“She had a lot of the features of her father,” Berezovsky recalled. “She worked twenty hours a day.” She was stubborn, like the president, he said, but she would listen. Yeltsin recalled that before she joined the campaign he feared “I was going to break down” under the stress, but she offered him a glint of optimism. Valentin Yumashev, who was Yeltsin's ghostwriter and had introduced Berezovsky to the Kremlin inner circle, joined Dyachenko on many political missions. Chubais quickly realized the value of Dyachenko's presence, especially in bypassing Korzhakov. Soon Dyachenko and Yumashev were traveling all over Moscow, recruiting advertising men and political consultants to come to Yeltsin's rescue.
On March 4, Dyachenko and Yumashev came to see Igor Malashenko, the president of NTV, and appealed to him to take on one of the most important jobs in the campaignâmedia and public relations. It was an extraordinary gesture to a leader of the Gusinsky camp. Malashenko, who has the short-cropped hair of a drill sergeant as well as finely honed political skills, told them he believed Yeltsin had “an enormous hidden support because the nation is basically non-Communist.” And, he said, “the only thing he needs is a real election campaign: to make news every day, to make stories that look good on television.” Malashenko regaled them with Reagan campaign techniques he had heard about, such as visiting a flag factory.
But Malashenko worried that Korzhakov and his pals did not want to go ahead with a real campaign. Malashenko was “not full of joy” about working for the Kremlin, Gusinsky said. There were obvious drawbacks. One was that Yeltsin's political standing was so low that Malashenko might not be able to turn it around. And there was the ever worrisome threat of Korzhakov, who had masterminded the faces in the snow attack on Gusinsky in 1994. Finally, there was the biggest risk of allâthe move could compromise NTV's cherished reputation for independence, earned during the Chechen war.
“Igor, I beg you to take the job at the Kremlin,” Gusinsky recalled telling Malashenko. “This is a team decision. This is a team game. We are defending ourselves from the Communists.”
“You lay me bare,” Malashenko protested, according to Gusinsky.
“Yes,” Gusinsky said, “I lay you bare. But I am exposing myself too, believe it or not. I am not concealing that this is our team decision. We must prevent the Communists from coming to power.”
Malashenko soon thereafter met with Yeltsin. He was blunt. “Listen,” he told Yeltsin, “you cannot just use the media as a propaganda tool of the Soviet times. It doesn't work; you need to get elected. You need to work a lot. You should go all over the country, make news, make speeches, meet people, and so on.” Malashenko advised Yeltsin: run a modern, Western-style campaign in a country that had never really known one.
“On a visceral level,” Malashenko told me, “he got it.”
Touching a sensitive subject, Malashenko reminded Yeltsin that he was one of Gusinsky's partners. He asked Yeltsin to stand by him in case of another attack from Korzhakov. According to Malashenko, Yeltsin understood and agreed. Gusinsky later attributed Yeltsin's acquiescence to his sense of powerâYeltsin knew he needed Malashenko, regardless of what had gone before. “For the sake of this sense of power,” Gusinsky said, “Yeltsin was prepared to love his enemies, betray friendsâit was all the same to him. The goal was to hold on to power.”
Chubais recruited the best and brightest political operatives from the financial clans. “From each of them, I took their strongest people,” Chubais said. Among them were Shakhnovsky, Luzhkov's senior aide, who had organized the Sparrow Hills club, and Sergei Zverev, another Gusinsky man who was a superlobbyist. Others included Yevstafiev, the Chubais aide who had recently been working at Berezovsky's television channel; Alexander Oslon, the leading commercial pollster; Vyacheslav Nikonov, a former member of the lower house of parliament; and Satarov, who was Yeltsin's political adviser. Many others worked as freelancers on the side, such as Sergei Lisovsky, the entertainment and advertising magnate. The team was just getting organized in March when the campaign nearly went off a cliff.
