Several members of the 1989 campaign team wanted Yeltsin to catch the coming political wave in Moscow. There he would have taken control of city hall and revenge on the local party machine. Yeltsin decided to train his sights on Russia. It was against Soviet law to sit in more than two elected legislatures. Yeltsin thus had to choose between Moscow and the RSFSR, unless he wanted first to resign his seat in the USSR Supreme Soviet. It was not a hard choice. “This maximal program” of going for Russia, wrote Lev Sukhanov, “was more to Yeltsin’s taste. He does not like to take the same track twice: monotony nauseates him.”2 The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was a much grander prize than Moscow. It accounted for half of the Soviet Union’s population, two-thirds of its economy, and three-quarters of its landmass. The RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies was to be elected on March 4, 1990, under rules eased up from the USSR election: The filters for candidates were simplified, and there were no seats earmarked for the CPSU or other organizations.
Yeltsin sought nomination in his home province and was registered in District No. 74, comprising Sverdlovsk city and the industrial town of Pervoural’sk. His return to Sverdlovsk in the last days of January was front-page news, despite moves by the CPSU obkom, now headed by his old enemy Leonid Bobykin, to hush it up. “He met with electors in halls filled to bursting. Whenever possible, an audio feed onto the street was organized.”3 At one rally, three social scientists from the Urals Polytechnic Institute—Aleksandr Il’in, Gennadii Kharin, and Lyudmila Pikhoya—walked up to Yeltsin and told him his statement had been haphazard and he was too dependent on Q&A repartee. They offered to write a sample speech with greater thematic richness. Yeltsin liked the result and asked them to draft his candidate’s program in February.4
For half of the campaign, Yeltsin was on the stump for candidates outside of Sverdlovsk oblast. The lion’s share of them subscribed to Democratic Russia, a protoparty formed in January 1990 on the basis of the Interregional caucus, which listed nominees in several hundred urbanized districts. Yeltsin offered his signature on leaflets and posters, “creating a giant coattails effect from Boris Yeltsin on down to the city district level.”5 Russia was the only Soviet republic where the CPSU was without a committee, bureau, and first secretary. Reluctantly, Gorbachev in October 1989 reconstituted the Khrushchev-era Russian Bureau within the Central Committee apparatus. He accepted a Russian Communist Party only in the new year. It did not have its founding congress until June of 1990, three months after the election. So it was that the Communist Party was hit-or-miss in the RSFSR campaign and candidates who were members of it (as 70 percent were) were left to sink or swim. Vitalii Vorotnikov, the Politburo member who answered for the RSFSR, met with yawns when he tried to get Gorbachev to send heavy hitters into the fray. He offered his resignation to Gorbachev in January, and then agreed to stay through the election.6
The Yeltsin campaign offered a mélange of the familiar and the new. In pushing populism and calling for a blanket prohibition on nomenklatura privilege, he was aided by publication in February of the best-selling Confession on an Assigned Theme, with its purple prose about the lifestyles of the CPSU elite. It was widely quoted in the provincial press.7 The new ingredients had to do mostly with the governance of Russia and its place in a reformed federal system. Here Yeltsin preached making the RSFSR over into a “presidential republic” with an elective president, a full-time parliament, a constitutional court, a state bank, an academy of sciences, a territorial militia, and multiple political parties. A democratic constitution adopted by referendum would enshrine these provisions as well as “the principle of the paramountcy of law” and freedoms of expression, assembly, association, and worship. The Soviet state, de jure federal but de facto unitary, ought to be decentralized, Yeltsin’s program said, “because monopoly and the overcentralization of political and economic power have led our country to its present state.” The heavy hand of Moscow stultified natural communities of interest as surely as dictatorship stultified political freedom and command planning stultified economic enterprise. “We have to give the maximum possible self-reliance [or self-rule—samostoyatel’nost’] to the republics,” beginning with the RSFSR. “We have to see to it that we have strong republics, which should decide themselves what functions to give up to [the center] and which to keep for them.”8 The same held within Russia, where regions had to have more autonomy. Devolution, based on liberal, nonethnic Russian nationalism, augmented democratization and market reform as a third and equal strand in Yeltsin’s de-monopolization project. How the wish would be made reality, or what would happen if the strands came into conflict or were internally inconsistent, was not specified.9
March 4 brought another electoral landslide. Yeltsin toted up 84 percent of the votes in his Sverdlovsk district against eleven no-name candidates. He told a journalist friend he would now “go only to Golgotha”—to a reckoning in some form with the old regime. The look on his face was both elated and fearful.10
Gorbachev hurried to prop up his position by carpentering a new institutional framework for governing the Soviet Union. In early February he had the party Central Committee approve a motion to repeal Article 6 of the 1977 Brezhnev constitution, which stipulated that the CPSU was the only legal party—“the leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system.” It was an overdue concession to the opposition and to democratic principles. On March 13, 1990, the USSR congress approved the measure. At the same sitting, on March 14, it introduced a Soviet presidency, to which it elected Gorbachev on March 19. The change was an acknowledgment that the Communist Party, whose general secretary he remained, was no longer plausible as the sole basis for political authority. At the Politburo session of March 7, Anatolii Luk’yanov, who was to succeed Gorbachev as USSR parliamentary chairman, asked him why they were acting in such unseemly haste. “So as to put them [the republics and the Russian democrats] in their place,” Gorbachev rejoined. Luk’yanov predicted, accurately, that the republics would counterpunch with presidencies of their own. He then brought up a deadlier point—about legitimacy. Why should Gorbachev be made president by the legislature and not by the whole people? “Why should the people not be the electors? This betokens mistrust of the people. All this will be exaggerated by [the opposition].” Gorbachev was unswayed, a blunder of biblical proportions.11 Until June–July 1990, when Yeltsin streaked past him in the opinion polls, he would have won a general election.12
A couple of weeks after the election, Yeltsin, as Gorbachev noted with satisfaction at a Politburo meeting, requested and received a spa ticket from the Soviet parliament; he had notified Luk’yanov that he was worn to the bone and had to get away. The effort to make Yeltsin speaker of the RSFSR congress, which was to open in May, would have to begin without him.13 Once he was back from vacation, however, Yeltsin worked methodically on getting the position and agreed to put off formation of the Russian presidency until 1991. On the question of chairing the legislature, about 40 percent of the deputies were pro-Yeltsin (in the USSR congress, only 10 to 15 percent by this time adhered to the Interregional group) and 40 percent were anti-Yeltsin; the rest were known as the “swamp.” Hopeful of success, the Democratic Russia bloc nominated Yeltsin for the chair.