But the greatest influences, according to Yeltsin, were not Kulikov or Clinton and not the oligarchs, with whom he had been out of contact. They were Tatyana Dyachenko and Anatolii Chubais. Tatyana secured an appointment with Yeltsin for Chubais, also on March 18, and Chubais for the one and only time in his years with Yeltsin raised the volume of his voice in protest. The one-hour meeting, Yeltsin said in his memoirs, made him feel “ashamed before those who had trusted me.” He got in a poke at Chubais in the conversation—“You also made plenty of mistakes in privatization,” he said. But he heeded the advice and that day dropped his ill-considered plan.52 Blessedly for Russia and for his reputation, he had come to his senses—for which those who tar him with neo-Bolshevism give him not a granule of thanks. “The president,” Kulikov writes accurately, “was wise enough to overstep himself and his character. He understood that the undertaking could end tragically and that some people were trying to use him.”53
On March 19, the day after finally giving the election a green light, Yeltsin appointed a new campaign council, chaired by himself, with Viktor Chernomyrdin as deputy chairman. But his most consequential decision was to impanel an “analytical group” under Chubais, who had agreed to it at a rendezvous with the oligarchs in Berezovskii’s Logovaz Club—an ideal place, Berezovskii chortled, because no one could bug it with listening devices except him. Chubais accepted several million dollars up front for campaign expenses, from which he was to deduct a monthly salary of $60,000. True to form, Yeltsin did not do away with the Soskovets grouping, whose senior members joined the council and which continued to occupy offices on a different floor of the Presidential Hotel. The nomination formalities, completed by April 5, were dealt with by an All-Russian Movement for Public Support of the President, an ecumenical front of 250 preexisting organizations headed up by Sergei Filatov, Yeltsin’s former chief of staff. It stayed around to liaise with regional and local leaders, while another organization still, People’s House, made connections to citizen groups and was the unofficial disburser of campaign funds.
The nerve center was the Chubais workshop, which, beginning about April 1, met five or six days a week, two to three hours at a time. Yeltsin sat in on a half-dozen of its meetings, although, knowing his aversion to collective decision making, members mostly went to see him singly or in pairs. The group took in the pollster Aleksandr Oslon, of the Public Opinion Foundation; Valentin Yumashev; presidential assistants Ilyushin and Satarov; Vasilii Shakhnovskii, chief of staff to Mayor Luzhkov; Igor Malashenko, the president of NTV, and Sergei Zverev, an executive in Media-Most, NTV’s corporate parent; and Sergei Shakhrai, once deputy premier and now a Duma deputy. The tenth member was Tatyana Dyachenko. Casually dressed and in flowing bangs, she was never far from Yeltsin’s side between then and the July runoff. She carried messages back and forth and advised on his grooming and the staging of campaign appearances. “On everything else,” says an eyewitness, “she felt herself unprepared.”54
Aleksandr Korzhakov, stung by Yeltsin’s change of heart, traduced the new team and continued his efforts to abort the election, holding exploratory talks with Chernomyrdin, the KPRF leadership, and others. On April 16, in a lengthy meeting with the prime minister at the Presidential Club, he flattered Chernomyrdin and poked fun at the Chubais group (they were wetbehind-the-ears pupils and laboratory assistants), savaged Viktor Ilyushin for defecting to them (“Viktor has no ideas of his own”), and said the vote, if held, was winnable by only a few percentage points and would thus be illegitimate. Apparently getting some sympathy from Chernomyrdin, Korzhakov said again that the presidential election should be postponed by two years and, in a new kink, that the neo-communists should be brought into a coalition government to rule until then. “The chief himself will be against this idea,” Korzhakov quotes himself as saying about Yeltsin, “but he can be broken.”55 In late April, in Khabarovsk, Korzhakov pulled aside Naina Yeltsina and asked her to deliver a letter to the chief. She was reluctant, since she stayed out of decisions of state, but gave Yeltsin the letter at Barvikha-4 upon their return. It touched on the election and argued that there was an urgent need to appoint Oleg Soskovets prime minister. Yeltsin read it and threw it in the wastebasket, an angry look on his face.56 On May 5 Korzhakov, who rarely spoke with journalists, brazenly called in a press interview for a two-year deferral of the vote for stability’s sake. The next day, with a beatific-looking Korzhakov behind him, Yeltsin informed the press that the election would be held without fail and that he had ordered his chief bodyguard “not to meddle in politics.” “I trust in the wisdom of the Russian voters,” he said. “That’s why the election will be held in the time determined by the constitution.”57
Yeltsin took some time to make his peace with the re-election assignment and with having to ask the people on bended knee for what he had come to see as rightfully his, so unlike the cakewalks of 1989, 1990, and 1991. By the time he made his first forays into the heartland, he had modified his posture. What tipped him were recognition of the novelty of the quest, the alacrity of the Chubais group, and the clicking in of his personal testing script: “He caught fire…. He assimilated it as a new game for himself…. He was the ideal candidate. It had all begun to be attractive to him. He could not get enough of it.”58
The principal adversary was Gennadii Zyuganov, who had chaired the KPRF since its founding in 1993. Zyuganov, a propaganda specialist in his home province of Orël and in Moscow before 1991, epitomized the gray apparatchik who had kept faith with state socialism. Presenting himself as the voice of “responsible opposition” and of “popular-patriotic forces” that went beyond his party, he charged that Yeltsin had not kept a single promise since he beat out Nikolai Ryzhkov for the presidency five years before. He advocated constitutional changes to strengthen parliament and reintroduce the office of vice president (Yeltsin’s former vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoi, supported Zyuganov), appointment of a medical commission to review the health of leaders (an obvious dig at Yeltsin), settlement of back wages, measures “to guarantee all citizens the right to labor, leisure, housing, free education and medical care, and a worthy old age,” and a review of privatization policy.59
The two principal combatants were joined by a piebald field of eight lesser contestants. Two were put forward by political parties that had standing in the Duma: Vladimir Zhirinovskii, the publicity hound and head of the scrappily imperialist LDPR; and Grigorii Yavlinskii of the liberal Yabloko Party, an economist by training and one of the authors of the Five Hundred Days Program in 1990. The semiforgotten Mikhail Gorbachev chose to run for the office that Yeltsin had used to destroy his power base, describing himself as Russia’s candidate of “consolidation.” The most serious of the independent candidates was Aleksandr Lebed, a gravel-voiced professional soldier from the Soviet military’s airborne branch who had retired from the service as a two-star general in 1995. Lebed’s defense of the Slavic minorities in post-Soviet Moldova, as commander of the Russian Fourteenth Army there, gave him cachet with nationalists, and his platform emphasized law and order. The four remaining candidates ran as personalities, although nominated by tiny political organizations: Vladimir Bryntsalov, a businessman who had made millions in the pharmaceuticals industry; Svyatoslav Fëdorov, the eye surgeon whom Yeltsin had tried to make prime minister in 1991; Martin Shakkum, a think-tank scholar; and Yurii Vlasov, once a world-champion weightlifter and now a Duma deputy and Russian chauvinist.60