Yeltsin: A Life

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Governing the State

Weekdays and most Saturdays through 1996, President Yeltsin got up at five A.M., did his ablutions, breakfasted, eyeballed briefs and a press digest, and was on the job by 8:30. From Barvikha-4 he commuted five miles eastward on the Rublëvo-Uspenskoye Highway and through the pine-forested corridor along the Moskva River where the Soviet upper crust had their dachas and the New Russians were beginning to put up more commodious dwellings. In Moscow, his car whisked him inbound on “the government route” (pravitel’stvennaya trassa) for official limousines and cavalcades, down Kutuzov Prospect and Novyi Arbat Street, and up a ramp into the Kremlin through the Borovitskii Gate.¹

Writ small, Boris Yeltsin’s workplace was the vaulted, wainscoted office in Building No. 1, handed over to him by Gorbachev in 1991. As a personal touch, he had the desk decorated with a lamp and writing set made of turquoise-hued Urals malachite.² He described the room in retirement in hushed tones and in the present tense. To the left as he occupies his chair is the console through which he can dial any member of his government on a hotline. The wood surface before him he knows like the back of his hand. If one file folder is awry, “I experience an unaccountable irritation.”³ The shipshape folders, readied before his arrival by his head of chancery, Valerii Semenchenko, are color-coded: In the red ones, to the side of the control panel, lie decrees, letters, and papers that are to be read and signed at once; in the white, in the center, there is lesser correspondence needing his attention; and in the green folders, on the right, he finds laws voted by parliament and requests for clemency.

As Yeltsin’s loving account conveys, his workplace writ large was the executive branch of the state. The white folders, on which he makes a checkmark as he riffles through them, were a porthole:

The green folders captivate him least, since they mostly originate in the legislature. The papers in the red folders, holding draft edicts, are the business end of government:

Like so much in Russia after communism, this was a habitat in transition—partly continuous with the past, partly reformed, partly in disrepair. Yeltsin was required by circumstances to devote inordinate effort to keeping his state vital, to ensuring that the wheels did not fall off or the engine freeze up. But he also wanted to steer the vehicle to make his anti-revolutionary revolution. And this was an exercise that stretched him as few others did. The pulverizing effects of the Soviet collapse had made the post-communist state an object to be governed and not only a subject of governance. Yeltsin was a wizard at exerting personal control over the machine. He was less proficient at using it to effect social change.

Yeltsin cadged many particulars of formal institutional design from abroad.⁵ His model of leadership after communism, however, was a homegrown syncretism of ingredients shaped as much by usage and improvisation as by laws and organization charts. It borrowed from three wells of inspiration.

The first and for Yeltsin the definitive source was his sense of historical mission, which linked up with his success script and expansive sense of self. A presidential form of government, he exclaimed at his first inauguration, had resonance in a country whose populace had always been voiceless. By aggregating political power and personifying it in a freely chosen individual, presidentialism would engender “a voluntary interdependence” between leader and led, as there never was under the tsars or the Communist Party. His election was a wager on reform: “The citizens… have selected not only a personality but the road down which Russia is to go… the road of democracy, reforms, and rebirth of human dignity.”⁶

When Yeltsin spoke of carrying out the mandate, he frequently dramatized himself in the third person. His October 1991 speech previewing shock therapy is a top-flight example. Russia and its leader, he said, were at a branching point where a choice about trajectory had to be made. “Your president” had already chosen. “I have never sought out easy paths, but I can see with clarity that the coming months will be the most difficult for me. If I have your support and faith, I am ready to travel this road with you to the end.”⁷ A strong head of state would proceed down the chosen highway in lockstep with his fellow travelers in society. Their support, given in a democratic election, raised him above all other servants of the state and gave him the cape of legitimacy, as it had in his battle with Mikhail Gorbachev and the CPSU.

Some inspiration flowed, counterintuitively, from a second source: Russia’s monarchic heritage. Yeltsin as a reincarnation of the tsar was a recurrent motif in the discourse of the 1990s, as it once was for Stalin.⁸ Gorbachev, we have seen, attributed to his nemesis the ability “to conduct himself like a tsar,” a knack Gorbachev knew he could not equal. Some scholars have referred to Yeltsin pejoratively as “Tsar Boris” and an “elected monarch” ringed by courtiers and lackeys.⁹ Some Yeltsin supporters at the time put a positive spin on the royalist argot. Boris Nemtsov, the reformist governor of Nizhnii Novgorod (Gorky from 1932 to 1990), who was to move to Moscow in Yeltsin’s second term, was the leading popularizer. He sketched the myth in expansive and flexible strokes:

