Conor O'Clery - Moscow, December 25, 1991

Yeltsin resists the domestic clamor to restore subsidies and fix prices, but in December 1992 he is obliged to dismiss Gaidar from his government and replace him with Viktor Chernomyrdin, a politician more sympathetic to the plight of state industry, though Chernomyrdin soon finds that Gaidar’s reforms have gone too far for the reintroduction of price controls on food items. In a few months Gaidar has managed to smash the state planning system and establish a market economy in a country where civil society hardly existed and initiative had been crushed for the best part of a century.

The volatile Russian president becomes so depressed at the setbacks that he contemplates suicide. On December 9, 1992, he locks himself inside the overheated bathhouse at Barvikha-4 and is only saved from suffocation by Korzhakov, who breaks down the door and pulls him out. On another occasion in his Kremlin office, he produces a pistol given him by his security minister, Viktor Barannikov—before Yeltsin sacked him for corruption—and threatens to shoot himself. Aides persuade him not to be foolish. He doesn’t pull the trigger. The weapon, however, is not lethal: Korzhakov has taken the precaution of boiling the bullets in water to make them harmless. [322] 15 Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin, 245-246.

In the Supreme Soviet the Russian president’s enemies proliferate, and the communists make up lost ground. Nevertheless, a motion to impeach Yeltsin fails by a narrow margin. “This means that the Russian people do not after all want to go back to the bright communist future,” observes Gaidar. But the parliament continues to pass antireform measures and mobilize against Yeltsin. It decks itself out in red flags and anarchist and fascist banners and stockpiles arms. It elects Rutskoy as provisional Russian president, and he names a new government. Russia once again faces a showdown between the White House and the Kremlin. The crisis comes to a head on September 21, 1993, when Yeltsin issues a decree dissolving the parliament. Armed White House “defenders,” many of them neo-Stalinists and protofascists, begin roaming the streets to show their defiance of the order, some in Cossack high hats and belts. In the following days they attack the television station and other key buildings in the city. On October 4 pro-Yeltsin army units fire several shells into the upper floors of the barricaded White House, forcing the communists and nationalists to surrender. The brief civil war results in the deaths of more than 150 people. The outcome is a more authoritarian style of presidential government.

Gorbachev blames Yeltsin for the crisis and calls the storming of the White House an act of madness. “The army was ordered to shoot at the people! It was unforgivable!” He charges Yeltsin with laying the groundwork for an absolute monarchy under the guise of a presidential republic.

The Russian constitution is changed in a referendum on December 12, 1993, giving stronger powers to the president. A new and weaker parliament, the Duma, is elected. One of its first acts is to grant an amnesty to the leaders of the White House revolt of October 1993, which Yeltsin endorses for the sake of peace.

The plotters of the August 1991 coup are released from prison without charges, but General Valentin Varennikov insists on standing trial. The case is heard in Moscow in 1994. Gorbachev is called as a witness and gives vent to his feelings about amnesties for coup plotters. “If we react to such crimes as nothing more than a farce, we would have one coup after another,” he declares. “We have already lived through the conspiracy of Belovezh Forest, which finished off the USSR by exploiting the consequences of the August coup. Then we had to live through the bloody events of 3–4 October 1993, when before our very eyes parliament was fired on…. If our future is to be determined by new coup plotters, we will never become a country in which everyone can feel a citizen.”

Varennikov walks free after all charges are dropped and claims that his acquittal is proof of Mikhail Gorbachev’s guilt. In 2008, a year before he dies, the former general presents the case in favor of Stalin in a popular nationwide television project seeking to identify Russia’s greatest historical figures. Stalin wins third place behind Grand Prince Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod and prerevolutionary prime minister Pyotr Stolypin. Neither Yeltsin nor Gorbachev figure in the final twelve.

In December 1994 President Yeltsin, whose outrage at the bloodshed in the Baltics in 1991 helped change Russian history, authorizes a full-scale and brutal invasion of the Russian republic of Chechnya to end its independence from Moscow. Russian forces fight an incompetent and savage war with Chechen guerrillas that destroys the capital of Grozny and results in the deaths of between 30,000 and 100,000 civilians. General Grachev, who ordered the storming of Grozny, reputedly when dead drunk, is sacked by Yeltsin when Russia is defeated, and a peace treaty is concluded in August 1996.

Yeltsin runs for reelection as president of Russia in 1996, amid widespread expectations that he will lose because of a collapse in his popularity and his poor health. He almost puts the election off because of a vote in the Duma on March 15, 1996, to renounce the decision of the Russian Supreme Soviet of December 12, 1991, approving the Belovezh Agreement—which raises questions about the legitimacy of the new Russia. His daughter Tanya helps talk him out of shutting down the Duma and delaying the election for two years, which could provoke a civil war.

His main opponent is Gennady Zyuganov, the candidate of the Russian Communist Party. Zyuganov campaigns to revive the socialist motherland, lumping Yeltsin and Gorbachev together with a world oligarchy as the destroyers of Russia. Convinced that “the country needs Gorbachev,” the former Soviet leader ignores the sage advice of his loyalists and runs as head of the fledgling Social Democratic Party.

The sixty-five-year-old Yeltsin stops drinking, loses weight, and manages to summon up one more great burst of energy to campaign for reelection. American and European leaders troop to Moscow to boost their free-market champion. Yeltsin’s campaign is helped by financial donations from the oligarchs, a timely announcement of a $10 billion loan from the IMF, the anticommunist bias of the television networks, and television advertisements produced with the expert advice of the American PR firm of Ogilvy & Mather. The Russian president wins reelection by 54 percent to Zyuganov’s 40 percent.

Gorbachev is humiliated by his performance in the election. With one section of the population accusing him of betraying socialism in the name of reform, and the other of sabotaging reforms to defend socialism, Gorbachev receives a mere half of 1 percent of the vote. In a further snub, Yeltsin removes his name from the guest list for his inauguration.

In his second term, Yeltsin’s Kremlin court becomes a hive of intrigue. It is a period of political and economic chaos during which Russia’s natural resources are being sold off to favored insiders at fire-sale prices. Yeltsin grows ever more irascible, yields power arbitrarily, and treats his staff abominably. Aides assume that as head of his security, Alexander Korzhakov is monitoring their phone calls, and they communicate with each other only in scribbled notes. Always suspicious of overfamiliarity, Yeltsin drops his preindependence collaborators one by one. He lets Gennady Burbulis go because his grey cardinal is annoyingly appearing every day “in my office, at meetings and receptions, at the dacha, in the steam bath.” Korzhakov survives for five years but is fired after a scandal over election funding. He writes an unflattering book, Boris Yeltsins: From Dawn to Dusk, which angers Yeltsin so much they never speak again.