Yeltsin considered his parliamentary position the stepping stone to a Russian presidency. Most of his associates were more interested than he in legislation and were less vociferous on policy toward the Soviet center. Even Vladimir Isakov, the chairman of the Council of the Republic, one of the two halves of the Supreme Soviet—a professor of jurisprudence from Sverdlovsk and a centrist—was upset by his propensity for playing the lone hand. Yeltsin would listen intently to advice, agree in principle, and then act “as if the conversation had never taken place.”58 Comity within the group dissipated in February–March 1991, and agitated sessions of the Supreme Soviet and congress were accompanied by pro-Yeltsin street demonstrations of up to 300,000 people, penned in by soldiers and riot police. Yeltsin’s salvation was to induce the legislature to piggyback a question on institution of the office of president onto an all-USSR referendum on the future of the union on March 17. Seventy percent of Russians endorsed the federation and 71 percent an elected Russian presidency. In a masterpiece of brinkmanship, Yeltsin got parliament to schedule the election for June 12, the anniversary of the 1990 sovereignty declaration, before agreeing on presidential powers—something it got to on May 24, with only three weeks to spare. The Communists for Democracy faction headed by Colonel Aleksandr Rutskoi, a mustachioed hero of the Afghan war, provided the requisite congressional votes.
Rutskoi was named Yeltsin’s vice-presidential running mate, at Lyudmila Pikhoya’s suggestion, and two members of Democratic Russia and the Interregional bloc, Gavriil Popov and Anatolii Sobchak, ran parallel campaigns for mayor of Moscow and Leningrad. Management of the Yeltsin campaign was entrusted to Gennadii Burbulis, an owlish professor of dialectical materialism from Sverdlovsk (born in the oblast town of Pervoural’sk), who was admitted to Yeltsin’s circle in 1990 and had hoped to be the vice-presidential nominee. An RSFSR television channel, one of the first inroads in the tussle over sovereignty, went on the air on May 13, in time for the race.
Of the five candidates who vied with Yeltsin in this, his third anti-establishment election in two years, only the former Soviet premier Nikolai Ryzhkov, the nominee of the Russian communists, was a serious contender. The party’s beetle-browed leader, Ivan Polozkov, impossible to get elected, would resign his post in August. Yeltsin ducked the all-candidates’ debates and did two rambles out of Moscow, formally on parliamentary business, presenting himself as statesmanlike and not grubbing for votes. If Vladimir Zhirinovskii, the windbag Russian nationalist who came in third, is speaking the truth, Gorbachev’s office, working through the KGB, implored him to visit the same cities as Yeltsin and covertly gave 3 million rubles (about $2 million) to his vice-presidential candidate, Andrei Zavidiya, to buy his cooperation. But Zavidiya, Zhirinovskii says, did not bring Zhirinovskii in on the scheme and skimmed off 90 percent of the money; Zhirinovskii did not alter his travel plans.59
As in 1989 and 1990, an army of amateurish democrats delivered Yeltsin’s message. Loosely coordinated by a group around Yeltsin and by Democratic Russia, they printed and photocopied materials, distributed them at Moscow subway stations, and rang doorbells. Retired schoolteachers rode the commuter rails of the capital region and passed Yeltsin fliers out of train windows. The chairman of the pilots’ union at Aeroflot, Anatolii Kochur, prevailed upon flight crews to cram bales of broadsheets into cargo bays and get them to activists in the outback. The punchline of the authorized candidate’s poster read Narodnogo deputata v narodnyye prezidenty!—“People’s Deputy for People’s President!” The main concern in the Yeltsin camp was that he would not make a majority in the first round and would lose to an anyonebut-Yeltsin candidate in a runoff.
Yeltsin campaigned against Gorbachev and the CPSU, not Ryzhkov or Zhirinovskii. In a firebrand interview on central television, he alluded to Gorbachev’s more soothing line in recent weeks as proof that communism, which had made Soviet citizens guinea pigs in a grotesque experiment, was on its last legs:
As recently as a month ago, he [Gorbachev] was saying everywhere that he is only for socialism, only for socialism, we cannot do otherwise. Just as for over seventy years we have been marching to a bright future, that is how [he says] we will continue, and somehow we will arrive. Our country has not been lucky…. It was decided to carry out this Marxist experiment on us—fate pushed us in precisely this direction. Instead of some country in Africa, they began this experiment with us. In the end, we proved that there is no place for this idea. It has simply pushed us off the road the world’s civilized countries have taken. This is reflected today, when 40 percent of people are living below the poverty line and… in constant humiliation when they receive produce upon the presentation of ration cards. This is a constant humiliation, a reminder every hour that you are a slave in this country.60
Support for Yeltsin, polls showed, flagged in late May, then rebounded. He had husbanded his small advertising budget for the home stretch. Come voting day, Wednesday, June 12, the one-man electoral juggernaut received 45,552,041 votes, or 59 percent of the valid ballots cast, to 18 percent for Ryzhkov and 8 percent for Zhirinovskii. He drew best in the Urals, Moscow, Leningrad (which was about to go back to being called St. Petersburg), the urbanized portions of central Russia and Siberia, and the Volga basin; he drew worst in the “red belt” of pro-communist regions on the steppes south of Moscow.61 Yeltsin’s testing of his authority with the demos, as Anatolii Luk’yanov had prophesied, contrasted sharply with Gorbachev’s quailing at that test in 1990. You, a Yeltsin ally said to Gorbachev, have been too timorous to try to obtain a mandate from society. Yeltsin dared, and got his agency by being chosen “not in the cloakrooms, not by a narrow circle, but by the people.” If the Soviet bosses went on attacking Yeltsin, it would continue to boomerang: “The anti-Yeltsin actions of the bankrupt top echelon have always had effects antithetical to those intended. They have brought forth the people’s wrath and elevated his authority.”62
A gala inaugural was held on July 10 at the Palace of Congresses. Yeltsin seated a Russian Orthodox priest, a rabbi, and a Muslim cleric in the front row as a cue to the television audience that his Russia would be an openminded place. Patriarch Aleksii II and Oleg Basilashvili, a parliamentary deputy and stage and movie actor from Leningrad, spoke before Yeltsin took the oath of office for a five-year term, with left hand on a copy of the Russian constitution and right hand over his heart. Yeltsin’s undertaking as president, he said, beaming, was to transport Russia into the community of nations as “a prosperous, democratic, peace-loving, law-abiding, and sovereign state.” He also tried to trim expectations: “The president is not God, he is not a new monarch, he is not an all-powerful worker of miracles, he is a citizen.”63