From Yeltsin foe to Kadyrov supporter

A look back at the life of former Supreme Soviet chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov, a key player in Russia's violent 1993 constitutional crisis

On January 3, 2023, Ruslan Khasbulatov, the second and last chairman of Russia’s Supreme Soviet, died at 80 years old. In the early 1990s, Khasbulatov was a close ally of Boris Yeltsin, but after the collapse of the USSR, when he rose to the top of Russia’s parliament, he became one of the president’s chief opponents. Their standoff eventually came to a dramatic climax in October 1993, when the country’s constitutional crisis culminated in violent fighting in the streets of Moscow. After the deadly clashes, Khasbulatov briefly returned to his native Chechnya, where he tried and failed to prevent a war from breaking out. Meduza tells the story of how a descendant of Chechen deportees managed to reach the top of Russia’s political system, and why he wasn’t able to stay there.

Ruslan Khasbulatov was born in Grozny on November 22, 1942. When he wasn’t yet one and a half, he and his family were deported by the Stalinist authorities to northern Kazakhstan. Despite his difficult beginnings, Khasbulatov went on to attend the prestigious Moscow State University, where he earned both a law degree and, later, a Ph.D. in economics. In March 1990, he was elected to represent Grozny (where he hadn’t lived since he was a baby) in the Russian SFSR’s Congress of People’s Deputies.

Khasbulatov's entry into politics came during a time of rigid opposition between party and state leadership led by Mikhail Gorbachev on one side and Boris Yeltsin on the other. Like other proponents of democratic reforms for Russia, Khasbulatov supported the latter figure. And when Yeltsin was elected chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet in 1990, he chose Khasbulatov to be his first deputy.

In the spring of 1991, the Russian authorities decided to hold presidential elections in the republic (which was then still part of the USSR). Yeltsin was the undisputed favorite to win, but his options for a running mate were less obvious. Yeltsin would later recall how he “could feel in [his] skin how anxiously two people were waiting for the decision”: Ruslan Khasbulatov and Gennady Burbulis, the Yeltsin team’s the informal ideologue whom the candidate had known for years.

“But neither of them suited me,” Yeltsin wrote. “To be honest, I was concerned about people’s purely irrational antipathy. It bothered me that both of them were seen as non-winners. That, and the main thing: I felt that by [choosing one,] I would severely disrupt some sort of balance of power on my team.” In the end, he chose Soviet–Afghan War veteran Alexander Rutskoy to be Russia’s first (and only) vice president.

Still, being bypassed for vice president meant that Khasbulatov would replace Yeltsin as Supreme Soviet chairman. At Russia’s first-ever presidential inauguration ceremony, he sat next to Yeltsin — a clear demonstration of his place in the new power hierarchy.

On the night of August 19, 1991, a group of party officials and generals calling themselves the State Committee on the State of Emergency launched a coup attempt against then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, declaring a state of emergency and announcing that they were now in charge. The putschists comprised the most conservative wing of the USSR’s leadership, and they saw the leadership of the Russian SFSR, headed by the extremely popular Boris Yeltsin, as their main enemy. Yeltsin’s supporters flocked to the Russian “White House,” the home of the Khasbulatov-led parliament.

Within hours, tanks had occupied the streets of Moscow, while armed troops took control of the city’s main TV broadcast studios and its main telegram offices. According to Yeltsin’s memoirs (.pdf), Khasbulatov was one of the few people who stayed with him throughout the attempted coup.

The standoff in Moscow lasted three days; the putschists ultimately didn’t dare order the army to take the White House by force. Nonetheless, three people died in clashes with the military: 37-year-old Vladimir Usov, 28-year-old Ilya Krichevsky, and 22-year-old Dmitry Komar.

Then feelings changed

The cracks in Khasbulatov’s support for Yeltsin first started showing in late 1991, when the Russian president started forming his first full-fledged government (the USSR was in its final days). Yeltsin assigned the task to Gennady Burbulis — Khasbulatov’s old foe — who assembled a team led by young economist Yegor Gaidar. According to journalist Oleg Poltsov, this was a major blow to Khasbulatov, who, until that point, had considered himself the president’s chief economist and who had likely been eyeing the prime ministership for himself. Once again, Yeltsin passed him over, just as he had done with the vice presidency.

The immediate effects of Gaidar’s free-market reforms, dubbed “shock therapy,” were mixed: on one hand, they helped the country overcome its budget deficit, but on the other, prices soared, people’s savings depreciated, and millions were driven into poverty. In 1992, Kharbulatov became one of the government’s main critics; over time, he turned against Yeltsin himself.

Now able to address the country from the parliamentary podium practically whenever he chose (meetings of the Congress of People’s Deputies were broadcast on television), Khasbulatov quickly became a national figure. Meanwhile, his influence among the deputies was growing. Dmitry Travin, a historian of the 1990s and a decided critic of Khasbulatov, described (.pdf) the speaker’s work as follows:

Khasbulatov’s work with the deputies was made easier by his Chechen heritage, his innate cunning, and his democratic orientation. [He was] a democrat but not a radical. An ethnic minority but also a member of the Moscow intelligentsia. Someone who could scheme, but who, for the time being, wasn’t overstepping the boundaries of acceptable behavior. In short, you couldn’t imagine anyone better.

Over time, Khasbulatov’s opponents began comparing him to Stalin (a clear allusion to his Caucasian heritage and his love of pipe smoking).

