A second institutional crisis blossomed forth in Moscow, under Yeltsin’s nose. It matched his executive branch, beefed up by the creation of the presidency, against the legislative branch he had chaired in 1990–91. Its roots were in the indeterminacy of the rules. The constitution of the RSFSR was chock full of loopholes, having been written under Leonid Brezhnev in 1978 and tinkered with repeatedly. A two-thirds vote in the Congress of People’s Deputies was all it took to change the constitution. Several hundred amendments carried between 1990 and 1993, and 180 were on the order paper when congress gathered in December 1992; the constitution of the United States, by comparison, has been altered only seventeen times since 1791. Dissentious clauses in the charter garmented the president and the congress with supreme authority in the state. The two branches, independently elected by universal suffrage, had overlapping powers. The Supreme Soviet could strike down a presidential veto by simple majority, and two-thirds of the members of congress could impeach the president if they found he had violated his oath of office. President Yeltsin was in charge of the armed forces but had no right to resolve a deadlock by ending a session of parliament and forcing new elections.42
Deadlock was what Yeltsin’s Russia had as it entered the reform era. Crosscurrents between organizational and policy issues polarized politics as badly as they had in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi and many high bureaucrats sided with the foes of Yeltsin in parliament, and the congress was not monolithic, but majority sentiments in the two branches were ever more discrepant. Attempts to craft a post-communist constitution were all for naught, as each camp sought one biased in its favor. On reform issues, the parliamentarists were more statist and the presidentialists much more pro-market. The peculiar two-tier legislature—the RSFSR was the only union republic to mimic the USSR in this regard—added another element. The sessions of the thronging congress, televised live and numbered like unique events, were circus-like. Both the congress and the smaller Supreme Soviet lacked a stable majority, with remnants of the Democratic Russia bloc and the regrouped communist faction having to compete for the affections of small-fry groups.
An enmity between Yeltsin and Ruslan Khasbulatov, who had replaced him as legislative chairman in October 1991, further aggravated the situation. Khasbulatov had more strength on the back benches than the legal scholar Sergei Shakhrai, Yeltsin’s first choice for the position. A pipe-smoking professor of international economics from a Moscow institute, Khasbulatov had been elected to represent Groznyi, the Chechen capital. Like Rutskoi, an air-regiment commander in Afghanistan until 1988, Khasbulatov was one of those political figures who had caromed out of obscurity during the transition. Yeltsin made no secret of his view that Khasbulatov and Rutskoi should defer to his lead on policy. He did not ask the counsel of either on the Belovezh’e negotiations, which they heard about from others.43 But the parliament was a world unto itself in the early 1990s, and showboating and inconsistent voting by the lawmakers provided the chairman “with the ability to manipulate the agenda for his own purposes.”44 He and his presidium emitted hundreds of administrative edicts and formed a guard squad. At the “sixth congress” that refused to confirm Gaidar as prime minister in December 1992, Yeltsin raged that they were thinking not about society or reform but “only about how to dictate their will.”45 After the session, Yeltsin took Khasbulatov off his telephone hotline and had him cut off from information about the president’s schedule; not to be outdone, Khasbulatov sent Yeltsin barbed letters and made gratuitous references to his drinking.
Gazing back at it all a decade later, Khasbulatov told me Yeltsin “backed himself and me into a corner” and that, as the junior man (he was born in 1942), he always expected to make the most concessions in any settlement.46 Yeltsin did go for total victory in September–October 1993; until then, he was ready to compromise. In December 1992 he proposed a national referendum for January, to ask the population whether they trusted him or the congress and soviet to solve the political crisis. The deputies said no, and the next day Yeltsin, with egg on his face, withdrew the idea.
President and speaker were at each other’s throats for the next four months. Khasbulatov drew up plans to send a congress-drafted constitution to a referendum; he threw them over in March. On March 20, determined to play his trump card, public opinion, Yeltsin divulged that he was instituting an undefined “special rule” (osobyi poryadok upravleniya) until a referendum on president versus parliament on April 25. Rutskoi balked at countersigning the decree and wrote an open letter to Yeltsin against it. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin desisted from comment until Yeltsin “literally compelled him to declare support,”47 and the justice minister, Nikolai Fëdorov, resigned.
The congress’s riposte was to deliberate impeachment, which had been provided for in the constitutional amendments instituting the presidency in 1991. Meeting Yeltsin, Chernomyrdin, and Valerii Zor’kin, chairman of the Constitutional Court, in the Kremlin on March 24, Khasbulatov gave Yeltsin his conditions for gagging the process: a coalitional government of national accord, restrictions on presidential decrees, recall of Yeltsin’s representatives in the provinces, and criminal prosecution of the drafters of the March 20 order. Yeltsin, seeing acceptance as tantamount to straw-man status, rebuffed them.48 Zor’kin backed Khasbulatov.
Hours before the congressional vote, on the evening of March 28, Yeltsin came before a floodlit rally on the apron of land connecting St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Moskva River. His speech drew on principles and personalities, formulating the latter in peppery, testing mode:
It’s been a grueling time since June 12, 1991, grueling in every respect—for you, for the people of Russia, for the president. We have gone onto a completely different road. We have thrown off the yoke of totalitarianism. We have thrown off the yoke of communism. We have taken the path of a civilized country, a civilized democracy. For those whose toes we have stepped on, this is inconvenient.
The national-democrats [Russian ultranationalists] and the has-beens [communists]… are going all out in order somehow to destroy Yeltsin—if not to destroy him physically, then to remove him. (Cries from the audience: “We will not allow this!” “Yeltsin, Yeltsin, Yeltsin!”)
I… am taken by the simple statement that Varennikov [Valentin Varennikov, the hard-line general in August 1991] has made from Matrosskaya Tishina [prison]: “The only person Gorbachev couldn’t handle was Yeltsin.”
You know what our congress is like. (Someone cries out, “We know!” A few shouts are heard.)… It is not for these six hundred [deputies] to decide Russia’s fortunes. I will not yield to them, I will only yield to the people’s will. (Cries from the audience, applause. A wave of “Yeltsin, Yeltsin, Yeltsin!”)49
The voting in the congress was done by hand, anonymously. Yeltsin later said it was low ebb for his eight years as president. “Impeachment was my worst moment. I really suffered through it… I sat and waited through it… I sat and waited for the votes to be counted.”50 Six hundred and seventeen disaffected deputies voted for the motion, seventy-two short of the 689 needed for the prescribed two-thirds majority. Had it passed, Rutskoi, in the legislators’ interpretation, would have taken over as president, in which case the face-off that took place in September would have come six months earlier. According to Aleksandr Korzhakov, the security chiefs had a plan, approved by the president on March 23, to read out a decree dissolving the parliament and to smoke the deputies out by placing canisters of tear gas on the balconies of the hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace.51