The issue of a third term was more theoretical than practical. Yeltsin had made a solemn vow to his wife that the 1996 campaign would be his last and never once indicated that he would go back on it.69 His infirmity, the many setbacks of the second term, and his unremittingly low scores in the opinion polls only reinforced the case. As long as Yeltsin remained Yeltsin, there was always the chance he would reconsider. It lingered until the very end. In mid-December 1999, two weeks before the handover to Putin, Yeltsin staggered his long-serving head of protocol, Vladimir Shevchenko, with the question, “What do you think? Should I or shouldn’t I go for a third term?” Shevchenko believes the query was part of the process of Yeltsin accommodating himself to the loss of power and that by then his mind was made up.70 No one can be sure. After the Constitutional Court judgment, the only way to cling to power would have been something like what Korzhakov and his sympathizers favored in 1996—martial law, postponement of the mandated presidential election, a suspension of the Duma and of many liberties, and the rest. Yeltsin’s physical and political weaknesses being what they were, it was an all but impossible scenario. The premise for Yeltsin, his family, and his political team was, therefore, that he would retire, and a new president would put on the chain of office, in July 2000, four years after his second inauguration.
Until then, Yeltsin was going to have his hands full. The harbingers of post-crisis normalization did not assuage the oppositionists who favored his impeachment, as had been tried without success in 1993. Article 93 of the new constitution set an obstacle course for those who would depose the president more difficult to traverse than the one in place in 1993. The only lawful justification was guilt of “high treason or another grave crime.” Upon motion of one-third of the Duma deputies, the chamber was to appoint a special committee to investigate presidential conduct; two-thirds of the deputies in the Duma had to vote in favor of any motion to remove; the Supreme Court had to certify the criminality of the president’s actions and the Constitutional Court to confirm the procedural regularity of the proceedings; and then the Federation Council, composed of regional leaders, needed to concur.
The Duma struck an impeachment committee in May 1998. It reported out a first charge on September 7. By February 1999 Yeltsin had been arraigned on five counts: for destroying the USSR by signing the Belovezh’e accord; abetting murder during the crackdown on the congress and Supreme Soviet in 1993; exceeding his powers by taking up arms in Chechnya; deliberately ruining the army; and bringing about “the genocide of the Russian people.” On May 13 and 14 Viktor Ilyukhin of the KPRF, a procurator by profession, read out the charges to the whole Duma and made a pitch for a yes vote. During hearings on the genocide charge, Ilyukhin had “stunned many . . . by declaring . . . that fewer Russians would have perished under Yeltsin’s rule had the president not surrounded himself with Jewish advisers.”71 The accusations were mostly about Yeltsin’s first term, ignoring the facts that the legislature had approved the Belovezh’e agreement, that Russians had elected him to a second term, and that the Duma derived its own legitimacy from the referendum that approved the Yeltsin constitution in 1993. In his defense, the most that liberal and centrist deputies were willing to do was plead that a bad status quo would get worse if parliament acted rashly. Impeachment “may lead to complete chaos,” one said. “Have we not had enough foolhardiness from the president? Do we want to add a parliamentary contribution to the destabilization of Russian democracy?” The constitution, he added, did not provide for the dethroning of the head of state “for weakness and incapacity as such. . . . And this is only fair. The country should have the president it has elected,” unless he has perpetrated high crimes, and not the trumped-up offenses listed in the indictment.72
