The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

As we moved forward, more and more obstacles presented themselves. Our progress felt strange. It did not resemble climbing a mountain: however steep and dangerous it may be, the end result depends only on you, your strength, and your perseverance. It was more like trying to make one's way through a tar pit: the path is unstable beneath your feet, sedge is cutting your skin, mosquitoes are getting in your eyes, and a single misstep can plunge you into

the liquid blackness.²¹

In other areas, Yeltsin was walking a similarly uncertain path. In March, almost exactly a year after Gorbachev's referendum on the Soviet Union, Yeltsin organized the signing of the Federation Treaty, the founding document of the new Russian union. This was not a promising beginning for the country: the document was hazy, and the signing was rocky. The federation included three different categories of members, with different degrees of independence from the center. Two republics—Tatarstan and Chechnya—refused to sign; both considered themselves independent states. The otherwise unremarkable Kaluga region, just a couple of hours from Moscow, signed but added a caveat. St. Petersburg added three—among other things, it refused to recognize Moscow's right to declare a state of emergency in the region.²² The imposition of a state of emergency

followed—not in St. Petersburg, but in North Ossetia and Ingushetia, where armed conflict over territory erupted in 1992.²³

By the fall of 1992, even Nemtsov, the poster boy for economic reform, was begging the cabinet to slow down.²⁴ But the cabinet pressed on with ever greater urgency. By the end of the year, it approved a privatization plan for Russia, according to which every one of the country's 148 million citizens would receive a voucher that could be turned into shares of any newly non-state-owned enterprise. The Congress generally hated the idea, but agreed to let it proceed. Soon after, the people's deputies demanded that Yeltsin get rid of Gaidar: until he did, they would block every one of the president's initiatives.

The new Russian prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, looked much more the part of a Russian, or, rather, Soviet official. He was fifty-four, came from a working-class family in a small town in the steppes, and had risen through the ranks of the Communist Party, from which he never resigned. He had been a member of the Central Committee, and his last job before joining the cabinet had been as head of the state's natural-gas monopoly.²⁵ He promised the Congress to stem the fall of production and to keep the population from growing poorer. "A market system need not be a bazaar," he said.²⁶

Chernomyrdin failed. He tried to reverse some of Gaidar's policies, but he lacked the cooperation of most of the cabinet. Russian politics had returned to its pre-coup state: the president and his cabinet, hardly a united front, were in an all-out war with the Congress. The hastily patched and repatched old Soviet-Russian constitution made matters worse because it did not delineate the responsibilities and powers of the branches of government. As large industrial plants began privatizing, corruption became a major force once again, with officials scrambling to apportion property, whether or not they had the right to do so.²⁷ With the president and Congress at war, there was no chance of adopting a new constitution. Instead, the Congress began to discuss, ad nauseam, impeaching Yeltsin. In a televised address on March 20, 1993, Yeltsin declared that the country's political crisis stemmed from "a deep contradiction between the people and the old Bolshevik anti-people system that still has not fallen and that now aims to restore the power it has lost."²⁸ Yeltsin said he was revoking the Congress's power to block his decrees and was scheduling a referendum for April 25. Russian citizens would be asked to affirm their confidence in the president and to vote on the draft of a new constitution.

It did not work. Yeltsin's move itself was unconstitutional, and the Constitutional Court invalidated it. Yeltsin got his referendum, but only on the following four questions:

Do you have confidence in the president of the Russian Federation, B. N. Yeltsin?

Do you approve of the social and political policies pursued by the president and cabinet of the Russian Federation since 1992?

Do you consider it necessary to hold early elections to the office of the president of the Russian Federation?

Do you consider it necessary to hold early elections of people's

deputies of the Russian Federation?²⁹