The one business figure on the Soskovets board was the hyperactive Berezovskii. He more than any of his colleagues was out to build status and influence in the political realm, to which end he had added to his portfolio the quality newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta, the TV-6 entertainment network, and a one-third share in the Ogonëk publishing house. He had frequently offered advice, solicited and unsolicited, to Soskovets and Korzhakov, and lobbied for advantage. His path had crossed Yeltsin’s in November or December 1993, when he and Vladimir Kadannikov volunteered to underwrite publication under the Ogonëk imprint of the Russian edition of volume two of Yeltsin’s memoirs, in which Yeltsin was advanced 10 percent against the domestic royalties. Berezovskii first shook the president’s hand when he went to his office to sign the contract. (The foreign rights, which brought in four or five times the revenue, were handled by the British literary agent Andrew Nurnberg.) In 1994 he was the first businessman to join the Presidential Club.38 Berezovskii also knew Tatyana Dyachenko, though not yet much less cursorily than he knew her father. Korzhakov was to write in his 1997 memoir that at some time in 1994 or 1995 Berezovskii made her a present of two cars: a Russian-made Niva wagon and a Chevrolet Blazer. The claim was claptrap and is controverted by both Dyachenko and Berezovskii.39 But the two were acquainted and had as a friend in common Valentin Yumashev, who had prepared both volumes of Yeltsin’s memoirs for publication. In his professional life, Yumashev was deputy editor of Ogonëk magazine from 1991 to 1995 and director general of the Ogonëk company in 1995–96.40
It took only several meetings of the Soskovets group for Berezovskii to conclude that not all was well. From February 2 to 5, he and seventy other Russian capitalists and officials attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where they were upset by the polite reception given to Gennadii Zyuganov, who had a bulge over Yeltsin in the polls. At Berezovskii’s suggestion, Viktor Ilyushin arranged for Yeltsin to host an unpublicized Kremlin luncheon for six businessmen—Berezovskii, Gusinskii, Khodorkovskii, Potanin, Aleksandr Smolenskii of SBS-Agro Bank, and Vladimir Vinogradov of Inkombank—and Chubais, who had been Yeltsin’s deputy for privatization until Yeltsin threw him to the wolves in January as a result of the Duma election. The meal was held about a fortnight after the Davos forum, in Shrovetide on the Russian calendar, and the chef served traditional fare for the season: pancakes with garnishes and drinks.41 Yeltsin had thought the diners wanted to speak with him about campaign finance, since “they had nowhere to go and would have to support me,” but the conversation was about the hopelessness of the Soviet-style effort under Soskovets. “I had not expected such tough talk,” he was to write in Presidential Marathon.42 Gusinskii and Chubais held nothing back. “Boris Nikolayevich,” Chubais stated, “your popularity rating is zero.” As usual when he was confronted by unlovely news, the meeting was marked by a long silence from the chair. One of the visitors, Khodorkovskii, thought “the tsar was thinking about whether to send of us all to the execution block”; another, Smolenskii, said in 2003 that “the pause was so loud that I hear it to this day.”43 The frank comments gave every appearance of shaking Yeltsin out of his apathy. Hesitating to catch his breath, he asked what they recommended. He promised after forty minutes of discussion to think about ways to energize the campaign and to involve Chubais and associates of big business in it. Berezovskii stayed to chat with Yeltsin briefly after the group dispersed.44
It is important to realize, though, that the dialogue with the magnates had no immediate effect.45 Almost a month after the Kremlin meeting, on March 14, Yeltsin’s political assistant, Georgii Satarov, and a group of consultants sent him a blistering memorandum noting that the campaign was still a shambles:
[Soskovets] is not a specialist on public politics or electoral technologies, as immediately revealed itself. But this has not been offset by the possible merits on which you apparently were counting.
Soskovets has displayed no organizational ability: The headquarters has not yet begun to work normally. He is unable to make contact with people who have a different point of view but are necessary to the campaign. His influence on the regional leadership has been exercised through vulgar and vain officiousness, which not only compromises you as president but turns off possible allies. The same methods are being employed, with the same result, with government agencies and with representatives of the mass media and of commercial and banking circles. The weirdest thing is that Soskovets has not resolved the problem of mobilizing in a short span of time the financial resources needed to wage the campaign…. More than a month has been lost.
Satarov urged Yeltsin to redo the organization while there was still time.46
I have no doubt that Yeltsin did not reorganize in February for a reason—because he had not yet resolved the bedrock dilemma of whether there should be a presidential election at all. The detonator here was a nonbinding resolution by the newly elected State Duma on March 15, 1996, to renounce the Supreme Soviet vote of December 12, 1991, on the Belovezh’e accord. Sponsored by the KPRF caucus and passed by a majority of 250 to ninety-eight, the vote asserted in effect that the Soviet Union and the legislation undergirding it still had legal force. Yeltsin reacted with indignation to an “attempt to liquidate our statehood” that “casts doubt on the legitimacy” of the new Russia and its political system.47 Within twenty-four hours, the Korzhakov-Soskovets group, fearing a loss to the communists in the forthcoming election and sensing an opportunity to prevail in the palace struggle—where Korzhakov had not yet persuaded Yeltsin to make Soskovets prime minister and thus to put him in the line of succession—had come up with a proposal to postpone the presidential election until 1998, ban the KPRF, and shut down the Duma so as to rule by executive decree for the two years. The proposal took the postponement project entertained by Moscow democrats in 1994–95 and linked it to radically anti-democratic ends.48
Yeltsin at first bought into the idea. On the morning of March 17, he ordered his aides to draft implementing directives and law-enforcement officers to make operational plans. There were, even so, dissenting voices, and Yeltsin did not shut them out. Viktor Ilyushin, four of Yeltsin’s liberal assistants, and Sergei Shakhrai said in a memorandum that they could not write a general decree because they could come up with no legal basis for it. Were one to be written and signed, they warned, Russia could be in for a civil war.49 Anatolii Kulikov, the MVD minister who had led the ministry’s troops in Chechnya in 1994–95, rallied the procurator general, Yurii Skuratov, and the chairman of the Constitutional Court, Vladimir Tumanov, to come out against the decision as unworkable, in part because his best soldiers were still embroiled in the North Caucasus. They saw him together in his office: “The president was really and truly glum. His complexion was sallow, he was ungracious…. He especially disliked that we had come as a threesome.” “Minister, I am dissatisfied with you,” Yeltsin spluttered. “A decree will follow shortly. Leave and prepare to implement it.” Kulikov and two officers secured a second Kremlin meeting, at six A.M. sharp on Monday, March 18. Yeltsin was in a darker mood than the day before and would not shake hands with them; Kulikov could see on the presidential desk an unsigned decree dismissing him. Repeating that Yeltsin had no constitutional or moral case, he added that there was no evidence the army would back the president, and that the communists would go underground as martyrs for principle. “Yeltsin interrupted me and said, ‘This is my affair and not yours.’” When Kulikov hung in, Yeltsin reminded him that “you are sitting in my office” and rebuked him for speaking on others’ behalf. But the minister stuck to his guns, and Yeltsin showed signs of fickleness and allowed that the communists might have to be turned back “in stages.”50 President Clinton, alerted by Yegor Gaidar (who sent a message through Ambassador Thomas Pickering), had written Yeltsin a private letter about the need to hold the election on timetable.51 Chernomyrdin and Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow were against the project as well.