The constitutional crisis

The conflict between president and parliament only exacerbated the constitutional crisis. After the USSR collapsed, Russia continued to operate under the Constitution of the Russian SFSR, which had been ratified in 1978; with the Communist Party dissolved, however, parliament was left with almost unlimited power. At the same time, President Yeltsin controlled the country’s security agencies, as well as enjoying widespread public support. Each side had its own views about how the crisis should be solved: Yeltsin’s supporters wanted to make Russia into a presidential republic, while the deputies hoped to maintain the elevated power they now enjoyed.

An attempt to reach a compromise by holding a referendum on whether to call early presidential and parliamentary elections was unsuccessful: in April 1993, Russians voted against early elections for both the presidency and parliament. One week later, on May 1, the political crisis erupted into violent protests, leading to dozens of injuries.

Soon, Khasbulatov found an ally in Alexander Rutskoy, whom Yeltsin had chosen over him for vice president just a few years earlier. Together, the two men gradually grew closer to the national patriotic forces demanding the restoration of the Soviet Union (despite the fact that Khasbulatov had voted to ratify the Belovezh Accords, dissolving the USSR in 1991). In September 1993, the parliamentary speaker called on all former Soviet countries to come together to restore their “political, economic, and defense union.” He also began insulting Yeltsin in public, alluding, among other things, to the president’s alcoholism.

In September 1993, Yeltsin signed an order dissolving the Supreme Soviet. Under Khasbulatov’s leadership, most of the body’s deputies refused to obey and barricaded themselves in the parliament building. On October 3, the standoff turned violent once again, when pro-parliamentary protesters broke the siege and tried to take control of the Ostankino television station; Khasbulatov himself even called on the protesters to storm the Kremlin and send Yeltsin to Moscow's Matrosskaya Tishina prison. On October 4, troops loyal to the president took control of the White House. In those two days, according to a State Duma commission, 124 people in Moscow were killed and 348 were injured.

After the violence, Ruslan Khasbulatov and Alexander Rutskoy (whom the parliament declared Russia’s temporary acting president), as well as numerous other parliamentary opposition leaders, were arrested and taken to Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison. Soon after, Khasbulatov and Rutskoy were charged with organizing a mass riot. Thirty years later, on January 3, 2023, Rutskoy would refer to Khasbulatov as the person most to blame for the parliament’s defeat.

In total, law enforcement agencies arrested more than 100 people, many of whom were subsequently beaten, according to human rights activists at Memorial. They included pro-Yeltsin protesters as well as pro-parliament ones.

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In December 1993, Russia adopted a new constitution — the one still in use today — that expanded the presidency’s powers and reduced those of the parliament. Then, in February 1994, the newly elected State Duma passed a decree granting amnesty to those involved in the October crisis, freeing Khasbulatov — much to the Kremlin’s dismay.

From one crisis to the next

Khasbulatov’s defeat in October 1993 didn’t make him any less popular in his native Chechnya, which, at the time of his release, was in the midst of a socioeconomic and political crisis. In 1991, the republic’s leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, had declared independence from Russia, a claim that failed to gain recognition from the international community. Over time, a powerful opposition movement arose against Dudayev, complete with its own armed wing — and Khasbulatov appeared to be the perfect potential leader.

Upon his return to Chechnya, the former parliamentary speaker was “welcomed as a hero,” journalist Mikhail Fishman later wrote:

A serious politician, an economics professor, and one of Russia’s top figures in the recent past, in addition to his repression by Yeltsin — Chechen society, disappointed in Dudayev, pinned its hopes on Khasbulatov. Khasbulatov traveled around Chechnya, and 200,000–300,000 people came out to rallies in his support.

The former parliamentary leader soon founded the Peacekeeping Mission of Professor Khasbulatov. “By the fall of 1994, Khasbulatov had become so popular that it seemed the days of Dudayev’s rule must be numbered,” said Chechen journalist Musa Muradov.

Ultimately, however, Russia’s leadership in Moscow, remembering Khasbulatov’s two-year campaign against Yeltsin, decided to pursue regime change in Chechnya itself — first by initiating a violent coup (which failed), and then by sending federal troops into the republic, launching the first Chechen War. In September 1995, when Chechnya was embroiled in combat, Yeltsin unexpectedly brought up Khasbulatov's name:

He was very popular in Chechnya. Why bring up the past? We ought to invite him in to talk. Besides, I think he’s gotten a lot smarter since then.

That same year, Khasbulatov planned to run in an election organized on by the Russian authorities to choose a new leader for the Caucasian republic. In the end, though, he withdrew from the race.

In 2003, he once again discussed plans to run to become Chechnya’s leader — and once again changed his mind. That election was won by Akhmat Kadyrov, who would later be succeeded by his son, Ramzan Kadyrov. In 2021, Khasbulatov would endorse the younger Kadyrov for re-election. Kadyrov Jr., who still rules the republic today, called Khasbulatov’s death an “irreparable loss” for the Chechen people.

Khasbulatov served as the head of the World Economics Department at the Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics. He spoke frequently about the events of 1991–1993, blaming the crisis on Yeltsin and the reformers from Gaidar’s team. He lived in the same Moscow apartment from the early 1990s until his death on January 3, 2023.

Story by Dmitry Kartsev

Translation by Sam Breazeale