Yeltsin got down to work in 1990 on a “federative treaty,” kindred to the never-to-be-consummated union treaty for the USSR, which all of Russia’s regions were intended to sign as a reaffirmation. Negotiations were stepped up in the autumn of 1991, with Gennadii Burbulis responsible to the president for protecting the federal government’s interests. On March 30, 1992, three texts were contracted in Moscow: for the twenty-one republics, the fifty-seven nonethnic territories (most of them oblasts), and eleven lowerranking subunits. Yeltsin hailed the treaty as codifying “a prudent balance of interests.” At the same time as it “put an end to the ascendancy of the . . . Moscow bureaucracy,” it would “defend Russia against chaos, impotence, and an orgy of localism.”37
The subtreaty for the republics acknowledged republican sovereignty and said they and other ethnic subunits, which had about 17 percent of the total Russian population, would get 50 percent of the seats in the parliamentary upper chamber in a new constitution. Several republics in effect blackmailed Yeltsin to make further concessions. Sakha (Yakutiya), on northeast Siberian permafrost, was given a large portion of the profits from the bankable diamond industry there; Bashkortostan, the most populous republic, got an appendix giving it dispensations. Two republics would not sign on the dotted line at all. Chechnya had declared its independence from Moscow on November 1, 1991. Tatarstan on March 21, 1992, organized a referendum on the proposition that Russia was an abutting state and relations between the two could be set only through state-to-state treaties; 61 percent voted in favor. One of the reasons Burbulis was demoted in April 1992 was that he misgauged the Tatarstan problem and encouraged a referendum on the premise that it would fail. As defeat in the referendum came into view, Yeltsin considered an economic blockade or even military intervention—Shaimiyev says the night before the vote was the scariest of his life. In 1992–93 Chechnya, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Sakha, and Tuva led the pack. In varying combinations, republics legislated language laws, skipped Russia-wide referendums, withheld tax payments, and declared republic laws and constitutions preponderate over Russian ones.38
Although non-republics could not marshal the fervency of the minority homelands, they noisily aired their concerns and tried to extract benefits from the Kremlin. In the August 1991 power vacuum, Yeltsin appropriated the authority to appoint provincial leaders and presidential representatives in the given region, a power confirmed by parliament in November.39 He looked the other way at the election of presidents in the republics; Shaimiyev in Tatarstan had been the first, running unopposed in June 1991.40 The ethnicity-blind oblasts seethed over their second-string status, economically and constitutionally, and wanted to be able to elect their chief executives, most of them now called governors. Yeltsin did not concede this until April 1993, when he permitted votes for governor in eight provinces. Several Russian oblasts tried the nominative cure of declaring themselves republics and ringing up the rights of a Tatarstan or a Tuva. Vologda, north and east of Moscow, was the first to do so, in May 1993. In Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin’s stomping ground, where he had made his promotee Eduard Rossel head of the executive after the 1991 putsch, the oblast council ruled to this effect in July 1993 and invited the nearby areas of Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Orenburg, and Perm to fall in. Projects to create single- or multiprovince republics sprang up in provinces from the Baltic littoral in the northwest to the Volga basin and on to central and east Siberia and Vladivostok.41
A second institutional crisis blossomed forth in Moscow, under Yeltsin’s nose. It matched his executive branch, beefed up by the creation of the presidency, against the legislative branch he had chaired in 1990–91. Its roots were in the indeterminacy of the rules. The constitution of the RSFSR was chock full of loopholes, having been written under Leonid Brezhnev in 1978 and tinkered with repeatedly. A two-thirds vote in the Congress of People’s Deputies was all it took to change the constitution. Several hundred amendments carried between 1990 and 1993, and 180 were on the order paper when congress gathered in December 1992; the constitution of the United States, by comparison, has been altered only seventeen times since 1791. Dissentious clauses in the charter garmented the president and the congress with supreme authority in the state. The two branches, independently elected by universal suffrage, had overlapping powers. The Supreme Soviet could strike down a presidential veto by simple majority, and two-thirds of the members of congress could impeach the president if they found he had violated his oath of office. President Yeltsin was in charge of the armed forces but had no right to resolve a deadlock by ending a session of parliament and forcing new elections.42
Deadlock was what Yeltsin’s Russia had as it entered the reform era. Crosscurrents between organizational and policy issues polarized politics as badly as they had in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi and many high bureaucrats sided with the foes of Yeltsin in parliament, and the congress was not monolithic, but majority sentiments in the two branches were ever more discrepant. Attempts to craft a post-communist constitution were all for naught, as each camp sought one biased in its favor. On reform issues, the parliamentarists were more statist and the presidentialists much more pro-market. The peculiar two-tier legislature—the RSFSR was the only union republic to mimic the USSR in this regard—added another element. The sessions of the thronging congress, televised live and numbered like unique events, were circus-like. Both the congress and the smaller Supreme Soviet lacked a stable majority, with remnants of the Democratic Russia bloc and the regrouped communist faction having to compete for the affections of small-fry groups.
An enmity between Yeltsin and Ruslan Khasbulatov, who had replaced him as legislative chairman in October 1991, further aggravated the situation. Khasbulatov had more strength on the back benches than the legal scholar Sergei Shakhrai, Yeltsin’s first choice for the position. A pipe-smoking professor of international economics from a Moscow institute, Khasbulatov had been elected to represent Groznyi, the Chechen capital. Like Rutskoi, an air-regiment commander in Afghanistan until 1988, Khasbulatov was one of those political figures who had caromed out of obscurity during the transition. Yeltsin made no secret of his view that Khasbulatov and Rutskoi should defer to his lead on policy. He did not ask the counsel of either on the Belovezh’e negotiations, which they heard about from others.43 But the parliament was a world unto itself in the early 1990s, and showboating and inconsistent voting by the lawmakers provided the chairman “with the ability to manipulate the agenda for his own purposes.”44 He and his presidium emitted hundreds of administrative edicts and formed a guard squad. At the “sixth congress” that refused to confirm Gaidar as prime minister in December 1992, Yeltsin raged that they were thinking not about society or reform but “only about how to dictate their will.”45 After the session, Yeltsin took Khasbulatov off his telephone hotline and had him cut off from information about the president’s schedule; not to be outdone, Khasbulatov sent Yeltsin barbed letters and made gratuitous references to his drinking.
Gazing back at it all a decade later, Khasbulatov told me Yeltsin “backed himself and me into a corner” and that, as the junior man (he was born in 1942), he always expected to make the most concessions in any settlement.46 Yeltsin did go for total victory in September–October 1993; until then, he was ready to compromise. In December 1992 he proposed a national referendum for January, to ask the population whether they trusted him or the congress and soviet to solve the political crisis. The deputies said no, and the next day Yeltsin, with egg on his face, withdrew the idea.