wished he could dance a jig, and one suspects he would not have been averse to some liquid refreshment, but these were beyond him: “I lay in my hospital bed and gazed tensely at the ceiling.”110 Right he was to be tense. The game hereafter was about Yeltsin trying to resume Russia’s progress while grappling with grievous physical limitations and with power parameters that had changed subtly and unsubtly from those of his first term.
Exchanging pens with George H. W. Bush after initialing a strategic arms pact, Washington, June 17, 1992. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)
Members of Yeltsin’s governing team, autumn 1992. Left to right: Yegor Gaidar, acting prime minister; Yurii Skokov, secretary of the Security Council; Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi; Aleksandr Korzhakov, chief of the Presidential Security Service. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)
With Ruslan Khasbulatov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, in 1992. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)
With long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, January 1996. (AP IMAGES.)
Wielding the tennis racket, June 1992. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)
With his mother, early 1990s. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
A quiet moment with Naina in Sochi, summer 1994. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)