Sergei Filatov, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, was behind the next party-building maneuver in 1994 and into 1995. He and Aleksandr Yakovlev founded a Russian Party of Social Democracy, dedicated to democratic values and a mixed economy, and registered it in February 1995. Filatov and Yakovlev felt they had a commitment from Yeltsin to help it with financing, back it in the next Duma election, and chair it after that.16 Despite assurances, Yeltsin went off on a tangent. Prodded by Shakhrai, the spoiler from 1993, he gave license for not one but two pro-presidential electoral groupings. Our Home Is Russia, headed by Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had sat out the 1993 election, was right-of-center programmatically (right in the sense of favoring the market over government control); the bloc struck by Ivan Rybkin, the Duma speaker, was left-of-center (left in the sense of partiality for government direction over the market). On April 25, 1995, Yeltsin jumped the gun to unveil plans for the two blocs to journalists and to blubber that they would stride coordinately in “two columns,” implying that they were apologists for the status quo. After that, he did not bestir himself to help either organization, although he did go on television on December 15 to speak out against the command economy and plans to restore the Soviet Union. Rybkin assumed he was at liberty to rebuke the prime minister and the government, only to find that, whenever he did, Chernomyrdin complained to him and Yeltsin; he also was strapped for campaign funds.17 On election day, December 17, Rybkin scraped together 1 percent of the popular vote. Our Home Is Russia far exceeded him in resources and had thirty-six governors on its national list, yet Yeltsin made slighting comments about its drawing power and it was not able to claim that it spoke for the president. Chernomyrdin noted both these points to Korzhakov. “I said to him right away [after Yeltsin made his comments in September], ‘Boris Nikolayevich, this is not my personal initiative only, it is necessary to all of us.’” Yeltsin was unmoved. “And then the governors would ask me, ‘Are you together or not together?’ I would say, ‘What are you talking about, why don’t you want to understand?’ [And they would reply], ‘We’re not able to figure it out, and that is it.’”18 On December 17 Our Home Is Russia finished with a puny 10 percent. The winner in the popular vote (with 23 percent) and in seats was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the KPRF, which was ferally opposed to Yeltsin.
Why all the bobbing and weaving on affiliation with a party? Yeltsin did not offer a reason during his years as president. In an interview in the privacy of retirement, he offered this comment:
The CPSU had left a belch in the air. I had an extreme reaction against the word “party,” an allergy against all of this stuff. So I had no wish to join any party and I did not join one, and I am not a member of any party today…. I had a very negative attitude toward [the creation of] a unifying party…. [I felt I should] be above the interests of any party. I was the president. He should respect every registered party and every tendency in society; he should help them and listen to them. That is it. If I had been a member of one of the parties, I would have had to concern myself with lobbying for that party. That would have been incorrect…. I did not want to give up on this preference of mine, that was a credo for me…. The president should be above all these things.19
Having chafed at the ruling party in the past, Yeltsin was pleased to be unbound from it and from anything that reeked of its subservient culture. For the present, he considered the president to be above the fray and representative of the whole nation, very much in the spirit of his constitution. The not caring to “lobby” for any organization was what registered most in the political elite. As one former activist in the Interregional group observed, from the turn of the 1990s onward Yeltsin “did not want any structure that might force upon him the necessity to coordinate his decisions with others.”20 From this perspective, a party was harmful less for constraining followers than for constraining the leader. Yeltsin had seen Gorbachev labor to steer both the CPSU and the Soviet state, while he as an oppositionist had flexibility after he walked out of the party in 1990. He was not sure how agreeable Russia’s untrammeled political elite would be to reimposition of partisan discipline in any form. And he knew that party organizations in open or semi-open political systems provide opportunities for subleaders to excel, and that subleaders can become rivals to the alpha leader if his grip slackens. In 1995 Yeltsin desired Our Home Is Russia to do well in the Duma campaign but not so well as to make Chernomyrdin a credible pretender to the presidential suite. Chernomyrdin would say in an interview that Yeltsin’s Kremlin entourage “feared that Chernomyrdin would get too strong, with 1996 coming up.”21 It would not have taken such a position without the president knowing.
Yeltsin’s allergic reaction to the party form was in keeping with his style of acting and governing—visceral and charismatic rather than cerebral and institutional. As with his reluctance to act as propagandist for Russia’s transformation, he was overcompensating for aspects of the totalitarian past. At times when he saw salvation in hooking up directly with the people, a permanent party machine might have posed hurdles. But a party can work for a leader and a cause: by supplying a brand with which citizens can identify, sharing responsibility for making choices in government, and acting as a repository of ideas. With no party at his side, Yeltsin, as Oleg Poptsov wrote, had difficulty answering the question, “Who is the president with?”22 Charles de Gaulle in France, who had slighted the Fourth Republic as a “regime of parties” that divided society, came to see the merits of an integrating, pro-presidential quasi-party, the Union for the New Republic, in his Fifth Republic. Yeltsin never drew the same conclusion in Russia.
And who was with Yeltsin as the 1996 election train pulled out of the station ? Public opinion surveys in 1995 showed not very many unqualified supporters remained and that as few as 5 percent of citizens had the firm intent of voting for him if he were to run.23 Observers frequently gave him no chance of prevailing and forecast a sweep by Gennadii Zyuganov of the KPRF. Yegor Gaidar was typical in a statement in February: “No matter how you arrange the possible coalitions, it is hard to imagine that the president will win.”24 But the polls also showed that a goodly portion of the electorate was undecided and that the attitude of roughly 40 percent of Russians was ambivalent: They were disappointed in Yeltsin but not unalterably against, they hoped he might do better in the future, or they preferred him to the available alternatives, as the best of a bad lot. These numbers, and the two-stage electoral format, which would allow a candidate into a runoff round, were one to be needed, with well under half of the votes, held open the possibility that Yeltsin would be able to turn things around on the campaign trail.25