Defense, Pavel Grachev, who promised a very quick and easy victory. Also, the President did not want to antagonize Russian nationalists, and wished to assure himself and all others that a component unit could not simply leave the Russian Federation at will. Pride and stubbornness certainly entered the picture on both sides. When the initial laughable military effort failed, the Chechen capital city of Grozny and the land of Chechnia became a battlefield, now often compared to Vietnam, or, to keep the analogy closer, to Afghanistan.
Perhaps not so unexpectedly to those who followed the evolution of Russia in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years, but to the great surprise of the world, the Russian army proved to be in an appaling condition and totally unprepared for a war with the Chechens. Tank assaults on Grozny without the necessary infantry support and even without maps of the city led to the isolation and annihilation of the attackers. Massive bombardment eventually reduced much of the city to rubble, but probably killed mostly its peaceful ethnic Russian inhabitants, for the Chechen urbanites were much quicker to take to the hills. As to the Chechen fighters, they proved remarkably elusive, usually escaping with ease and striking suddenly from all sides. Some 40,000 people perished in Grozny. To be sure, the Russian army did capture, or recapture, the city, but only to abandon it again. And the total Russian military casualties in Chechnia were estimated as exceeding those of the Soviet army in Afghanistan. The unavoidable death and destruction of war were underlined by particular acts of deliberate cruelty, such as the massacre of civilians in the village of Samashki by the special forces of the ministry of the interior on the sixth through the eighth of April 1995. In general, there was much cruelty on both sides, but it was the Russians who were the aggressors. About a year after the assassinations in Samashki they even succeeded in killing by a rocket from a Russian aircraft, which had homed in on a satellite telephone in Chechen headquarters, the President and largely self-appointed main leader of the Chechens Dzhokbar Dudayev, an able but disreputable character, formerly a general in the Soviet air force, but later the standard-bearer of Chechen nationalism and Islam, which he neither knew nor followed. Yet the bitter war, although deadlocked, continued. It was only several months later that Aleksandr Lebed, representing Russia, and Asian Maskhadov, a more moderate Chechen leader, signed a peace pact. Victorious, the Chechens had in effect gained their independence and retained all their land for themselves, although the formulation of their exact relationship to Russia was left for the future.
One great fear of Yeltsin and his government, associated with the Chechen war, has not so far materialized: The inability to suppress the Chechens did not lead, in a domino effect, to other nationalities or parts of the country separating themselves from Moscow. But in other major respects the war was indeed a disaster. The utterly miserable performance of the Russian army was a shame and a scandal for patriotic Russians, and even Russians in general, and it was blamed directly on Yeltsin, Grachev, and their assistants. Perhaps an even more signifi-
cant divide came to separate the President from the liberals who could not pardon him the stubborn pursuit of the Chechen war and its cruelty. The much respected Sergei Kovalev's resignation from his position as head of the President's human rights commission was more than an individual gesture. Yeltsin's humanitarian and progressive mystique was no more. Abroad, too, the Chechen war produced a most painful impression, even if no state rushed to recognize the new Chechen government.
Yeltsin's bloody victory over the parliament in October 1993 did not establish either cooperation or a stable balance between the executive and the legislative branches of the Russian government. To be sure, the successful referendum on the new constitution of December 12, 1993, further strengthened the President's powerful position. In full charge of the executive, he could appoint and dismiss ministers and even pass measures by executive decree, when legislative approval was not available. Yet ultimately he needed the agreement of the two-house legislature - the Upper House, the Federation Council, representing the federal units of the state, and the Lower House, the Duma, representing the people at large - to enact a budget and a full legislative program. The parliament could also reject the proposed prime minister, although a third rejection would lead to the dissolution of the legislature and new elections, a threat that was to be effective in obtaining approval. Thus obviously important, although not dominant, the legislature, and in particular the Duma, remained on the whole hostile to Yeltsin throughout his tenure of office. There were several reasons for that unfortunate situation. As has been repeatedly noted, neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin made a determined effort to establish and lead a strong political party. They had little appreciation of party politics and preferred to think of themselves as national leaders on a presumably higher plane. Moreover, through the years Russian liberals and moderates could not create an effective united party, but stayed divided into quarreling factions. The most prominent liberal politician, the able economist Grigory Yavlinsky, has been frequently criticized for his vanity and exclu-siveness, but it may be unfair to single him out in that connection. By contrast, the only major party available and ready to operate, given an opportunity, was the communist party, and it was, of course, in the opposition. Besides, very hard times gave rise to all kinds of opposition, including the fantastic Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his so-called Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.
Zhirinovsky became politically prominent rather suddenly in 1991, when he came in third in the first Russian presidential election won by Yeltsin. Even more striking, indeed stunning for many Russians and foreigners alike, were the results of the Duma election of December 14, 1993, when Zhirinovsky's party, the L.D.P.R., took 23 per cent of the total vote. Of course, much of Zhirinovsky's support was a protest vote for a man who challenged the government, the establishment, and even the world in a most extreme and vulgar manner, including physical assault on his opponents in the Duma, who promised everything to all, and who never hesitated to lie or to deny well-known facts. Yet beyond that
amazing behavior - similar in some important ways to that of Zhirinovsky's friend, the French Right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen - many observers seemed to detect a fundamental fanaticism even as Zhirinovsky proposed such solutions for establishing peace in the world as another major war, which would destroy Turkey and the Turks and ensure the legitimate Russian expansion to the south. Zhirinovsky certainly made his contribution to the frequently drawn analogy between Yeltsin's Russia and the Weimar Republic in Germany. But the December 17, 1995, Duma election reduced the vote for the L.D.RR. from 23 to 11 per cent, and even Zhirinovsky's own antics appeared gradually to lose, in spite of his inventiveness, much of their impact and news value.
Yeltsin had much more reason to worry about the communist, or neo-communist, revival and the coming presidential election in June 1996. In fact, his chances of political survival looked minimal. After five years of his rule most of the Russian people were in dire and still worsening economic straits, with no end to their tribulations in sight. As already stated, agriculture was in shambles, the industrial output kept declining, the government went on borrowing money, but did not even provide wages or social security payments to its millions of employees and retirees who had to survive somehow for weeks, months, and sometimes years on their own. The war in Chechnia continued. Enormous corruption and organized crime held sway in the country. The polls indicated that the popular approval and support of Yeltsin had fallen to several percentage points. Yeltsin's main challenger, the communist leader Genady Zyuganov, while deficient in charisma and even in simple personal appeal, had a huge nationwide party behind him and aimed to mobilize all discontent, including the nationalist variety.