In December 1993, Yeltsin should have been riding high. He had eliminated the old Supreme Soviet and imprisoned his nemeses, Ruslan Khasbulatov and his former vice-president, Aleksandr Rutskoi. He had secured passage of his Constitution, which accorded him extraordinary powers vis-à-vis all other political institutions, made him virtually unimpeachable, and enshrined the approach to center-periphery relations and nation building for which he had been pushing. But that is not quite how Yeltsin saw it. Although he celebrated passage of the Constitution, he was apparently surprised by the results of the elections to the Duma: the anti-regime nationalists and communists won a substantial plurality. Yeltsin did not comment on the December 12 election results until ten days later. Then he criticized the “democrats” for their disunity, the opposition for their extremism, the government for the way in which it had implemented policy, and himself for having lost touch with the people.

The memoir literature gives us a fuller understanding of Yeltsin's reaction to this frustration. The Russian president was very pleased with his accretion of formal powers and with the adoption – at long last! – of his preferred Constitution. But he was distressed by the dramatic deflation of his popularity with the mass public. He had exerted great energy to gain military support for subduing the Supreme Soviet by force – and even then it was a close call. He knew that he might not be able to count on such support in the future. Moreover, public opinion polls revealed a backlash against him for having used military force in October 1993.