As in 1989 and 1990, an army of amateurish democrats delivered Yeltsin’s message. Loosely coordinated by a group around Yeltsin and by Democratic Russia, they printed and photocopied materials, distributed them at Moscow subway stations, and rang doorbells. Retired schoolteachers rode the commuter rails of the capital region and passed Yeltsin fliers out of train windows. The chairman of the pilots’ union at Aeroflot, Anatolii Kochur, prevailed upon flight crews to cram bales of broadsheets into cargo bays and get them to activists in the outback. The punchline of the authorized candidate’s poster read Narodnogo deputata v narodnyye prezidenty!—“People’s Deputy for People’s President!” The main concern in the Yeltsin camp was that he would not make a majority in the first round and would lose to an anyonebut-Yeltsin candidate in a runoff.
Yeltsin campaigned against Gorbachev and the CPSU, not Ryzhkov or Zhirinovskii. In a firebrand interview on central television, he alluded to Gorbachev’s more soothing line in recent weeks as proof that communism, which had made Soviet citizens guinea pigs in a grotesque experiment, was on its last legs:
As recently as a month ago, he [Gorbachev] was saying everywhere that he is only for socialism, only for socialism, we cannot do otherwise. Just as for over seventy years we have been marching to a bright future, that is how [he says] we will continue, and somehow we will arrive. Our country has not been lucky. . . . It was decided to carry out this Marxist experiment on us—fate pushed us in precisely this direction. Instead of some country in Africa, they began this experiment with us. In the end, we proved that there is no place for this idea. It has simply pushed us off the road the world’s civilized countries have taken. This is reflected today, when 40 percent of people are living below the poverty line and . . . in constant humiliation when they receive produce upon the presentation of ration cards. This is a constant humiliation, a reminder every hour that you are a slave in this country.60
Support for Yeltsin, polls showed, flagged in late May, then rebounded. He had husbanded his small advertising budget for the home stretch. Come voting day, Wednesday, June 12, the one-man electoral juggernaut received 45,552,041 votes, or 59 percent of the valid ballots cast, to 18 percent for Ryzhkov and 8 percent for Zhirinovskii. He drew best in the Urals, Moscow, Leningrad (which was about to go back to being called St. Petersburg), the urbanized portions of central Russia and Siberia, and the Volga basin; he drew worst in the “red belt” of pro-communist regions on the steppes south of Moscow.61 Yeltsin’s testing of his authority with the demos, as Anatolii Luk’yanov had prophesied, contrasted sharply with Gorbachev’s quailing at that test in 1990. You, a Yeltsin ally said to Gorbachev, have been too timorous to try to obtain a mandate from society. Yeltsin dared, and got his agency by being chosen “not in the cloakrooms, not by a narrow circle, but by the people.” If the Soviet bosses went on attacking Yeltsin, it would continue to boomerang: “The anti-Yeltsin actions of the bankrupt top echelon have always had effects antithetical to those intended. They have brought forth the people’s wrath and elevated his authority.”62
A gala inaugural was held on July 10 at the Palace of Congresses. Yeltsin seated a Russian Orthodox priest, a rabbi, and a Muslim cleric in the front row as a cue to the television audience that his Russia would be an openminded place. Patriarch Aleksii II and Oleg Basilashvili, a parliamentary deputy and stage and movie actor from Leningrad, spoke before Yeltsin took the oath of office for a five-year term, with left hand on a copy of the Russian constitution and right hand over his heart. Yeltsin’s undertaking as president, he said, beaming, was to transport Russia into the community of nations as “a prosperous, democratic, peace-loving, law-abiding, and sovereign state.” He also tried to trim expectations: “The president is not God, he is not a new monarch, he is not an all-powerful worker of miracles, he is a citizen.”63
Gorbachev said to Shakhnazarov that he had to disabuse Yeltsin of suggestions for projecting the swearing-in onto a jumbo screen on Red Square, firing a twenty-four-gun salute, and taking the oath on the Bible, like an American president. The Soviet president arrived late and spoke briefly. The honoree responded in kind: As Gorbachev reached to shake his hand, Yeltsin took several steps forward and stopped, forcing Gorbachev to come to him. Gorbachev, seeing red at Yeltsin’s ambitions, as always, had a new regard for his acumen: “Such . . . a simpleminded yen for the scepter!” he let on to Shakhnazarov. “I am at my wit’s end to understand how he combines this with political instinct [chut’ë]. God knows, maybe this is his secret, maybe this is why he is forgiven everything. A tsar must conduct himself like a tsar. And that I do not know how to do.”64 After the inauguration, Gorbachev approved rooms in the Kremlin for Yeltsin. They were in Building No. 14, across a cobblestoned square from Gorbachev’s lair in Building No. 1.65
Gorbachev, having zigged toward the counterreformist pole in 1990, zagged back toward reformism in the spring of 1991. In dread of losing his support in the USSR congress and the Central Committee, of the republics coming to agreement at their own initiative, and of consumer ire at price increases, he restarted the effort to herd the republics together into a union treaty. The “Nine Plus One” talks (nine willing republics and the Soviet government) at the Novo-Ogarëvo state residence west of Moscow, built for Georgii Malenkov as Soviet prime minister in the 1950s, was one more sparring match with Yeltsin and dragged on from April 23 to late July. Gorbachev wanted a federation in which the center retained as many powers as possible.66 With some sadness, Yeltsin thought the Soviet Union as constituted by Lenin and Stalin was doomed. “I am a Russian,” he confided to a French academic of Russian origin in Strasbourg, “and I am not happy with the idea of the collapse of the empire. For me, it is Russia, it is Russian history. But I know it is the end. . . . The only way [forward] is to get rid of this empire as quickly as possible, or to accept the process.”67 He wanted in effect a confederation (although he stuck to the word “federation”), with Russia and the other sovereign republics controlling all taxation and natural resources and delegating a few functions (national security, railroads, the power grid, and atomic energy) to a central authority, which would haggle over its budget with them line by line. Verbal fisticuffs between Yeltsin and Gorbachev on May 24 spotlighted the disagreement over the monetary lifeblood of government:
YELTSIN: On taxes . . . we are thinking of transferring into the federal budget a fixed sum for programs that we are going to implement jointly, or that the union [government] will tackle, including ones for the republics. It will be done by amount and not by percent. That will be it. . . .
GORBACHEV: Hold on. You say it will be by program. But what about permanent functions of the state such as the army or basic scientific research?
YELTSIN: I am thinking of the army, too. We will have a look, so to speak. “Please show us everything” [we will say].