Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [35]
But Kulikov’s and Chernomyrdin’s responses had puzzled Yeltsin, and the president hesitated. In a maneuver that must have thrown the hawks for a loop, he retired to his study for a final moment of reflection. The thick silence of the Kremlin descended on his shoulders. Yeltsin was alone in the famous room where Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin, and Khrushchev had each once plotted. As Yeltsin recalls it in his memoirs, he wrestled with a terrible choice: Would he be the ruler to go down in history as the man who had a chance to free Russia for the first time in a thousand years, and blew it?
And then he heard a noise. It was his daughter Tatyana who stormed into the room.
“Papa, you must hear another opinion.”
While Yeltsin had been discussing the would-be coup with his generals, she and Valentin Yumashev, the Tanya-Valya team, had brought into the Kremlin the only man who had the brains, the clout, and the chutzpah to try to change Yeltsin’s mind: Anatoly Chubais.
When Chubais entered the room, his face was crimson, his usual color in moments of extreme excitement. He did not waste time on niceties. He denounced Yeltsin’s idea as “madness.” He spoke about the civil war that such a move would unleash, and about the KGB hacks, Korzhakov & Company, whose true agenda was to control the presidency. He boasted of his confidence that Shadow HQ would bring Yeltsin to victory in the election if it were to go forward.
In the end, after enduring a shouting match with Yeltsin, something he had never done before, Chubais changed the president’s mind.
Yeltsin returned to the meeting, canceled the decrees, and told the Korzhakov team to steer clear of the campaign. Chubais received a green light to do what he saw fit.
Activity at Shadow HQ resumed at full speed. Working in concert, ORT and NTV strove to offset Zyuganov’s propaganda on the many regional TV stations that were controlled by the Communists. In living rooms, on banners, and on billboards, Yeltsin’s campaign slogans “Vote with Your Heart!” and “Choose or Lose!” were ubiquitous. Goose delivered Luzhkov’s support and blanketed Moscow with photographs of the president and the mayor together. Berezovsky met with General Lebed and agreed to secretly fund his campaign, to split the Communist vote.
April 21, 1996: Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudayev is assassinated by two guided missiles homing in on the signal from his satellite telephone. He had been speaking with a liberal Duma deputy in Moscow, discussing a peace initiative. Dudayev is succeeded by Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev.
May 27, 1996: President Yeltsin and Prime Minister Chernomyrdin meet with Yandarbiyev at the Kremlin to sign a cease-fire in the seventeen-month war, in which an estimated forty thousand people have died.
On June 16, after an ardous campaign that took him all over the country, Yeltsin managed to eke out a plurality of 35 percent of the vote, just ahead of the 32 percent for his Communist rival Zyuganov. By the rules of the new Russian electoral system, it set the two of them to face each other in a runoff on July 4. Berezovsky’s strategy of diminishing the social democrat Yavlinsky and secretly helping Lebed paid off: Lebed, the former paratrooper, finished a strong third with 15 percent, heavily denting the Communist base, while Yavlinsky finished fourth with only 7 percent. Vladimir Zhirinovsky earned only 6 percent of the vote.
There was no doubt in the president’s mind that he owed his first-round win to the work of Chubais, Goose, and Berezovsky. On the morning of June 17 he gathered the team in the Kremlin to start planning for the second round. The mood was jubilant. The coalition of reformers and oligarchs seemed to be firmly in charge in the Kremlin.
Not only that, but Yeltsin even managed a masterstroke on the very next day. He got Lebed’s endorsement in exchange for naming him secretary of the National Security Council, with a mandate to find a quick solution to the Chechen conflict. It all but sealed Yeltsin’s victory in the second round.
One day later,