The Russian “parade of treaties” was a consensual and eminently defensible means of keeping the federation together. Through them, Yeltsin traded concessions to particularistic interests for recommitment to the federation and to his policies. The first several were the most generous. Beginning with Sakha in June 1995, “style and content shifts from a recognition of distinctiveness to agreement to conformity with established rules and jurisdictions.” 93 Aspects of the agreements breached the 1993 constitution and federal statutes. Moscow winked at these and other constitutional transgressions, notably by the republics—a policy that was to be reversed in the next decade.94
Yeltsin also took a hands-off stance toward regional development, enjoining local leaders to solve their problems self-reliantly with minimal tutorship from Moscow: “We have said to the Russian republics, territories, and oblasts, Moscow is not going to give you commands anymore. Your fate is in your hands.”95 He acknowledged that the provinces’ revenues would swell in relation to central revenues (they went from 41 percent of the Russian total in 1990 to 62 percent in 1998) and that interregional inequalities unacceptable under Soviet rule would emerge. The squeaky wheel was oiled, in that regions that voted against Yeltsin and his allies or that were hard hit by strikes and social unrest were given financial transfers and tax breaks.96 The logic again was that of tacit reciprocity of support:
In exchange for loyalty or even for neutrality, Boris Yeltsin often gave the governors a free hand, not hindering those who carried out reforms, others who imitated them, or a third group who, as the adage went, wanted “to uphold the gains of socialism in one oblast” [a joking reference to Stalin’s catchword of “Socialism in One Country”]. Not infrequently in the arguments of the federal government with the regions, the president took the part of the latter and would come out as the lobbyist of several of them, supporting their requests for supplementary budget allocations for this or that purpose—which badly nettled the reformers in the cabinet. Most often Yeltsin preferred to distance himself from these questions, considering that life itself would show who was right. Mind you, he took an understanding attitude when the government used unorthodox methods of influencing the regions, such as reallocation of financial resources. He would look at such methods in the context of preserving the balance. Knowing from his own experience how heavy was the burden of leaders on the spot, he in any case saw to it that some limit in the relations between the center and the regional leaders was not crossed.97
Immanent in the principle that regional leaders would not serve anymore at Yeltsin’s pleasure was sufferance of incorrigible communists and of politicians with whom he had been at loggerheads, such as Eduard Rossel (returned to power by the Sverdlovsk electorate in August 1995) and, more dramatically, Aleksandr Rutskoi (elected governor in Kursk in October 1996). He was willing to let bygones be bygones: “I forget such things. It is better for the health.”98 With the more obliging provincial barons, Yeltsin cultivated human ties. He kept in contact with officials he had known through the nomenklatura or in the USSR and RSFSR parliaments, and went on a charm offensive with others. Anatolii Korabel’shchikov, a trusted aide out of the CPSU apparatus, was his contact man for the regions and had unrestricted entrée to him on his provincial tours. Yeltsin invited groups of fifteen to twenty governors to his ABTs compound on Varga Street in southwest Moscow (taken from the KGB in 1991) for discussion and a dinner. A select few were fêted in the Kremlin or at Zavidovo and were telephoned to consult on decrees and political trends. The pleiad of regional leaders with whom the president had a confidential relationship took in Dmitrii Ayatskov (of Saratov), Vladimir Chub (Rostov), Nikolai Fëdorov (Chuvashiyia), Anatolii Guvzhin (Astrakhan), Viktor Ishayev (Khabarovsk), Nikolai Merkushkin (Mordoviya), Boris Nemtsov (Nizhnii Novgorod), Mikhail Prusak (Novgorod), Mintimer Shaimiyev (Tatarstan), Anatolii Sobchak (St. Petersburg), Yegor Stroyev (Orël), and Konstantin Titov (Samara).99 With one of the youngest and the brightest of them, Nemtsov—born in 1959, trained as a nuclear physicist, and the leader of an environmental protest movement before Yeltsin appointed him governor in 1991—Yeltsin developed a father-son relationship. To a local audience in August 1994, Yeltsin said he could see Nemtsov as the worthiest successor to himself as president. The central media picked up the statement.100
“The danger of Russia falling apart has passed,” Yeltsin stated boisterously the same month as the lovefest with Nemtsov. “This does not mean,” he said in qualification of his good cheer, “that all difficulties are behind us.”101 Little did he know that he was about to get into a fratricidal war that bore out this admonitory note.
Chechnya, a swatch of North Caucasus uplands fringed on the north by plain, had as many grievances against the Russian state as any region. Its people, incorporated into the empire against their will in the nineteenth century, raised revolts against tsars and commissars. From 1944 to 1956, they lived in exile in Central Asia and Siberia, having been deported by Stalin on the charge of sympathizing with the German invaders. Although their troubles were not unique,102 their sense of deprivation and an ingrained willingness to take up arms were a flammable combination. The Chechens follow Sunni Islam and are organized into clans that drive off higher authority, be it Russian or Chechen.
The Brezhnev-era leadership of the republic was not changed until June 1989, when Moscow replaced an ethnic Russian first secretary with Doku Zavgayev, a Chechen partocrat. Nationalist and reformist ferment flared in 1990, and that November republic sovereignty was duly declared. The next month Djokhar Dudayev was chosen to chair a national congress, an alternative legislature working in collaboration with street-level activists. In August–September 1991 his congress and paramilitary overthrew Zavgayev, with some loss of life, and on October 27 Dudayev was elected president in a procedurally flawed contest. On November 1 he declared Chechnya fully independent of the Soviet Union and the RSFSR. The Moscow authorities fled the territory and left behind thousands of heavy weapons—the only province of Russia where they did so.
The proximate cause of the Chechen horror show was leadership failure. An air-force officer by profession, Dudayev was the first ethnic Chechen to make general in the Soviet military and had commanded six thousand men in a strategic bomber wing in Estonia—a force that in the event of war with NATO would have rained nuclear bombs on Western Europe. Except for a few weeks in babyhood, he had never lived in Chechnya until 1991. Between him and Yeltsin there were certain parallels: The two were model servants of the former regime, broke with it, and succeeded politically as populists. But there the similarities ended. Where Yeltsin was a risk-taker who knew his limits, Dudayev was a narcissist influenced by the Chechen mountaineers’ cult of the jiggit, the madcap or knight who proves himself in armed forays and lives on in heroic songs if he falls on the battlefield.103 And Dudayev was more beguiled by the trappings of power than by its utilization—“much more interested in the idea of calling Chechnya independent than in the practicality of making that idea work.”104 He had a weakness for cinematic costumes and pageantry. Of a commemoration in Grozny where Dudayev took the platform in a leather trench coat, epaulets, and jackboots, one observer writes that “he looked like nothing so much as a bad copy of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Dictator, toothbrush mustache included.”105 Unlike Mintimer Shaimiyev, who flirted with separatism and then did a workable deal for his republic under the Russian tent, Dudayev scorned the via media and a Tatarstan-type accommodation. As was once said of Yasser Arafat, he rarely lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity. Dudayev’s Chechnya was an economic basket case, at the mercy of political cliques, smugglers, counterfeiters, local mobsters, and Russian businessmen and officials who valued it as a haven and transit point. Between 1992 and 1994, nearly 200,000 people, or one-fifth of the population, left the republic as refugees; most were ethnic Russians.