Yeltsin firmed up his choice to seek a second term in late December 1995, a month in which his political allies suffered defeat in the parliamentary election and he endured his third coronary in a half-year. Naina Yeltsina and their daughters were moved to tears by the very suggestion. Physicians had reported that the rigors of an electioneering marathon might kill him or shorten his life and leave him incapacitated.26 Not for the first time, Yeltsin overrode family and medical science.
His motivations, as always, were a jumble. In political terms, the neo-communists he so detested were now the main enemy and would gain the most from a failure to stand and fight: “The idea that I myself would facilitate the communists coming to power was more than I could bear.”27 In personal terms, the stacking of the deck against him made the challenge seem especially worthwhile. As he met staff after New Year’s to inform them of his decision, he took umbrage at reports that pollsters hired by the Kremlin found his popularity at a record low: “I am being stuffed to the gills with sociology, but I myself know sociology better than the whole lot of you.”28 His memoir selfportrait of those weeks might be captioned “King Lear Makes a Comeback.” “My whole life was buffeted by all manner of storms and winds,” he wrote. “I was on my feet but almost knocked over by the gusts.” His health was bad, power was slipping through his fingers, trusted comrades were letting him down, and the people would not forgive him for shock therapy and Chechnya. “It appeared as if all was lost. But this was one of those moments when a sort of clarity comes over me. With a clear head, I said to myself, ‘If I run in this election I am going to win it without any doubt.’ This I knew with certitude, regardless of all the forecasts, all the polls…. Most likely, I was saved by my imperishable passion and my will to resist.”29 Yegor Gaidar in his memoirs was to call up a Russian cultural trope: “Our Il’ya Muromets had finally roused himself.”30
Yeltsin left Moscow’s Vnukovo field on February 15 to make the official announcement in old Urals haunts. Aides and ministers had been summoned to the airport. “With his storied stare, he looked around at all the functionaries there to send him off and asked with great sincerity, ‘So tell me, do you think it’s not worth it for me to get mixed up in this business?’ And the answer that rang out was, of course, a simultaneous chorus of voices: ‘How can you say such a thing, Boris Nikolayevich, what is this all about? You must!’” “If I must, then I must,” Yeltsin replied.31 His speech in Yekaterinburg was in the same Youth Palace where he had dialogue with local students as first secretary of the Sverdlovsk obkom fifteen years before. Battling laryngitis, he portrayed himself as ready to learn from his mistakes but not to turn back the clock: “I am for reforms but not at any price. I am for a correction in course but not a return to the past. I am for basing Russian politics not on utopia and dogmas but on practical utility.” He struck an inclusive note, suggesting that he shared the people’s concerns about the road taken since 1991, yet reproved reactionaries who rejected the trajectory. “We,” he proclaimed, “are stronger than those who for all these years have put a spoke in the wheel and have impeded our motion toward a great and free Russia…. We are stronger than our own disappointments and doubts. We are tired out but we are together, and we will win.”32
The “we” at the head of the uphill effort was an open-ended category. On January 15 Yeltsin put Oleg Soskovets, the powerful first deputy premier and friend of Aleksandr Korzhakov, in charge of his re-election headquarters. In the past year, Yeltsin had spoken several times to Soskovets of the possibility of Soskovets in due course succeeding him as president. What with Soskovets’s high position in Moscow, this talk was bound to be taken more seriously than the fleeting conversation he had with Boris Nemtsov in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1994. Yeltsin now conceived of the assignment as a tryout: “I saw it this way: If Oleg Nikolayevich had political ambitions, let him display them. Let him show what kind of politician he was and what kind of political will he possessed, and then we would see.”33 Loading up the nascent campaign with a secondary objective was a mistake Yeltsin would soon regret. The drive to gather signatures for his nomination papers (one million were required by the 1995 law on presidential elections) was badly bungled. Railway and metallurgical workers were instructed by government officials to sign nominating petitions before collecting their pay at the wicket, and some governors were ordered to deliver signatures on quota.
Around February 1, Yeltsin asked his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, age thirty-six, to sit in on meetings of the Soskovets group. Other than transcribing speeches and canvassing in his early campaigns, this was her first involvement in her father’s politics. She was smart and resolute like her father but soft-spoken and unassuming like her mother. She had felt unfulfilled in the defense-related institute where she had worked for a decade and where she turned down a suggestion in the mid-1980s that she join the Communist Party (she said she did not know enough about politics and did not consider herself “worthy”), and in the bank where she was on staff in 1994–95: “My character is such that I for some reason tend to have inflated expectations of myself. And then it seems that each time I do not quite live up to them.”34 This time she was willing to heed her father’s request.
Dyachenko was soon saying to Yeltsin that something was out of whack with the Soskovets effort.35 But at first nothing much came of her efforts. It was then that Yeltsin’s need to reconnect with the mass electorate intersected with the process of connecting differently with players at the elite level. Come what may, he had to empower a functional campaign staff and to appease other public politicians. A new presence in post-communist politics—the leaders of the nonstate business class that was beginning to amass fabulous wealth in the market economy—showed both tasks in a new light.
The Russian moguls were mostly in their thirties and forties, had been nobodies under Soviet power, and until the year before Yeltsin’s re-election were mostly financiers who made money out of currency speculation, arbitrage, handling governmental deposits, and buying high-interest state debt. On August 31, 1995, Yeltsin had his first meeting with a group of them, about reserve requirements and other banking issues, and referred to the banks as having a political role. “Russian bankers,” he told ten representatives, “take part in the country’s political life…. The banks, like all of Russia, are learning democracy.”36 The loans-for-shares auctions in November–December 1995 allowed the more conspicuous of “the oligarchs,” as they were now known, to reposition as captains of industry. Initially dreamt up by Vladimir Potanin of Oneximbank, this privatization scheme was backed by Chubais but also by Kremlin conservatives like Soskovets, who was the one to get Yeltsin’s signature on it.37 At bargain-basement prices, Potanin picked up Norilsk Nickel, the world’s number one smelter of palladium and nickel, and he, Mikhail Khodorkovskii of Menatep, and Boris Berezovskii acquired the oil giants Sidanco, Yukos, and Sibneft. Two oligarchs also had extensive media interests and were bound to figure in the 1996 campaign: Vladimir Gusinskii of Most Bank was de jure the proprietor of NTV television; his rival Berezovskii had been de facto the moneyman behind the ORT network (formerly Ostankino) since 1994. Relations between Gusinskii and Berezovskii had always been testy, but they were willing in 1996 to set differences aside in order to protect their gains.