Most of the post-communist states in Europe were panting for admission to the European Union more than to NATO. This entryway, too, was closed to Russia and its leader. The union was of the view, as one review of the 1990s put it, that Russia was “simply too big, too complex, and too backward to be considered for EU membership.”29 A ten-year cooperation agreement Yeltsin signed in Corfu’s Venetian fort in June 1994 was as close as he got to a meaningful association. Although Russia applied for membership in the Council of Europe, a medium for legal and human rights, and acceded to it and its parliamentary assembly in February 1996, Yeltsin had no strategy for buying into the much more dynamic and rigorous EU.30
Domestically, post-Soviet entropy was nowhere more of a threat than in center-periphery relations, the reef on which the USSR’s empire of nations had shipwrecked. The showdown between Russia and the Soviet leadership provoked competitive appeasement of the constituent provinces of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and mostly of its republics (known until December 1990 as autonomous Soviet socialist republics), delimited as the homelands of “titular” nationalities such as the Tatars and Bashkirs. Somewhat privileged in communist ethnofederalism, they were the gravest threat to the unity of post-communist Russia. Yeltsin’s pronouncement in Kazan about the titulars taking as much autonomy as they could guzzle was an expression of his propensity for decentralization, a jab at Gorbachev in the Russian-Soviet context, and, in the intra-Russian context, an attempt to fight fire with fire and to keep the minorities within whatever state entity survived. While playing to enlightened self-interest, he said geopolitical realities would have to be put on the weigh scales as well. The union republics of the USSR were placed around the Russian lands, but, he noted at Kazan University in 1990, “You [the Tatars] are located in the center of Russia—and you have to think about that.”31 On that same trip, “Yeltsin privately warned local leaders not to go too far in their assertions of local autonomy,” U.S. intelligence reported.32
The immediate effect of the RSFSR’s declaration of sovereignty and the sermon in Kazan was an outpouring from the minorities. Between the Russian parliamentary resolution on June 12, 1990, and Kazan on August 5, North Ossetiya in the North Caucasus was the one republic to declare sovereignty. In the two months after August 5, the legislatures of Tatarstan (formerly Tatariya) and five other republics came forth with resolutions; in the two months after that, ten more, including Bashkortostan (formerly Bashkiriya), followed them; the four remaining did between December 1990 and July 1991.33 Many centrists and conservatives in the republics bent to agitation by nationalist movements. In Tatarstan, for example, leader Mintimer Shaimiyev, a former CPSU first secretary, had fought against protégés of Yegor Ligachëv in the late 1980s but backed the August 1991 putsch against Gorbachev—and only after its defeat did he defect to the Tatar cause.34 The radicals in the Ittifaq movement until then wanted Tatarstan reclassified as the sixteenth union republic of the USSR, as Tatar nationalists had favored since the 1920s; after August 1991 they wanted unalloyed independence and held almost daily demonstrations in Kazan to press their claims.35
In so unsure an environment, there was no reason a priori why Russia would be vaccinated against the infection that killed off the Soviet Union. Many of its provinces were comparable in magnitude to the smaller of the union republics that hived off in 1991. Wrote Aleksandr Tsipko late that year, “It is difficult to explain to the Ossetins and Chechens,” constituent peoples of Russia, “that they have fewer rights than the Moldovans,” whose union republic on the Romanian border was making good its exit from the USSR. The fever was contagious, Tsipko observed, as non-republics populated by ethnic Russians now plugged for equality with the minority areas. Yeltsin “awaits the fate of Gorbachev or of the queen of England, who does not rule anything.” Unless a pan-Soviet federation were salvaged, which was soon shown to be impossible, the only way out, he apostrophized, would be for a Russian leader to recentralize and de-democratize: “Under conditions of ongoing disintegration, the pendulum of public attitudes will swing to the other extreme, and this time it is the democrats who will come under fire.”36
Yeltsin got down to work in 1990 on a “federative treaty,” kindred to the never-to-be-consummated union treaty for the USSR, which all of Russia’s regions were intended to sign as a reaffirmation. Negotiations were stepped up in the autumn of 1991, with Gennadii Burbulis responsible to the president for protecting the federal government’s interests. On March 30, 1992, three texts were contracted in Moscow: for the twenty-one republics, the fifty-seven nonethnic territories (most of them oblasts), and eleven lowerranking subunits. Yeltsin hailed the treaty as codifying “a prudent balance of interests.” At the same time as it “put an end to the ascendancy of the… Moscow bureaucracy,” it would “defend Russia against chaos, impotence, and an orgy of localism.”37
The subtreaty for the republics acknowledged republican sovereignty and said they and other ethnic subunits, which had about 17 percent of the total Russian population, would get 50 percent of the seats in the parliamentary upper chamber in a new constitution. Several republics in effect blackmailed Yeltsin to make further concessions. Sakha (Yakutiya), on northeast Siberian permafrost, was given a large portion of the profits from the bankable diamond industry there; Bashkortostan, the most populous republic, got an appendix giving it dispensations. Two republics would not sign on the dotted line at all. Chechnya had declared its independence from Moscow on November 1, 1991. Tatarstan on March 21, 1992, organized a referendum on the proposition that Russia was an abutting state and relations between the two could be set only through state-to-state treaties; 61 percent voted in favor. One of the reasons Burbulis was demoted in April 1992 was that he misgauged the Tatarstan problem and encouraged a referendum on the premise that it would fail. As defeat in the referendum came into view, Yeltsin considered an economic blockade or even military intervention—Shaimiyev says the night before the vote was the scariest of his life. In 1992–93 Chechnya, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Sakha, and Tuva led the pack. In varying combinations, republics legislated language laws, skipped Russia-wide referendums, withheld tax payments, and declared republic laws and constitutions preponderate over Russian ones.38
Although non-republics could not marshal the fervency of the minority homelands, they noisily aired their concerns and tried to extract benefits from the Kremlin. In the August 1991 power vacuum, Yeltsin appropriated the authority to appoint provincial leaders and presidential representatives in the given region, a power confirmed by parliament in November.39 He looked the other way at the election of presidents in the republics; Shaimiyev in Tatarstan had been the first, running unopposed in June 1991.40 The ethnicity-blind oblasts seethed over their second-string status, economically and constitutionally, and wanted to be able to elect their chief executives, most of them now called governors. Yeltsin did not concede this until April 1993, when he permitted votes for governor in eight provinces. Several Russian oblasts tried the nominative cure of declaring themselves republics and ringing up the rights of a Tatarstan or a Tuva. Vologda, north and east of Moscow, was the first to do so, in May 1993. In Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin’s stomping ground, where he had made his promotee Eduard Rossel head of the executive after the 1991 putsch, the oblast council ruled to this effect in July 1993 and invited the nearby areas of Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Orenburg, and Perm to fall in. Projects to create single- or multiprovince republics sprang up in provinces from the Baltic littoral in the northwest to the Volga basin and on to central and east Siberia and Vladivostok.41