Yeltsin at first bought into the idea. On the morning of March 17, he ordered his aides to draft implementing directives and law-enforcement officers to make operational plans. There were, even so, dissenting voices, and Yeltsin did not shut them out. Viktor Ilyushin, four of Yeltsin’s liberal assistants, and Sergei Shakhrai said in a memorandum that they could not write a general decree because they could come up with no legal basis for it. Were one to be written and signed, they warned, Russia could be in for a civil war.49 Anatolii Kulikov, the MVD minister who had led the ministry’s troops in Chechnya in 1994–95, rallied the procurator general, Yurii Skuratov, and the chairman of the Constitutional Court, Vladimir Tumanov, to come out against the decision as unworkable, in part because his best soldiers were still embroiled in the North Caucasus. They saw him together in his office: “The president was really and truly glum. His complexion was sallow, he was ungracious. . . . He especially disliked that we had come as a threesome.” “Minister, I am dissatisfied with you,” Yeltsin spluttered. “A decree will follow shortly. Leave and prepare to implement it.” Kulikov and two officers secured a second Kremlin meeting, at six A.M. sharp on Monday, March 18. Yeltsin was in a darker mood than the day before and would not shake hands with them; Kulikov could see on the presidential desk an unsigned decree dismissing him. Repeating that Yeltsin had no constitutional or moral case, he added that there was no evidence the army would back the president, and that the communists would go underground as martyrs for principle. “Yeltsin interrupted me and said, ‘This is my affair and not yours.’” When Kulikov hung in, Yeltsin reminded him that “you are sitting in my office” and rebuked him for speaking on others’ behalf. But the minister stuck to his guns, and Yeltsin showed signs of fickleness and allowed that the communists might have to be turned back “in stages.”50 President Clinton, alerted by Yegor Gaidar (who sent a message through Ambassador Thomas Pickering), had written Yeltsin a private letter about the need to hold the election on timetable.51 Chernomyrdin and Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow were against the project as well.
But the greatest influences, according to Yeltsin, were not Kulikov or Clinton and not the oligarchs, with whom he had been out of contact. They were Tatyana Dyachenko and Anatolii Chubais. Tatyana secured an appointment with Yeltsin for Chubais, also on March 18, and Chubais for the one and only time in his years with Yeltsin raised the volume of his voice in protest. The one-hour meeting, Yeltsin said in his memoirs, made him feel “ashamed before those who had trusted me.” He got in a poke at Chubais in the conversation—“You also made plenty of mistakes in privatization,” he said. But he heeded the advice and that day dropped his ill-considered plan. 52 Blessedly for Russia and for his reputation, he had come to his senses—for which those who tar him with neo-Bolshevism give him not a granule of thanks. “The president,” Kulikov writes accurately, “was wise enough to overstep himself and his character. He understood that the undertaking could end tragically and that some people were trying to use him.”53
On March 19, the day after finally giving the election a green light, Yeltsin appointed a new campaign council, chaired by himself, with Viktor Chernomyrdin as deputy chairman. But his most consequential decision was to impanel an “analytical group” under Chubais, who had agreed to it at a rendezvous with the oligarchs in Berezovskii’s Logovaz Club—an ideal place, Berezovskii chortled, because no one could bug it with listening devices except him. Chubais accepted several million dollars up front for campaign expenses, from which he was to deduct a monthly salary of $60,000. True to form, Yeltsin did not do away with the Soskovets grouping, whose senior members joined the council and which continued to occupy offices on a different floor of the Presidential Hotel. The nomination formalities, completed by April 5, were dealt with by an All-Russian Movement for Public Support of the President, an ecumenical front of 250 preexisting organizations headed up by Sergei Filatov, Yeltsin’s former chief of staff. It stayed around to liaise with regional and local leaders, while another organization still, People’s House, made connections to citizen groups and was the unofficial disburser of campaign funds.
