The dénouement was swift and brutal. Thirteen hundred servicemen flooded inside Moscow’s in-city ring road on Monday, October 4. Armored cars scrunched through the barricades in front of the White House at about seven A.M. At 10:00, four T-80 tanks on a bridge over the Moskva broke into a cannonade. “With a thunderous roar that echoed heavily through the nearby streets, the tanks opened fire on the upper floors…. Chunks of the marble façade shattered and flew into the air, and the huge clock in the center of the White House froze with its hands at 10:03. Windows were blown out of their frames, and thousands of sheets of paper, flung out of the building, spun slowly in the air like a flock of birds hovering in the sunshine.”64 Yeltsin had warned Khasbulatov to vacate and get to safety before the shooting started. Khasbulatov was not in his tenth-story office when it was one of the first to be slammed by a round. Commandos stormed the structure, emptied it and other occupied buildings, and stamped out the street mayhem.
The footage of tanks lobbing 125-mm. shells over the spot where Yeltsin had peacefully defied the putschists in 1991—upright on a T-72 from the very same Taman Division—and of Khasbulatov and Rutskoi being bused off to Lefortovo prison, was a graphic contrast to happier days. During the victory gathering, Yeltsin was handed Khasbulatov’s tobacco pipe; he examined it and dashed it on the floor.65 The official death toll was 187, none of them elected deputies, and 437 wounded; about three-quarters of the deaths were in and near the White House and about one-quarter at Ostankino.66 Several anti-government organizations were banned, thirteen communist and rabidly nationalist newspapers were closed down, and editors were told to present articles to censors. After repair of the blast and flame damage by a Turkish contractor, the White House was to go to the Russian government for office space.
The pride and joy of the Yeltsin scheme was the long-awaited post-Soviet constitution to tie the state together and encode the norms of representative government, separation of powers, primacy of the president, and federalism. Its inculcation through even partially democratic means ought to be counted as an achievement, as should the normalization of political life it made possible.
The tactic of having the newly elected Federal Assembly rule on the constitution was as much of a gamble as any Yeltsin made as president, for no one could be sure that it would go over as legitimate, that the assembly would adopt a satisfactory constitution, or that it would approve any constitution—if not, he would have lopped off the limb on which they all rested. After the shootout in Moscow, he reconsidered. He decreed on October 15 that the constitution would go to a plebiscite on election day.67 His Constitutional Conference resumed its labors, and on November 8 Yeltsin approved a draft that largely parroted earlier renderings. Putting it before the electorate was another roll of the dice: What would occur if voters turned thumbs down? For stability’s sake, Yeltsin made one more adjustment. On November 6 he rescinded a slapdash pledge he made in September to advance the date of the next presidential election by two years, from the summer of 1996 to the summer of 1994. Even were constitutional ratification and the parliamentary election to come a cropper, he would have a leg to stand on.68
The 137-article draft was inserted in national and regional newspapers and affixed in public places. Yeltsin’s pitch to the people was binary. It was either him and his constitution or perdition. He promised Russians both democracy and an individuated authority consistent with the needs of reform, with their traditions, and, he said overweeningly in an interview in Izvestiya, with their limitations:
I will not deny that the powers of the president in the draft really are significant. But what else would you want to see? [This is] a country habituated to tsars and chieftains; a country where clear-cut group interests have not developed, where the bearers of them have not been defined, and where normal parties are only beginning to be born; a country where discipline is not great and legal nihilism runs riot. In such a country, do you want to bet only or mostly on a parliament? If you did, within a half-year, if not sooner, people would demand a dictator. I can assure you that such a dictator would be found, and possibly from within that very same parliament….
This is not about Yeltsin but about people being knowledgeable of the need to have an official from whom they can make demands…. The president of Russia [in the new constitution] has just as many powers as he needs to carry out his role in reforming the country.69
On December 12 the constitutional blueprint was approved by a 58 percent majority. A Constitutional Conference delegate had foreseen that citizens in the plebiscite “will vote for or against the president, and that will be it.”70 This at root is what they did. Fewer than half of the “yes” voters had read the document. More than to constitutional issues, narrowly conceived, most responded to Yeltsin, his market economy, and their like or dislike of the Soviet regime.71 The constitution went into effect on December 25, two years after the winding down of the Soviet state.
Yeltsin, therefore, got his legal cornerstone, and, imperfectly and inelegantly, the crisis of the state in its white-hot form was allayed.72 Western specialists, comparing Russia to other post-communist countries, commonly characterize the constitution of 1993 as “superpresidential.” Gennadii Zyuganov, the leader of the reborn communists, liked to say it gave the president more powers than the tsar, the Egyptian pharaoh, and a sheikh of Araby put together. A correspondent for the pro-presidential Izvestiya asked Yeltsin in November 1993 if he were not laying claim to “almost imperial” powers. An emperor, he replied, would have no need of a constitution, and a tyrant like Stalin would have a merely decorative one. He, Yeltsin, could act only within the law, he was limited to two terms (his second term would be four years, a year less than the first), and parliament could reverse his veto or impeach him.73
It was equally true that Yeltsin got most of what he had wished for. Of the ministers in the government, only the prime minister was to be confirmed in office by the Duma. As head of state, the president was going to function as guarantor of the constitutional order, lay down “guidelines” for domestic and foreign policy, and have the power to dissolve the Duma for cause.74 Two-thirds majorities in both houses of parliament were needed to override a presidential veto, and the president was not compelled to give a reason for using the veto power.75 Article 90, on the power to issue binding decrees at will, was the benchmark for Yeltsin. In the final draft, he stroked out the caveat that presidential decrees and directives be only “in execution of the powers conferred on him by the constitution of the Russian Federation and by federal laws.”76 The constitution was echoed in the insignia of state—in the Presidential Regiment and Presidential Orchestra (instituted as the Kremlin Regiment and Kremlin Orchestra by Stalin in the 1930s), the chain of office and Presidential Standard, the two presidential yachts, the new Kremlin chinaware (emblazoned with the double-headed eagle in place of the Soviet coat of arms), and the grandiloquent state protocol written up by aide Vladimir Shevchenko, who was one of the few Gorbachev associates Yeltsin kept on.77