Nonetheless, as the first term wore on, Yeltsin communed person-to-person with his fellow citizens less and less. Security tightened during the 1993 constitutional conflict and when the Chechen war made him an assassination target. Some governors discouraged him from making appearances when in their regions. A tour in the spring of 1995 was aborted after one stop because of lack of interest in the events.9 Yeltsin’s extemporaneous contacts with the masses, the press corps noticed, were getting to be more perfunctory. “He preferred to go up to the crowd, slap it on the back . . . and get away,” is how Tatyana Malkina, a beat reporter for the newspaper
As the 1995–96 election season approached, it was equally apparent that Yeltsin lacked a key resource that leaders and aspiring leaders have in the retail politics of mature democracies: an effective party. Post-Soviet Russia was a petri dish for political parties and protoparties (there were 273 of them registered in 1995), and they were found in every ideological hue, from fascist to feminist. Quality, admittedly, did not match quantity, and many of these organizations were jerry-built, personality-driven, and transient.11 Nonetheless, a party or mass movement of his own would have given Yeltsin a chance to advance positions, build organizational capacity in the parliamentary election arena, and utilize them in a presidential campaign.
There had been no want of schemes for hatching a Yeltsin party. Early on in his administration, advisers Gennadii Burbulis, Sergei Stankevich, and Galina Starovoitova pushed a broad-based national party—an August Bloc, they suggested calling it, in honor of the turning back of the coup. In March 1992 Yeltsin received the representatives of several dozen liberal organizations and said he was for creation of a pro-reform Assembly of Russian Citizens. All that came from it was a charter meeting in April, chaired by Burbulis. The plan revived in June 1992 as an Association in Support of Democracy and Reforms, bracketing forty-three reformist groups. In consultations, Yeltsin gave it his imprimatur, said that in principle he might lead it, and even expressed a preference for a name with the words “people’s” or “democratic” in it. This endeavor, too, trailed off into nothingness. Then, after the April 1993 referendum, Burbulis and Stankevich thought they had won Yeltsin over to an overarching League of the Twenty-Fifth of April or an April Alliance in the same mold. All over again, they were unable to get him to act.12
Russia’s Choice in the 1993 Duma election was a Yeltsin-friendly electoral formation that did get into the air. Without his assistance, it gathered together government ministers and reformist intellectuals, all in the hopes of a symbiosis with their hero: “Our bloc makes no bones about who is its leader—it is President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.”13 Yeltsin indicated to Yegor Gaidar, who headed up the list of candidates, that he would throw his weight behind them. On his journey to Japan in October, he promised Gaidar to address the bloc’s convention and back its list. But he never did. Pouring all of his energies into making and ratifying the constitution, Yeltsin determined at the eleventh hour not to attend the meeting, withheld sanction, and did not take issue when cabinet minister Sergei Shakhrai formed a separate electoral list, the Party of Russian Unity and Accord. A planned post-Tokyo meeting with Russia’s Choice panjandrums became a presidential soliloquy on Asian affairs.14 Gaidar estimates that a Yeltsin statement would have swung 10 percent of the vote to Russia’s Choice and made it the undisputed winner of the election.15
