The 137-article draft was inserted in national and regional newspapers and affixed in public places. Yeltsin’s pitch to the people was binary. It was either him and his constitution or perdition. He promised Russians both democracy and an individuated authority consistent with the needs of reform, with their traditions, and, he said overweeningly in an interview in Izvestiya, with their limitations:
I will not deny that the powers of the president in the draft really are significant. But what else would you want to see? [This is] a country habituated to tsars and chieftains; a country where clear-cut group interests have not developed, where the bearers of them have not been defined, and where normal parties are only beginning to be born; a country where discipline is not great and legal nihilism runs riot. In such a country, do you want to bet only or mostly on a parliament? If you did, within a half-year, if not sooner, people would demand a dictator. I can assure you that such a dictator would be found, and possibly from within that very same parliament. . . .
This is not about Yeltsin but about people being knowledgeable of the need to have an official from whom they can make demands. . . . The president of Russia [in the new constitution] has just as many powers as he needs to carry out his role in reforming the country.69
On December 12 the constitutional blueprint was approved by a 58 percent majority. A Constitutional Conference delegate had foreseen that citizens in the plebiscite “will vote for or against the president, and that will be it.”70 This at root is what they did. Fewer than half of the “yes” voters had read the document. More than to constitutional issues, narrowly conceived, most responded to Yeltsin, his market economy, and their like or dislike of the Soviet regime.71 The constitution went into effect on December 25, two years after the winding down of the Soviet state.
Yeltsin, therefore, got his legal cornerstone, and, imperfectly and inelegantly, the crisis of the state in its white-hot form was allayed.72 Western specialists, comparing Russia to other post-communist countries, commonly characterize the constitution of 1993 as “superpresidential.” Gennadii Zyuganov, the leader of the reborn communists, liked to say it gave the president more powers than the tsar, the Egyptian pharaoh, and a sheikh of Araby put together. A correspondent for the pro-presidential Izvestiya asked Yeltsin in November 1993 if he were not laying claim to “almost imperial” powers. An emperor, he replied, would have no need of a constitution, and a tyrant like Stalin would have a merely decorative one. He, Yeltsin, could act only within the law, he was limited to two terms (his second term would be four years, a year less than the first), and parliament could reverse his veto or impeach him.73
It was equally true that Yeltsin got most of what he had wished for. Of the ministers in the government, only the prime minister was to be confirmed in office by the Duma. As head of state, the president was going to function as guarantor of the constitutional order, lay down “guidelines” for domestic and foreign policy, and have the power to dissolve the Duma for cause.74 Two-thirds majorities in both houses of parliament were needed to override a presidential veto, and the president was not compelled to give a reason for using the veto power.75 Article 90, on the power to issue binding decrees at will, was the benchmark for Yeltsin. In the final draft, he stroked out the caveat that presidential decrees and directives be only “in execution of the powers conferred on him by the constitution of the Russian Federation and by federal laws.”76 The constitution was echoed in the insignia of state—in the Presidential Regiment and Presidential Orchestra (instituted as the Kremlin Regiment and Kremlin Orchestra by Stalin in the 1930s), the chain of office and Presidential Standard, the two presidential yachts, the new Kremlin chinaware (emblazoned with the double-headed eagle in place of the Soviet coat of arms), and the grandiloquent state protocol written up by aide Vladimir Shevchenko, who was one of the few Gorbachev associates Yeltsin kept on.77
But the parliamentary election of 1993 did not break Yeltsin’s way. On October 18 martial law in the capital and most restrictions on political activity were lifted. While the ban held on three extremist parties and twenty-one persons, Zyuganov’s KPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) was reinstated and registered. Half of the Duma’s seats were to be filled by national lists and half in territorial districts. Yeltsin stoutly maintained, and with reason, that the ambit of choice in the election was without precedent. “The spectrum of political positions taken by the participants [in the campaign] is uncommonly wide,” he said to the Council of Ministers on November 2. “I don’t think there has been a thing like it here since the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1917,” before that democratic body’s suppression by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.78 Most forecasts were of a victory for the Russia’s Choice movement, the torch carrier for Yeltsin chaired by Yegor Gaidar; also on its slate were Anatolii Chubais and Sergei Filatov, who had replaced Yurii Petrov as head of the executive office of the president. There were predictions that it would get 50 or even 65 percent of the popular vote. But “the party of power” (partiya vlasti), as it was known, never got a Yeltsin endorsement and did not prevent other reformist politicians, including cabinet members, from entering the contest under different banners. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin admonished his ministers to campaign only “outside of working hours.”79 On December 12 the Russia’s Choice list ran a dispiriting second in the national poll, with 16 percent of the votes, and came in with sixty-five deputies out of 450. Many reformist votes were diverted to the smaller parties headed by Grigorii Yavlinskii, Sergei Shakhrai, and Anatolii Sobchak of St. Petersburg. The party-list vote was won by the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia of the flamboyant Vladimir Zhirinovskii, whose message was one of chauvinism and inchoate protest; the LDPR took 23 percent of the ballots cast and finished with sixty-four deputies. The neocommunist KPRF was third, with 12 percent of the national vote and fortyone seats, and five lesser parties were also seated. Ivan Rybkin of the Agrarian Party, a moderate leftist offshoot of the KPRF, was made speaker of the Duma in January.
The constitution did not give Yeltsin the dictatorial “throne of bayonets” he had charged the GKChP with wanting to construct in 1991. Aleksei Kazannik, the Siberian lawyer who in 1989 gave up his seat in the USSR Supreme Soviet to Yeltsin, accepted appointment as procurator general of Russia on October 3, 1993, promised by the president that he could go ahead with investigations with “a maximum of legality” and “a maximum of humanitarianism.” 80 Yeltsin then demanded that he press murder and complicity charges against some of the jailed perpetrators, which Kazannik would not do, saying the evidence of homicidal intent was lacking and the worst they could be indicted for was “organizing mass disorder.” Kazannik also told Yeltsin that he was considering prosecution of executive-branch officials for failing to negotiate in good faith with the opposition, and he was to say later that he might have indicted Defense Minister Grachëv and Interior Minister Viktor Yerin.81 One of the Duma’s first legislative acts, on February 23, 1994, was to pass, by 252 votes to sixty-seven, a bill of amnesty for Rutskoi, Khasbulatov, and the Supreme Soviet leaders, and some supporters, sixteen people in all. Yeltsin, who fervently dissented from the motion, ordered Kazannik not to comply. Kazannik, finding the Duma’s decision profligate but constitutional (under Article 103), informed Yeltsin he would carry out the decision and then leave office. “Don’t dare do it,” Yeltsin threw back at him.82 Kazannik did dare. On February 26 the prisoners were freed and Kazannik resigned. Clenching his teeth, Yeltsin did not pursue the matter further.