In Chuvashia I was scheduled to visit the university and have a meeting with the lecturers and students. It was moved to the local concert hall because ‘Moscow advised against’ politicians speaking in colleges and universities. As a result, the hall was jammed full of people, standing in the aisles, up by the stage. An attempt by a small group to disrupt my speech was put down by members of the audience themselves. The stream of questions made it seem our conversation would never end. There were hostile questions too, which I answered frankly.
In the evening I had dinner with Nikolai Fedorov, the president of Chuvashia. Three years previously, as minister of justice, he had threatened to have me brought in handcuffs to Zorkin in the Constitutional Court. He seemed to have mellowed.
My main preoccupation in those months was how to save Russia from sliding into authoritarianism. There were increasingly persistent rumours that the government was looking for a way to avoid elections. In October 1995, I stated that postponing the elections would be tantamount to usurping the people’s right to take decisions about their own future. If allowed, it would put an end to democracy in Russia and to her future as a civilized state. The parliamentary elections went ahead in December, evidently in order to test the temperature, assess the balance of power, and then decide what to do about the presidential elections.
The elections brought defeat for the government. The Our Home is Russia Party received just 10 per cent of the vote. The Communist Party gained two and a half times more and came first. Zhirinovsky’s ‘liberal democrats’ came third. For the first time, scaring the electorate with the ‘red and brown’ threat did not work. The vote for the Communists and Zhirinovsky was very obviously a protest vote. Public sentiment was made clear in opinion polls, which gave Yeltsin an approval rating of just 6 per cent.
The economic situation continued to deteriorate. The budget was coming apart at the seams. To solve the problem of budget revenues while simultaneously bringing in funds for his election campaign, Yeltsin embarked on an unheard-of privatization stunt: ‘deposit auctions’.
The mechanism was simple: a small group of bankers were handed Russia’s most promising enterprises as collateral (supposedly on a competitive basis). They made ‘loans’ to the state budget completely incommensurable with the real value of the enterprises. If the state was unable to repay those amounts, the enterprises would become the property of people who soon came to be known as ‘oligarchs’. It all duly happened. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there were legal irregularities in this corrupt merging of government and business.
In January 1996, Yeltsin announced he would probably agree to run for a second presidential term. On 1 March, just six months after the presidential decree pawning the state’s assets, he had a meeting with seven owners of the major private banking institutions. Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Potanin, Smolensky, Fridman, Aven and Khodorkovsky undertook to do, and indeed did, all that was necessary to finance Yeltsin’s re-election campaign and have him back as president of Russia.
The banking institutions that entered into this deal controlled, according to Berezovsky, more than half the Russian economy and, most importantly, all the television stations and almost all the media. The government decided to ‘re-elect’ itself with the aid of big finance, a virtual monopoly of the media and the state’s ‘administrative resources’. By fair means or foul.
The Need for an Alternative
Throughout 1995, I was constantly being asked whether I would run in the presidential election. I did not underestimate the obstacles and was in no hurry to reply. Most of my colleagues and friends were against my participating, and some, like Alexander Yakovlev and Vadim Medvedev, said so publicly. Raisa was also opposed, but I could not reconcile myself to the election being a choice between Yeltsin and Zyuganov. They were a pretty pair: one had destroyed the Soviet Union, shelled the first Russian parliament, fused government and big business together and given the green light to Russia’s criminals. The other had not repudiated Stalinist totalitarianism, approved of the deeds of the 1991 coup conspirators and had persuaded his party to support the Belovezha Accords with their votes in the Supreme Soviet of Russia.
I felt that to stay on the sidelines would be a dereliction of duty. I had to do what I could to unite the truly democratic, healthy forces capable of representing the interests of the majority of citizens and be a civic alternative to the Yeltsinites and Zyuganovites.
For that, however, action was needed. People had to be convinced. There was a need to explain the past and talk about the future. An election campaign provided a unique opportunity for that, and in the end I decided I could not ignore it.
My supporters set up a campaign team in February 1996 and began collecting signatures, of which we needed at least one million. I did not immediately make my decision public, but in an interview, in response to being asked yet again whether I intended to stand in the presidential election, I said the logic of events was inclining me towards doing so.
I invited all the political leaders of centre and centre-left parties to discuss uniting our efforts, and had meetings with their representatives. On 1 March 1996 I sent the media an appeal to all democratic forces titled ‘Give the people a choice’. It read:
The presidential campaign is only just beginning, but the intention is already plainly to offer the public a choice of evils, as if, apart from the party in government and the Communist Party, there are no other credible forces in the political arena. Some are trying to persuade citizens that the party in government is the only safeguard against a return to the old order. Others, exploiting the results of the Duma elections, seek to present themselves as Russia’s salvation.
…The current government is at bay, and that is very dangerous. No less dangerous are the leaders of the Communist Party, who have yet to break their umbilical link with the totalitarian past. We should not be deceived by the social democratic and liberal slogans currently now in vogue with the Zyuganovites. Knowing these people and the nature of Party officialdom, I fear that if they come to power they will halt reform, take away society’s democratic freedoms and, wittingly or unwittingly, open the way to national socialism in Russia. For a country that sacrificed millions of lives on the altar of victory over fascism, that would signal total moral degradation.
In short, we are being driven into a corner through the efforts of the party in government and the leaders of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation to ensure that, whoever wins, the result will be restoration of old regime officialdom.
Despite the trials of privation, loss and disillusionment, our people have not turned their back on democracy. Now is not the time for petty opportunism, personal ambitions and resentments. We must not miss this historic opportunity of making Russia a free and prosperous land. Otherwise, we shall have to hang our heads in shame.
I see only one way of ensuring the prospect of further progress towards reform and democracy: all reform-minded, pro-democracy leaders, parties and movements must unite and go into the election as a united team, agreeing the distribution of key posts in the future government and making the agreement public. In this way, we shall ensure the legitimacy not only of the next president, but also of the government.
I therefore propose that we should immediately convene a national forum of democrats to agree a common plan of action. It is our sacred duty to give Russia a real choice.