At Camp David in 1992, Yeltsin pressed President Bush for reference in the communiqué to Russia and the United States as “allies.” Bush refused. For the time being, “transitional language” about “friendship and partnership” would have to suffice.26 The transitional idiom persisted, even as neocontainment put Yeltsin on the defensive. Western governments never saw Russia’s transformation as an urgent task for them and never found or tried terribly hard to find a niche for Russia in a new security architecture for Europe and Asia. For his part, Yeltsin more than once couched Russia’s policy in the ethic of prickly self-reliance that he preached for individuals. In 1991–92, when the case for debt relief was strongest, he did not set about drafting a formal request for it. Meeting Clinton the presidential candidate in June 1992, Yeltsin stressed that Russia was “a great power” and was “not asking for handouts.” At the first meeting with Clinton as president, in Vancouver in April 1993, Yeltsin solicited outside help, “but not too much,” since a big subsidy would open him to criticism for making Russia dependent on outsiders.27 In early exchanges, Yeltsin was more than willing to play with Russia someday joining NATO, although, again, his government never articulated it as policy. Yeltsin told Clinton in January 1994 that the post-Soviet countries should enter NATO as a bloc, after an acclimation period, and he repeated this to reporters in August. By December of that same year, as Washington and the alliance moved toward selective admission, Yeltsin informed Vice President Al Gore in Moscow that it would never add up for Russia to join, since it is “very, very big” and NATO “quite small.” “Yeltsin put Gore in the bizarre position of trying to persuade him that Russia might actually someday qualify.”28 Future conversations were infrequent and unlinked to current decisions.
Most of the post-communist states in Europe were panting for admission to the European Union more than to NATO. This entryway, too, was closed to Russia and its leader. The union was of the view, as one review of the 1990s put it, that Russia was “simply too big, too complex, and too backward to be considered for EU membership.”29 A ten-year cooperation agreement Yeltsin signed in Corfu’s Venetian fort in June 1994 was as close as he got to a meaningful association. Although Russia applied for membership in the Council of Europe, a medium for legal and human rights, and acceded to it and its parliamentary assembly in February 1996, Yeltsin had no strategy for buying into the much more dynamic and rigorous EU.30
Domestically, post-Soviet entropy was nowhere more of a threat than in center-periphery relations, the reef on which the USSR’s empire of nations had shipwrecked. The showdown between Russia and the Soviet leadership provoked competitive appeasement of the constituent provinces of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and mostly of its republics (known until December 1990 as autonomous Soviet socialist republics), delimited as the homelands of “titular” nationalities such as the Tatars and Bashkirs. Somewhat privileged in communist ethnofederalism, they were the gravest threat to the unity of post-communist Russia. Yeltsin’s pronouncement in Kazan about the titulars taking as much autonomy as they could guzzle was an expression of his propensity for decentralization, a jab at Gorbachev in the Russian-Soviet context, and, in the intra-Russian context, an attempt to fight fire with fire and to keep the minorities within whatever state entity survived. While playing to enlightened self-interest, he said geopolitical realities would have to be put on the weigh scales as well. The union republics of the USSR were placed around the Russian lands, but, he noted at Kazan University in 1990, “You [the Tatars] are located in the center of Russia—and you have to think about that.”31 On that same trip, “Yeltsin privately warned local leaders not to go too far in their assertions of local autonomy,” U.S. intelligence reported.32
The immediate effect of the RSFSR’s declaration of sovereignty and the sermon in Kazan was an outpouring from the minorities. Between the Russian parliamentary resolution on June 12, 1990, and Kazan on August 5, North Ossetiya in the North Caucasus was the one republic to declare sovereignty. In the two months after August 5, the legislatures of Tatarstan (formerly Tatariya) and five other republics came forth with resolutions; in the two months after that, ten more, including Bashkortostan (formerly Bashkiriya), followed them; the four remaining did between December 1990 and July 1991.33 Many centrists and conservatives in the republics bent to agitation by nationalist movements. In Tatarstan, for example, leader Mintimer Shaimiyev, a former CPSU first secretary, had fought against protégés of Yegor Ligachëv in the late 1980s but backed the August 1991 putsch against Gorbachev—and only after its defeat did he defect to the Tatar cause.34 The radicals in the Ittifaq movement until then wanted Tatarstan reclassified as the sixteenth union republic of the USSR, as Tatar nationalists had favored since the 1920s; after August 1991 they wanted unalloyed independence and held almost daily demonstrations in Kazan to press their claims.35
In so unsure an environment, there was no reason a priori why Russia would be vaccinated against the infection that killed off the Soviet Union. Many of its provinces were comparable in magnitude to the smaller of the union republics that hived off in 1991. Wrote Aleksandr Tsipko late that year, “It is difficult to explain to the Ossetins and Chechens,” constituent peoples of Russia, “that they have fewer rights than the Moldovans,” whose union republic on the Romanian border was making good its exit from the USSR. The fever was contagious, Tsipko observed, as non-republics populated by ethnic Russians now plugged for equality with the minority areas. Yeltsin “awaits the fate of Gorbachev or of the queen of England, who does not rule anything.” Unless a pan-Soviet federation were salvaged, which was soon shown to be impossible, the only way out, he apostrophized, would be for a Russian leader to recentralize and de-democratize: “Under conditions of ongoing disintegration, the pendulum of public attitudes will swing to the other extreme, and this time it is the democrats who will come under fire.”36