After the vote, Yeltsin and Khasbulatov agreed that the decree on special rule would be ditched and a four-point referendum to clear the air held on April 25. The four questions would be about (1) trust in Yeltsin, (2) approval of his social and economic policies, and early elections for (3) president and (4) the parliament. Yeltsin campaigned hard for yes votes on questions one, two, and four and a no vote on question three, trying as before to brand Khasbulatov and the congress as ultraconservative, which not all of them were. Khasbulatov struck back by calling Yeltsin a plaything for shadowy power brokers, as Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra had once been for the mystic Grigorii Rasputin. Yeltsin’s threats to take decisive action, he said, amounted to “the strong gesture of a weak man” who was “tragically illequipped” for his office. “This person degenerated before my very eyes. He stopped being a leader and converted himself into a kind of puppet of those who have been called a ‘collective Rasputin’… adventurers… ignoramuses.” Yeltsin’s project was to build a “semicolonial regime” in which a “wild, criminal, and semifeudal” capitalism would be in bondage to foreign interests.52
When the ballots were tallied on April 25, Yeltsin had prevailed. Fiftynine percent of Russians expressed trust in him, 53 percent approved of his reforms, those wanting an early presidential election were just short of 50 percent, and 67 percent approved of an early parliamentary election. The results were nonbinding, but the pattern, and the surprising vote on the reform course, in particular, was a moral victory.53
Khasbulatov, having said earlier that the initiators of a referendum should resign if they lost out, stayed on. Yeltsin did not press the point and moved at a leisurely general pace, telling Richard Nixon in late April that Khasbulatov and Rutskoi were “midgets” he need not bother with.54 In May he appointed a 762-member Constitutional Conference to circumvent the constitutional committee under the Supreme Soviet. Yeltsin addressed the conference on June 5, harkening to the tradition of “free Novgorod,” whence the Yeltsins had moved to the Urals centuries before, and of Peter the Great and Alexander II. Khasbulatov was drowned out by clangor from the floor and had to recite his remarks from a stairway outside the meeting hall. The conference approved a draft on July 12, though without agreement on the federal system. Khasbulatov and the Supreme Soviet quashed a spate of presidential decrees, and Yeltsin vetoed parliamentary bills. Clashes between them burgeoned on privatization, social policy, and foreign relations. “It was widely assumed in Moscow… that another attempt to impeach Yeltsin was imminent and would be launched at the end of September or the beginning of October at the latest.”55
Yeltsin decided in late summer to lower the boom. Huddling with advisers on August 10, he said that the stalemate on the constitution and on future elections “is pushing us toward the use of force.”56 There was a broad hint on August 31: He flew by helicopter to the army’s two armored formations in the Moscow area (the Taman Division and the Kantemirov Tank Division) and to the 106th Airborne Division stationed in Tula, where he rakishly donned a paratrooper’s beret. At the Taman garrison, he attended a tank exercise and dined in an officers’ mess with Defense Minister Pavel Grachëv; the men drank to his health and gave him a soldierly “Hurrah!” The point was not to check up on the military’s loyalty, in which he had complete faith, but to flaunt it before the press and his opponents.57 In the early days of September, Yeltsin “suspended” Vice President Rutskoi and his Kremlin pass. He also took away Justice Zor’kin’s bodyguards and transportation. Zor’kin had been testing the waters for a presidential campaign of his own, on the speculation that Yeltsin would step down as part of a constitutional pact. One of his supporters was Vladimir Lukin, the Russian ambassador to Washington, who was promised the position of foreign minister in a Zor’kin government and who arranged a visit by him to the United States in late summer.58 Around September 9 Yeltsin gave his aides Viktor Ilyushin and Yurii Baturin some scrabbled notes and told them to prepare a presidential edict. Decree No. 1400 was promulgated on Tuesday, September 21, at eight P.M. Yeltsin shared it with the nation in a telecast. Before recording it, he found some gallows humor in proposing that the Kremlin staff pose with him for a good-bye photograph, since, if he were to fail, “We will sit together [in prison].”59
As he did at Belovezh’e Forest, Yeltsin had sliced through a Gordian knot with a freewheeling decision of debatable legality. The unilateralism and extraconstitutionality of his fiat caused him some grief. As he wrote a year later, “Here I was, the first popularly elected president, violating the law—bad law… yet law all the same.”60 But Decree No. 1400 stood. Its main articles laid to rest the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet and ordered the election on December 12 of a bicameral Federal Assembly comprising a State Duma (the name Russia’s first parliament bore from 1905 to 1917), to represent individuals, and a Federation Council as the upper house, to represent the provinces. The first assembly would sit for a two-year term, and its first item of business would be to adopt a new constitution.
Yeltsin and Khasbulatov had baited and blustered since the winter of 1992–93, and both lowballed the danger of the other party following through. Yeltsin had no detailed battle plan, sure that “political methods” and threats would get the parliamentarians to relent; and Khasbulatov said that “until the last minute, I did not believe he [Yeltsin] would take such a step” (the abolition decree).61 When the step was upon them, Khasbulatov and the deputies made a last stand. In a midnight session at the White House, the Supreme Soviet passed a resolution to remove Yeltsin from the presidency, which the congress had not done in March. Minutes later, Rutskoi was sworn in. That same night he began appointing ministers of defense, the interior, and security to a provisional government. The congress met on September 23 and passed a skein of measures against Yeltsin and his government, which Khasbulatov now called a “fascist dictatorship” (Rutskoi dubbed Yeltsin Russia’s Führer). It also approved capital punishment for failure to carry out the orders of the new government and president.
Frenetic attempts by Zor’kin and Patriarch Aleksii to mediate foundered over the next ten days. At the White House, several hundred hard-line deputies dug in with radical nationalists, racists, and diehard communists. On Sunday, October 3, Yeltsin went briefly to the Kremlin, and on the ride in, “for the first time in my life the thought drilled into my head—had I done the right thing, had there been any other option?”62 That day, after he returned to Barvikha-4, skirmishes on the streets spun out of control. Yeltsin decreed martial law in Moscow and rushed to the Kremlin as armed fighters, stirred up by Rutskoi, went at the mayor’s office and the Ostankino television tower with Molotov cocktails, grenades, and Kalashnikovs. National television screens went blank for several hours. In the black of night, Yeltsin, exasperated that army troops had not penetrated mid-Moscow, as the Defense Ministry said they would, drove to the Russian Pentagon on Arbat Square and, with Viktor Chernomyrdin at his elbow, demanded action by first light. The generals skulked and explained that some of their men had been busy with the fall harvest, leading him to conclude that his military “was being pulled into pieces, and everyone was yanking on his part.” A lawful government hung by a thread, “but the army could not defend it: some soldiers were picking potatoes and others did not feel like fighting.” Minister Grachëv, who had been hopeful that police forces could manage the disturbances, said he would comply, on the condition that he be given written orders from the commander-in-chief—the kind of explicit authorization Mikhail Gorbachev never brought himself to give in his hour of need. Yeltsin was galled by the request but went back to the Kremlin, signed the order, and sent it to Grachëv by courier. It made all the difference to the officers, who proceeded to discharge their duty.63