Yeltsin полностью

It took only several meetings of the Soskovets group for Berezovskii to conclude that not all was well. From February 2 to 5, he and seventy other Russian capitalists and officials attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where they were upset by the polite reception given to Gennadii Zyuganov, who had a bulge over Yeltsin in the polls. At Berezovskii’s suggestion, Viktor Ilyushin arranged for Yeltsin to host an unpublicized Kremlin luncheon for six businessmen—Berezovskii, Gusinskii, Khodorkovskii, Potanin, Aleksandr Smolenskii of SBS-Agro Bank, and Vladimir Vinogradov of Inkombank—and Chubais, who had been Yeltsin’s deputy for privatization until Yeltsin threw him to the wolves in January as a result of the Duma election. The meal was held about a fortnight after the Davos forum, in Shrovetide on the Russian calendar, and the chef served traditional fare for the season: pancakes with garnishes and drinks.⁴¹ Yeltsin had thought the diners wanted to speak with him about campaign finance, since “they had nowhere to go and would have to support me,” but the conversation was about the hopelessness of the Soviet-style effort under Soskovets. “I had not expected such tough talk,” he was to write in Presidential Marathon.⁴² Gusinskii and Chubais held nothing back. “Boris Nikolayevich,” Chubais stated, “your popularity rating is zero.” As usual when he was confronted by unlovely news, the meeting was marked by a long silence from the chair. One of the visitors, Khodorkovskii, thought “the tsar was thinking about whether to send of us all to the execution block”; another, Smolenskii, said in 2003 that “the pause was so loud that I hear it to this day.”⁴³ The frank comments gave every appearance of shaking Yeltsin out of his apathy. Hesitating to catch his breath, he asked what they recommended. He promised after forty minutes of discussion to think about ways to energize the campaign and to involve Chubais and associates of big business in it. Berezovskii stayed to chat with Yeltsin briefly after the group dispersed.⁴⁴

It is important to realize, though, that the dialogue with the magnates had no immediate effect.⁴⁵ Almost a month after the Kremlin meeting, on March 14, Yeltsin’s political assistant, Georgii Satarov, and a group of consultants sent him a blistering memorandum noting that the campaign was still a shambles:

[Soskovets] is not a specialist on public politics or electoral technologies, as immediately revealed itself. But this has not been offset by the possible merits on which you apparently were counting.

Soskovets has displayed no organizational ability: The headquarters has not yet begun to work normally. He is unable to make contact with people who have a different point of view but are necessary to the campaign. His influence on the regional leadership has been exercised through vulgar and vain officiousness, which not only compromises you as president but turns off possible allies. The same methods are being employed, with the same result, with government agencies and with representatives of the mass media and of commercial and banking circles. The weirdest thing is that Soskovets has not resolved the problem of mobilizing in a short span of time the financial resources needed to wage the campaign. . . . More than a month has been lost.

Satarov urged Yeltsin to redo the organization while there was still time.⁴⁶

I have no doubt that Yeltsin did not reorganize in February for a reason—because he had not yet resolved the bedrock dilemma of whether there should be a presidential election at all. The detonator here was a nonbinding resolution by the newly elected State Duma on March 15, 1996, to renounce the Supreme Soviet vote of December 12, 1991, on the Belovezh’e accord. Sponsored by the KPRF caucus and passed by a majority of 250 to ninety-eight, the vote asserted in effect that the Soviet Union and the legislation undergirding it still had legal force. Yeltsin reacted with indignation to an “attempt to liquidate our statehood” that “casts doubt on the legitimacy” of the new Russia and its political system.⁴⁷ Within twenty-four hours, the Korzhakov-Soskovets group, fearing a loss to the communists in the forthcoming election and sensing an opportunity to prevail in the palace struggle—where Korzhakov had not yet persuaded Yeltsin to make Soskovets prime minister and thus to put him in the line of succession—had come up with a proposal to postpone the presidential election until 1998, ban the KPRF, and shut down the Duma so as to rule by executive decree for the two years. The proposal took the postponement project entertained by Moscow democrats in 1994–95 and linked it to radically anti-democratic ends.⁴⁸