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The art and science of public opinion polling was still crude in 1996. Instead of telephone surveys, pollsters relied on an army of foot soldiers who went door to door with clipboards and questionnaires, often having doors slammed in their face. But it was possible, with enough pluck and care, to build a picture of the electorate. Oslon's polls
charted this picture. Months-long backlogs in paying wages spread across the country, feeding discontent. The Chechen war was deeply unpopular. The January battle in Pervomaiskoye was especially humiliating for Yeltsin. He had demonstrated before television camerasâby moving his head back and forth like a sharpshooter through a scopeâhow thirty-eight crack Russian snipers were watching every move of the rebels and predicted they would be defeated in a single day. Instead, they escaped. Yeltsin looked totally disconnected from the bloody reality of the war. Oslon told me back then, “Chechnya is the fundamental question. There's nothing left for him to do but end the war in Chechnya.” Yet another factor was Yeltsin's isolation “behind the Kremlin walls,” Oslon said. Russians felt they had lost touch with their leader, a one-time streetcar populist who had inexplicably become a distant caricature of himself.
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Yet the polls also showed that Yeltsin had a store of popular support, if he could unlock it. For all his mistakes, Yeltsin's ratings went up as voters began to think about where the country was going next, rather than about the past. Instead of capitalizing on his strength, Yeltsin came close to discarding it.
What Berezovsky had told Yeltsin was true: Korzhakov was hoping to call off the election rather than risk defeat. In late February, Soskovets secretly hired a group of American political consultants to analyze the trends in public opinion. On February 27 Soskovets told one of the consultants, Richard Dresner, that “one of your tasks is to advise us, a month from the election, about whether we should call it off if you determine that we're going to lose.”
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Korzhakov tried to persuade Yeltsin to abandon the elections. “It is senseless to struggle when you have a 3 percent approval rating, Boris Nikolayevich,” Korzhakov said, according to Yeltsin's account. “If we lose time with all these electoral games, then what?”
Korzhakov later offered his own explanation, saying, “It was clear to me whom we were going to elect: either Zyuganov or a sick president. That is why I was suggesting to postpone the elections by two years.”
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Dyachenko later recalled that Korzhakov wanted to “preserve his influence” on Yeltsin and surrounded him with “a tight circle of his men.” Soon “Papa got encircled by people who were all saying as one: why do we need this most difficult campaign? You shall stay on for two more years . . . . later we will hold the elections calmly. All the
democratic values will be preserved.”
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Korzhakov knew what others did not: Yeltsin was seriously ill. But the full weight of the idea to postpone the elections cannot be placed on Korzhakov's shoulders alone. At some point, it became Yeltsin's idea. He pushed forward a plan, in violation of the constitution, to dissolve the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, ban the Communist Party, and postpone the elections. “I had to take a radical step,” Yeltsin said in his memoir, without really explaining why. “After the ban, the Communist Party would be finished forever in Russia,” he recalled thinking at the time. But Yeltsin would undoubtedly be finished too, and his account leaves many questions unanswered about why he went so far with such a risky scheme. “I don't know whose crazy idea it was exactly,” Berezovsky recalled, “but Korzhakov and the gang were very actively trying to bring it to life.”
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On March 15, a Friday, the State Duma voted 250 to 98 for a nonbinding resolution to repeal the 1991 agreement at Belovezhskaya Pushcha. This was the agreement, after the failed coup, between Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus. Meeting at a hunting resort outside Brest, they declared their own union, defying Gorbachev and triggering the end of the Soviet Union three weeks later. The Duma vote was a political statement, a bit of grandstanding by the newly elected Communists and nationalists. But to Korzhakov and his party of war, the vote was a perfect pretext to trigger dissolution of the Duma. Over the next two days, a hidden drama of extraordinary significance unfolded in the Kremlin. It was so secret that most journalists, including myself, had only a vague clue, until long after it was over, what had happened. I should have paid more attention to Yeltsin's reaction to the vote on Saturday. Yeltsin said the Duma had called into doubt its own legitimacy, as well as “the possibility of holding presidential elections.” I didn't realize it at the time, but Yeltsin meant every word.
Early on Saturday morning, Yeltsin summoned Anatoly Kulikov, the interior minister, to the Kremlin. The barrel-chested Kulikov, inscrutable behind glasses with thick, tinted lenses, was an architect of the Chechen war and presided over a far-flung national police force, riddled with corruption. When he got to Yeltsin's office, he saw the Russian president “excited and agitated,” he recalled. As soon as Kulikov sat down, Yeltsin told him he had decided to dissolve the Duma, ban the Communists, and put off the election. “I'm not going
to tolerate it any more,” Yeltsin said. “I need two years.” Kulikov recalled that Yeltsin kept repeating, “I need two years.” Yeltsin said the decree would be sent out in the afternoon.
