President and speaker were at each other’s throats for the next four months. Khasbulatov drew up plans to send a congress-drafted constitution to a referendum; he threw them over in March. On March 20, determined to play his trump card, public opinion, Yeltsin divulged that he was instituting an undefined “special rule” (osobyi poryadok upravleniya) until a referendum on president versus parliament on April 25. Rutskoi balked at countersigning the decree and wrote an open letter to Yeltsin against it. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin desisted from comment until Yeltsin “literally compelled him to declare support,”47 and the justice minister, Nikolai Fëdorov, resigned.
The congress’s riposte was to deliberate impeachment, which had been provided for in the constitutional amendments instituting the presidency in 1991. Meeting Yeltsin, Chernomyrdin, and Valerii Zor’kin, chairman of the Constitutional Court, in the Kremlin on March 24, Khasbulatov gave Yeltsin his conditions for gagging the process: a coalitional government of national accord, restrictions on presidential decrees, recall of Yeltsin’s representatives in the provinces, and criminal prosecution of the drafters of the March 20 order. Yeltsin, seeing acceptance as tantamount to straw-man status, rebuffed them.48 Zor’kin backed Khasbulatov.
Hours before the congressional vote, on the evening of March 28, Yeltsin came before a floodlit rally on the apron of land connecting St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Moskva River. His speech drew on principles and personalities, formulating the latter in peppery, testing mode:
It’s been a grueling time since June 12, 1991, grueling in every respect—for you, for the people of Russia, for the president. We have gone onto a completely different road. We have thrown off the yoke of totalitarianism. We have thrown off the yoke of communism. We have taken the path of a civilized country, a civilized democracy. For those whose toes we have stepped on, this is inconvenient.
The national-democrats [Russian ultranationalists] and the has-beens [communists] . . . are going all out in order somehow to destroy Yeltsin—if not to destroy him physically, then to remove him. (Cries from the audience: “We will not allow this!” “Yeltsin, Yeltsin, Yeltsin!”)
I . . . am taken by the simple statement that Varennikov [Valentin Varennikov, the hard-line general in August 1991] has made from Matrosskaya Tishina [prison]: “The only person Gorbachev couldn’t handle was Yeltsin.”
You know what our congress is like. (Someone cries out, “We know!” A few shouts are heard.) . . . It is not for these six hundred [deputies] to decide Russia’s fortunes. I will not yield to them, I will only yield to the people’s will. (Cries from the audience, applause. A wave of “Yeltsin, Yeltsin, Yeltsin!”)49
The voting in the congress was done by hand, anonymously. Yeltsin later said it was low ebb for his eight years as president. “Impeachment was my worst moment. I really suffered through it . . . I sat and waited through it . . . I sat and waited for the votes to be counted.”50 Six hundred and seventeen disaffected deputies voted for the motion, seventy-two short of the 689 needed for the prescribed two-thirds majority. Had it passed, Rutskoi, in the legislators’ interpretation, would have taken over as president, in which case the face-off that took place in September would have come six months earlier. According to Aleksandr Korzhakov, the security chiefs had a plan, approved by the president on March 23, to read out a decree dissolving the parliament and to smoke the deputies out by placing canisters of tear gas on the balconies of the hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace.51
After the vote, Yeltsin and Khasbulatov agreed that the decree on special rule would be ditched and a four-point referendum to clear the air held on April 25. The four questions would be about (1) trust in Yeltsin, (2) approval of his social and economic policies, and early elections for (3) president and (4) the parliament. Yeltsin campaigned hard for yes votes on questions one, two, and four and a no vote on question three, trying as before to brand Khasbulatov and the congress as ultraconservative, which not all of them were. Khasbulatov struck back by calling Yeltsin a plaything for shadowy power brokers, as Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra had once been for the mystic Grigorii Rasputin. Yeltsin’s threats to take decisive action, he said, amounted to “the strong gesture of a weak man” who was “tragically illequipped” for his office. “This person degenerated before my very eyes. He stopped being a leader and converted himself into a kind of puppet of those who have been called a ‘collective Rasputin’ . . . adventurers . . . ignoramuses.” Yeltsin’s project was to build a “semicolonial regime” in which a “wild, criminal, and semifeudal” capitalism would be in bondage to foreign interests.52
When the ballots were tallied on April 25, Yeltsin had prevailed. Fiftynine percent of Russians expressed trust in him, 53 percent approved of his reforms, those wanting an early presidential election were just short of 50 percent, and 67 percent approved of an early parliamentary election. The results were nonbinding, but the pattern, and the surprising vote on the reform course, in particular, was a moral victory.53
Khasbulatov, having said earlier that the initiators of a referendum should resign if they lost out, stayed on. Yeltsin did not press the point and moved at a leisurely general pace, telling Richard Nixon in late April that Khasbulatov and Rutskoi were “midgets” he need not bother with.54 In May he appointed a 762-member Constitutional Conference to circumvent the constitutional committee under the Supreme Soviet. Yeltsin addressed the conference on June 5, harkening to the tradition of “free Novgorod,” whence the Yeltsins had moved to the Urals centuries before, and of Peter the Great and Alexander II. Khasbulatov was drowned out by clangor from the floor and had to recite his remarks from a stairway outside the meeting hall. The conference approved a draft on July 12, though without agreement on the federal system. Khasbulatov and the Supreme Soviet quashed a spate of presidential decrees, and Yeltsin vetoed parliamentary bills. Clashes between them burgeoned on privatization, social policy, and foreign relations. “It was widely assumed in Moscow . . . that another attempt to impeach Yeltsin was imminent and would be launched at the end of September or the beginning of October at the latest.”55
Yeltsin decided in late summer to lower the boom. Huddling with advisers on August 10, he said that the stalemate on the constitution and on future elections “is pushing us toward the use of force.”56 There was a broad hint on August 31: He flew by helicopter to the army’s two armored formations in the Moscow area (the Taman Division and the Kantemirov Tank Division) and to the 106th Airborne Division stationed in Tula, where he rakishly donned a paratrooper’s beret. At the Taman garrison, he attended a tank exercise and dined in an officers’ mess with Defense Minister Pavel Grachëv; the men drank to his health and gave him a soldierly “Hurrah!” The point was not to check up on the military’s loyalty, in which he had complete faith, but to flaunt it before the press and his opponents.57 In the early days of September, Yeltsin “suspended” Vice President Rutskoi and his Kremlin pass. He also took away Justice Zor’kin’s bodyguards and transportation. Zor’kin had been testing the waters for a presidential campaign of his own, on the speculation that Yeltsin would step down as part of a constitutional pact. One of his supporters was Vladimir Lukin, the Russian ambassador to Washington, who was promised the position of foreign minister in a Zor’kin government and who arranged a visit by him to the United States in late summer.58 Around September 9 Yeltsin gave his aides Viktor Ilyushin and Yurii Baturin some scrabbled notes and told them to prepare a presidential edict. Decree No. 1400 was promulgated on Tuesday, September 21, at eight P.M. Yeltsin shared it with the nation in a telecast. Before recording it, he found some gallows humor in proposing that the Kremlin staff pose with him for a good-bye photograph, since, if he were to fail, “We will sit together [in prison].”59