But the parliamentary election of 1993 did not break Yeltsin’s way. On October 18 martial law in the capital and most restrictions on political activity were lifted. While the ban held on three extremist parties and twenty-one persons, Zyuganov’s KPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) was reinstated and registered. Half of the Duma’s seats were to be filled by national lists and half in territorial districts. Yeltsin stoutly maintained, and with reason, that the ambit of choice in the election was without precedent. “The spectrum of political positions taken by the participants [in the campaign] is uncommonly wide,” he said to the Council of Ministers on November 2. “I don’t think there has been a thing like it here since the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1917,” before that democratic body’s suppression by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.78 Most forecasts were of a victory for the Russia’s Choice movement, the torch carrier for Yeltsin chaired by Yegor Gaidar; also on its slate were Anatolii Chubais and Sergei Filatov, who had replaced Yurii Petrov as head of the executive office of the president. There were predictions that it would get 50 or even 65 percent of the popular vote. But “the party of power” (partiya vlasti), as it was known, never got a Yeltsin endorsement and did not prevent other reformist politicians, including cabinet members, from entering the contest under different banners. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin admonished his ministers to campaign only “outside of working hours.”79 On December 12 the Russia’s Choice list ran a dispiriting second in the national poll, with 16 percent of the votes, and came in with sixty-five deputies out of 450. Many reformist votes were diverted to the smaller parties headed by Grigorii Yavlinskii, Sergei Shakhrai, and Anatolii Sobchak of St. Petersburg. The party-list vote was won by the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia of the flamboyant Vladimir Zhirinovskii, whose message was one of chauvinism and inchoate protest; the LDPR took 23 percent of the ballots cast and finished with sixty-four deputies. The neocommunist KPRF was third, with 12 percent of the national vote and fortyone seats, and five lesser parties were also seated. Ivan Rybkin of the Agrarian Party, a moderate leftist offshoot of the KPRF, was made speaker of the Duma in January.
The constitution did not give Yeltsin the dictatorial “throne of bayonets” he had charged the GKChP with wanting to construct in 1991. Aleksei Kazannik, the Siberian lawyer who in 1989 gave up his seat in the USSR Supreme Soviet to Yeltsin, accepted appointment as procurator general of Russia on October 3, 1993, promised by the president that he could go ahead with investigations with “a maximum of legality” and “a maximum of humanitarianism.”80 Yeltsin then demanded that he press murder and complicity charges against some of the jailed perpetrators, which Kazannik would not do, saying the evidence of homicidal intent was lacking and the worst they could be indicted for was “organizing mass disorder.” Kazannik also told Yeltsin that he was considering prosecution of executive-branch officials for failing to negotiate in good faith with the opposition, and he was to say later that he might have indicted Defense Minister Grachëv and Interior Minister Viktor Yerin.81 One of the Duma’s first legislative acts, on February 23, 1994, was to pass, by 252 votes to sixty-seven, a bill of amnesty for Rutskoi, Khasbulatov, and the Supreme Soviet leaders, and some supporters, sixteen people in all. Yeltsin, who fervently dissented from the motion, ordered Kazannik not to comply. Kazannik, finding the Duma’s decision profligate but constitutional (under Article 103), informed Yeltsin he would carry out the decision and then leave office. “Don’t dare do it,” Yeltsin threw back at him.82 Kazannik did dare. On February 26 the prisoners were freed and Kazannik resigned. Clenching his teeth, Yeltsin did not pursue the matter further.
All members of the 1990–93 Supreme Soviet were permitted to keep the housing that had been assigned them. Khasbulatov, for example, retained the oversize apartment on Shchusev Street in central Moscow once occupied by Brezhnev and reverted to his professorship at the Plekhanov Economics Institute.83 Rutskoi organized a new political party called Derzhava, or Great Power. Even Viktor Barannikov, the former security minister who deserted to the opposition, was treated with kid gloves.84 The February 23 law amnestied the organizers of the 1991 coup attempt, and not only Yeltsin’s opponents from 1993. They had gone to trial in April 1993, but the proceedings had been delayed and no judgment yet given. Only General Varennikov, the most radical of the GKChP conspirators, who refused to accept the amnesty, was not released. He stood trial and was acquitted by the military panel of the Russian Supreme Court on August 11, 1994. Varennikov was to be elected to the Duma in 1995, as a communist, and to chair its committee on veterans’ affairs. Other political enemies of Yeltsin from bygone days, such as Yegor Ligachëv, also sat in the Dumas formed in 1993 and 1995.85
Parliament, limited in the oversight function, still had the power of the purse, and that gave it bargaining chips with relation to the budget and to fiscal and macroeconomic policy. And it had the power to legislate, which it soon did with far greater productivity than analyses treating it as a fig leaf would imply. It adopted only six laws in 1994; in 1995, despite the continued lack of a stable majority, it adopted thirty-seven; in the first half of 1996, after another parliamentary election, it adopted eight.86 Yeltsin still had to resort freely to the decree power, though somewhat less frequently than before the constitutional reform. In 1992 and 1993, he had published an average of twenty-four rule-making decrees per month. They were to average seventeen per month in 1994 and twenty per month in 1995.87
Constitutional gridlock in 1993 gave Yeltsin both the necessity and the chance to rejig relations with the subunits of the federation. As before, the ethnic enclaves were the nub of the problem. In the April referendum, the governments of two of the twenty-one republics, Chechnya and Tatarstan, refused to participate, and in twelve republics confidence in the president was lower than 50 percent. (In the sixty-eight non-republics, Yeltsin stacked up majority support in fifty-four.) Yeltsin left no stone unturned in trying to secure provincial support. On August 12–14 he met in conclave in Petrozavodsk, Kareliya, with the heads of the republics and representatives of eight interregional associations, treating them to a full-day sail in a presidential yacht on Lake Onega. Yeltsin’s proposal to co-opt all of the regional leaders into his Federation Council irked republic leaders who preferred special treatment.
In many places, Decree No. 1400 met with a glacial reception. Several dozen provincial legislatures, among them those in twelve of the nineteen republics with functioning assemblies, passed motions of solidarity with Khasbulatov and Rutskoi. Yeltsin retaliated on October 9 and 12 by disbanding all of the non-republic soviets, ordering the election of more compact assemblies between December 1993 and June 1994, and advising the republics to do the same. The governors and republic presidents were less incautious than the legislators. Fifteen of them indicated hesitancy about Decree No. 1400. Four governors opposed it fervidly, and Yeltsin gave them the axe. A fifth case was Sverdlovsk oblast’s Eduard Rossel, who did not support Khasbulatov but proclaimed his Urals Republic on November 1. Yeltsin abolished the republic on November 9 and dismissed Rossel on November 10. Of the presidents of the existing ethnic republics, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov of Kalmykiya, in the North Caucasus, joined the defenders of the blockaded White House and issued anti-Yeltsin declarations. Once the parliamentarist forces had been subdued, Ilyumzhinov “capitulated and made the rather remarkable proposal to eliminate Kalmykiya’s status as a… republic… [and] abolish its constitution.” Yeltsin allowed him to stay in his post, only much more compliant with Moscow than before.88