The constitutional plebiscite on December 12 seemed at first to portend more fireworks. Majorities went against the presidential draft in eight republics and ten other regions. The 1993 conjuncture, however, was a bottoming out for Yeltsin and the federal administration. The masterstroke for recovery was his consolidation of power at the center, which showed regional leaders, to put it crudely, who was king of the mountain. On the local scene, aping Moscow, the republic presidents emerged more potent than their legislatures. The muting of political competition made them better able to withstand nationalist pressures, and these pressures simmered down. “Yeltsin’s centralization of power altered Russia’s entire institutional environment, shifting power from republican parliaments to executives and eliminating the massive central state weakness that had made possible republican challenges to federal sovereignty in the early 1990s.”89 There was similar momentum in the non-republics. Yeltsin felt strong enough in November 1993 to disclaim the line in the federative treaty of 1992 that would have given the ethnic reserves half of the seats in the upper house. The new Federation Council gave all territories two places apiece. Yeltsin further lessened the inequality between the republics and the non-republics by consenting to gubernatorial elections in selected oblasts and making them universal practice in December 1995. After two years in which Federation Council members were elected, it was agreed at the end of 1995 that each province’s two seats would be assigned ex officio to its head executive and legislator, bringing the regional leaders into the central political establishment.90
The innovation in relations between center and periphery was Yeltsin’s espousal of custom-built power-sharing “treaties” with many of the provinces. This was not a new concept: He had lofted it on the same 1990 sortie to Tatarstan when he urged it to take all the sovereignty it needed.91 The first bilateral treaty was struck, appropriately, with Mintimer Shaimiyev of Tatarstan on February 15, 1994. Yeltsin traveled to the republic in May. He made appearances at the spruced-up Kazan kremlin, the Mardzhani mosque, an Orthodox church, several factories and farms, a children’s hospital, and a press conference. “They beat me up and denigrated me for the treaty with Tatarstan,” he said, standing beside Shaimiyev, “but nonetheless I have been proven right…. Tatarstan has taken as many powers under the treaty as it can. The rest that remain with the federal government are enough to satisfy us.”92
Neighboring Bashkortostan and Kabardino-Balkariya in the North Caucasus came to understandings with Moscow later in 1994, four republics did in 1995, two in 1996, and, after Yeltsin’s second inauguration, one in 1997 and one in 1998. In 1995 Yeltsin was to extend the practice to nonethnic provinces, with Viktor Chernomyrdin’s native Orenburg and Yeltsin’s Sverdlovsk first. Eventually forty-seven of eighty-nine federal subunits were to have their treaties. The sweeteners were mostly economic—provisions allowing signatories to hold some federal taxes collected locally, for instance, or giving them a fixed share of revenues from sale of oil and other natural resources—but some ancillary agreements touched on environmental issues, conscription, and linguistic policy. Yeltsin held the signings in the gilded and chandeliered St. George’s Hall, the most resplendent in the Grand Kremlin Palace: It measures 13,500 square feet, and has a fifty-seven-foot-high ceiling. It did not go unnoticed that the statues on the eighteen monumental pylons, by the nineteenth-century sculptor Ivan Vitali, stood for regions ingested by the Russian state from the 1400s to the 1800s. It was the room Gorbachev had reserved for the signing ceremony for the USSR union treaty in August 1991.
The Russian “parade of treaties” was a consensual and eminently defensible means of keeping the federation together. Through them, Yeltsin traded concessions to particularistic interests for recommitment to the federation and to his policies. The first several were the most generous. Beginning with Sakha in June 1995, “style and content shifts from a recognition of distinctiveness to agreement to conformity with established rules and jurisdictions.”93 Aspects of the agreements breached the 1993 constitution and federal statutes. Moscow winked at these and other constitutional transgressions, notably by the republics—a policy that was to be reversed in the next decade.94
Yeltsin also took a hands-off stance toward regional development, enjoining local leaders to solve their problems self-reliantly with minimal tutorship from Moscow: “We have said to the Russian republics, territories, and oblasts, Moscow is not going to give you commands anymore. Your fate is in your hands.”95 He acknowledged that the provinces’ revenues would swell in relation to central revenues (they went from 41 percent of the Russian total in 1990 to 62 percent in 1998) and that interregional inequalities unacceptable under Soviet rule would emerge. The squeaky wheel was oiled, in that regions that voted against Yeltsin and his allies or that were hard hit by strikes and social unrest were given financial transfers and tax breaks.96 The logic again was that of tacit reciprocity of support:
In exchange for loyalty or even for neutrality, Boris Yeltsin often gave the governors a free hand, not hindering those who carried out reforms, others who imitated them, or a third group who, as the adage went, wanted “to uphold the gains of socialism in one oblast” [a joking reference to Stalin’s catchword of “Socialism in One Country”]. Not infrequently in the arguments of the federal government with the regions, the president took the part of the latter and would come out as the lobbyist of several of them, supporting their requests for supplementary budget allocations for this or that purpose—which badly nettled the reformers in the cabinet. Most often Yeltsin preferred to distance himself from these questions, considering that life itself would show who was right. Mind you, he took an understanding attitude when the government used unorthodox methods of influencing the regions, such as reallocation of financial resources. He would look at such methods in the context of preserving the balance. Knowing from his own experience how heavy was the burden of leaders on the spot, he in any case saw to it that some limit in the relations between the center and the regional leaders was not crossed.97
Immanent in the principle that regional leaders would not serve anymore at Yeltsin’s pleasure was sufferance of incorrigible communists and of politicians with whom he had been at loggerheads, such as Eduard Rossel (returned to power by the Sverdlovsk electorate in August 1995) and, more dramatically, Aleksandr Rutskoi (elected governor in Kursk in October 1996). He was willing to let bygones be bygones: “I forget such things. It is better for the health.”98 With the more obliging provincial barons, Yeltsin cultivated human ties. He kept in contact with officials he had known through the nomenklatura or in the USSR and RSFSR parliaments, and went on a charm offensive with others. Anatolii Korabel’shchikov, a trusted aide out of the CPSU apparatus, was his contact man for the regions and had unrestricted entrée to him on his provincial tours. Yeltsin invited groups of fifteen to twenty governors to his ABTs compound on Varga Street in southwest Moscow (taken from the KGB in 1991) for discussion and a dinner. A select few were fêted in the Kremlin or at Zavidovo and were telephoned to consult on decrees and political trends. The pleiad of regional leaders with whom the president had a confidential relationship took in Dmitrii Ayatskov (of Saratov), Vladimir Chub (Rostov), Nikolai Fëdorov (Chuvashiyia), Anatolii Guvzhin (Astrakhan), Viktor Ishayev (Khabarovsk), Nikolai Merkushkin (Mordoviya), Boris Nemtsov (Nizhnii Novgorod), Mikhail Prusak (Novgorod), Mintimer Shaimiyev (Tatarstan), Anatolii Sobchak (St. Petersburg), Yegor Stroyev (Orël), and Konstantin Titov (Samara).99 With one of the youngest and the brightest of them, Nemtsov—born in 1959, trained as a nuclear physicist, and the leader of an environmental protest movement before Yeltsin appointed him governor in 1991—Yeltsin developed a father-son relationship. To a local audience in August 1994, Yeltsin said he could see Nemtsov as the worthiest successor to himself as president. The central media picked up the statement.100