All members of the 1990–93 Supreme Soviet were permitted to keep the housing that had been assigned them. Khasbulatov, for example, retained the oversize apartment on Shchusev Street in central Moscow once occupied by Brezhnev and reverted to his professorship at the Plekhanov Economics Institute.83 Rutskoi organized a new political party called Derzhava, or Great Power. Even Viktor Barannikov, the former security minister who deserted to the opposition, was treated with kid gloves.84 The February 23 law amnestied the organizers of the 1991 coup attempt, and not only Yeltsin’s opponents from 1993. They had gone to trial in April 1993, but the proceedings had been delayed and no judgment yet given. Only General Varennikov, the most radical of the GKChP conspirators, who refused to accept the amnesty, was not released. He stood trial and was acquitted by the military panel of the Russian Supreme Court on August 11, 1994. Varennikov was to be elected to the Duma in 1995, as a communist, and to chair its committee on veterans’ affairs. Other political enemies of Yeltsin from bygone days, such as Yegor Ligachëv, also sat in the Dumas formed in 1993 and 1995.85
Parliament, limited in the oversight function, still had the power of the purse, and that gave it bargaining chips with relation to the budget and to fiscal and macroeconomic policy. And it had the power to legislate, which it soon did with far greater productivity than analyses treating it as a fig leaf would imply. It adopted only six laws in 1994; in 1995, despite the continued lack of a stable majority, it adopted thirty-seven; in the first half of 1996, after another parliamentary election, it adopted eight.86 Yeltsin still had to resort freely to the decree power, though somewhat less frequently than before the constitutional reform. In 1992 and 1993, he had published an average of twenty-four rule-making decrees per month. They were to average seventeen per month in 1994 and twenty per month in 1995.87
Constitutional gridlock in 1993 gave Yeltsin both the necessity and the chance to rejig relations with the subunits of the federation. As before, the ethnic enclaves were the nub of the problem. In the April referendum, the governments of two of the twenty-one republics, Chechnya and Tatarstan, refused to participate, and in twelve republics confidence in the president was lower than 50 percent. (In the sixty-eight non-republics, Yeltsin stacked up majority support in fifty-four.) Yeltsin left no stone unturned in trying to secure provincial support. On August 12–14 he met in conclave in Petrozavodsk, Kareliya, with the heads of the republics and representatives of eight interregional associations, treating them to a full-day sail in a presidential yacht on Lake Onega. Yeltsin’s proposal to co-opt all of the regional leaders into his Federation Council irked republic leaders who preferred special treatment.
In many places, Decree No. 1400 met with a glacial reception. Several dozen provincial legislatures, among them those in twelve of the nineteen republics with functioning assemblies, passed motions of solidarity with Khasbulatov and Rutskoi. Yeltsin retaliated on October 9 and 12 by disbanding all of the non-republic soviets, ordering the election of more compact assemblies between December 1993 and June 1994, and advising the republics to do the same. The governors and republic presidents were less incautious than the legislators. Fifteen of them indicated hesitancy about Decree No. 1400. Four governors opposed it fervidly, and Yeltsin gave them the axe. A fifth case was Sverdlovsk oblast’s Eduard Rossel, who did not support Khasbulatov but proclaimed his Urals Republic on November 1. Yeltsin abolished the republic on November 9 and dismissed Rossel on November 10. Of the presidents of the existing ethnic republics, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov of Kalmykiya, in the North Caucasus, joined the defenders of the blockaded White House and issued anti-Yeltsin declarations. Once the parliamentarist forces had been subdued, Ilyumzhinov “capitulated and made the rather remarkable proposal to eliminate Kalmykiya’s status as a . . . republic . . . [and] abolish its constitution.” Yeltsin allowed him to stay in his post, only much more compliant with Moscow than before.88
The constitutional plebiscite on December 12 seemed at first to portend more fireworks. Majorities went against the presidential draft in eight republics and ten other regions. The 1993 conjuncture, however, was a bottoming out for Yeltsin and the federal administration. The masterstroke for recovery was his consolidation of power at the center, which showed regional leaders, to put it crudely, who was king of the mountain. On the local scene, aping Moscow, the republic presidents emerged more potent than their legislatures. The muting of political competition made them better able to withstand nationalist pressures, and these pressures simmered down. “Yeltsin’s centralization of power altered Russia’s entire institutional environment, shifting power from republican parliaments to executives and eliminating the massive central state weakness that had made possible republican challenges to federal sovereignty in the early 1990s.”89 There was similar momentum in the non-republics. Yeltsin felt strong enough in November 1993 to disclaim the line in the federative treaty of 1992 that would have given the ethnic reserves half of the seats in the upper house. The new Federation Council gave all territories two places apiece. Yeltsin further lessened the inequality between the republics and the non-republics by consenting to gubernatorial elections in selected oblasts and making them universal practice in December 1995. After two years in which Federation Council members were elected, it was agreed at the end of 1995 that each province’s two seats would be assigned ex officio to its head executive and legislator, bringing the regional leaders into the central political establishment.90
The innovation in relations between center and periphery was Yeltsin’s espousal of custom-built power-sharing “treaties” with many of the provinces. This was not a new concept: He had lofted it on the same 1990 sortie to Tatarstan when he urged it to take all the sovereignty it needed.91 The first bilateral treaty was struck, appropriately, with Mintimer Shaimiyev of Tatarstan on February 15, 1994. Yeltsin traveled to the republic in May. He made appearances at the spruced-up Kazan kremlin, the Mardzhani mosque, an Orthodox church, several factories and farms, a children’s hospital, and a press conference. “They beat me up and denigrated me for the treaty with Tatarstan,” he said, standing beside Shaimiyev, “but nonetheless I have been proven right. . . . Tatarstan has taken as many powers under the treaty as it can. The rest that remain with the federal government are enough to satisfy us.”92
Neighboring Bashkortostan and Kabardino-Balkariya in the North Caucasus came to understandings with Moscow later in 1994, four republics did in 1995, two in 1996, and, after Yeltsin’s second inauguration, one in 1997 and one in 1998. In 1995 Yeltsin was to extend the practice to nonethnic provinces, with Viktor Chernomyrdin’s native Orenburg and Yeltsin’s Sverdlovsk first. Eventually forty-seven of eighty-nine federal subunits were to have their treaties. The sweeteners were mostly economic—provisions allowing signatories to hold some federal taxes collected locally, for instance, or giving them a fixed share of revenues from sale of oil and other natural resources—but some ancillary agreements touched on environmental issues, conscription, and linguistic policy. Yeltsin held the signings in the gilded and chandeliered St. George’s Hall, the most resplendent in the Grand Kremlin Palace: It measures 13,500 square feet, and has a fifty-seven-foot-high ceiling. It did not go unnoticed that the statues on the eighteen monumental pylons, by the nineteenth-century sculptor Ivan Vitali, stood for regions ingested by the Russian state from the 1400s to the 1800s. It was the room Gorbachev had reserved for the signing ceremony for the USSR union treaty in August 1991.