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Kulikov, while promising to follow orders, asked for time to consider Yeltsin's plan. He said he would come back to Yeltsin at 5:00 P.M. He then had a cognac with Korzhakov and Soskovets, at Korzhakov's invitation, and realized, as they spoke “passionately,” that they were architects of the idea to put off the elections. When Kulikov called around to the general prosecutor, Yuri Skuratov, and the chairman of the Constitutional Court, Vladimir Tumanov, he discovered Yeltsin had told each of them, untruthfully, that the other ones approved of his plan. Kulikov entered Yeltsin's study again at 5:00 P.M. and found the Russian president “morose, his face sallow.” Kulikov expressed grave doubts about the plan, warning Yeltsin that if he went ahead it could lead to a “social explosion” in Russia, “and we did not have forces to manage the situation.” For Yeltsin, this must have been an ominous warning, that the army and interior troops would not support him. Yeltsin, undeterred, ordered aides to prepare the decrees. Kulikov went to the Kremlin office where they were drafting the documents. He walked up to a window overlooking Red Square, which at about 6:00 P.M. was full of people strolling on the cobblestones.
“Don't you dare prepare this decree,” Kulikov implored the aides. “See these people walking around? Tomorrow, after the decree is signed, fires will be burning here. And I don't know at what other places in Moscow, how many around the country. We don't have forces to keep the situation under control. This is the path to civil war.”
Kulikov was summoned back to Yeltsin's study on Sunday morning at 6:00 A.M. He found Yeltsin even more somber, and tormented. To Kulikov's surprise, Yeltsin had also summoned the heads of the Moscow city and regional interior troops, who would have to handle any riots. One of them told Yeltsin that sixteen thousand troops were ready but another ten thousand to twelve thousand were needed. Kulikov noticed Yeltsin had a decree on his desk firing him. Unbowed, he protested once again that Yeltsin would ignite a civil war if he went ahead with his plan. Kulikov said the army might not stand behind Yeltsin; the prosecutor and chairman of the Constitutional Court also opposed the plan. Then Kulikov asked a question. Yeltsin wanted to ban the Communist Party. “Does anyone know where their headquarters is located?”
Yeltsin looked at the two Moscow interior chiefs. He asked the first one, then the second one, “Do you know where?”
“No,” they admitted.
“I know where,” said Mikhail Barsukov, head of the Federal Security Service and a crony of Korzhakov. Barsukov shuffled through some papers. “1 Okhotny Ryad,” he announced. “The State Duma.” Kulikov thought it was Barsukov's way of breaking the tension, a joke.
A long pause. “No one looked up; all sat silent,” Kulikov recalled. “This was a very difficult period.” He expected to be fired by Yeltsin at any minute. But after a long silence, Yeltsin said, “Right, certainly, they must be dispersed. I need two more years.” Yeltsin also said, “Of course the only obstacle is the constitution.” He then gave a signal, a hint, of uncertainty, Kulikov noticed. He said he would consult with others, including Luzhkov.
That morning at home, Yeltsin had also heard protests from his daughter, Dyachenko. “I told him that no one was going to understand him, that this meant losing everything that had been achieved with so much effort. But he was not taking my words seriously,” she recalled.
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Berezovsky and Gusinsky had also picked up word of the plan through Kremlin leaks. “When we learned what was being prepared, we felt that the moment had arrived when we must try to prevent the situation through the mass media,” Berezovsky said, “to make it public in order to oppose it.” On Sunday, there were still hours to go before the evening broadcasts. Ilyushin, Yeltsin's loyal aide, had started leaking word of the dramatic plan to call off the elections to Gusinsky's NTV television channel. “We were getting information virtually live,” Malashenko recalled. “Ilyushin was a very secretive guy, so, you know, to leak the information, it would mean the situation was disastrous, just disastrous. And he was leaking information to us.”