Nemtsov was cavalier in his historiography: No factual tsar hailed from a peasant hut or the Urals. If utterances like his had little to offer as doctrine, they did conform to canonical themes in Russian political culture. In particular, they consorted with the timeless idea of the nation’s leader as a father figure both authoritative and possessing the common touch. Yeltsin as president looked the part, up to a point. Like a storybook tsar, he asserted the right, when justice and raison d’état prescribed, to buck parchment rules (by pardoning reprobates), bureaucratic formalities (by short-circuiting the chain of command), and precedent (by countermanding decrees he had authored). With citizens and midlevel officials, his bearing was regal—posture straight, chin held high, gestures spare, manner of speech magisterial.¹¹

Yeltsin’s take on president-as-tsar was mixed. He did speak openly about his admiration for Peter the Great and made several public references to himself as Boris I.¹² The word was sometimes used nonchalantly in family circles.¹³ In closeted settings, he a few times donned the mantle, as when, on a state visit to Sweden, he ribbed King Carl Gustav about the lengthiness of the seven-course palace banquet. “The king answered, ‘You have to understand, Mr. President, that we have a certain ritual here, and it has been observed since the thirteenth century.’ And Yeltsin replied jovially, ‘Listen, you are a king and I am a tsar, and you tell me the two of us cannot solve such a problem?’” Carl Gustav had the wait staff speed up the feast.¹⁴ On occasions, Yeltsin would toss out the trope of the tsar to reprimand employees. He once chastised a cheeky press secretary with the words, “Go and do what the tsar has ordered.”¹⁵ And the figure of speech in which he and members of his staff belittled matters not worth his personal attention was that they were “not the tsar’s business” (ne tsarskoye delo).

Yeltsin in the end recognized that the partial democratization of Russia made it impolitic to apply monarchism literally. As he knew, the plasticity that was the great boon of the monarchial legend was its great bane as well. Elected monarchy is an oxymoron. Kings are chosen on the hereditary principle from a royal caste, train for the throne from birth, and sit on it until death. Yeltsin was elected to a fixed term and knew that he would have to leave his post. In an exchange with me about the subject, he saw no way to conciliate tsardom with democracy: “How can a tsar lead in a democratic society? There are certain democratic institutions through which you have to act.”¹⁶ When subalterns pressed him too hard to address a ticklish issue, he was known to turn them aside with the question, “What do you think I am, a tsar?”

A third template for directorship of the post-communist state came from Russia’s recent national past, the Soviet period, and from Yeltsin’s personal past. The reflex here was to the CPSU boss he was in Sverdlovsk and Moscow.

Like the provincial party prefect of yore, Yeltsin as president felt qualified, when the spirit moved him, to intervene on any issue. His onetime economic adviser Aleksandr Livshits testifies he had “the mentality of the obkom first secretary” in assuming “the right and the duty to make decisions about urgent questions then and there.”¹⁷ The interventions that counted most, as in the Soviet system, were those given verbally. The richly experienced Viktor Chernomyrdin knew the norm: “The verbal assignments the premier received [from Yeltsin]… were carried out strictly, which cannot be said about decrees or even the written assignments of the president. That is to say, as things had been signified in the [party] apparatus, words spoken orally outranked pieces of paper.”¹⁸ As in the Sverdlovsk obkom and the Moscow gorkom, Yeltsin did not sweat the small stuff of public policy, the technicalities of administration, and the legal niceties, all of which were best farmed out to specialists. He “understood the limits of what he understood,” Yegor Gaidar has said.¹⁹ He would “‘grab’ a question on the wing… get a feel for problems without subjecting them to long and detailed study,” to cite Boris Fëdorov, who held several economic portfolios in the first term.²⁰ Like the party secretary, Yeltsin in the Kremlin wanted to leave his door open to petitioners and not filter the upbound flow of information and advice. To quote Livshits again, “For him to say to people who made overtures to him that he had to check with Livshits or [Georgii] Satarov [another Kremlin aide] was as good as saying he did not have vlast’ [power], and that was something he could never admit.”²¹

Yeltsin also bore a resemblance to a CPSU first secretary in swinging the big stick of control over cadres.²² Anyone was expendable if he connived against the president, was flagrantly inefficient, or if Yeltsin had simply had his fill of him or wanted to reshuffle his team. Upon removal, an official would not normally be granted an audience to hear why. He could consider himself lucky if he got a telephone call giving him the news and wishing him well, and luckier still if Yeltsin found him a new position.²³ On average, deputy premiers in Yeltsin’s first term lasted sixteen months; ordinary members of the Council of Ministers lasted twenty-three months. By the time he faced re-election in 1996, Yeltsin was on his seventh finance minister, his sixth minister of economics and trade, his fifth minister of regional development, and his fourth ministers of agriculture and energy. In the national-security realm, he had one defense minister and two foreign ministers in term one, but three chairmen of the Security Council, four heads of state security, and four interior ministers.²⁴

Yeltsin, like many partocrats in their day, turned courtesies and picayune favors to his advantage. He did it not only to build personal fealty, as had been the practice in Soviet days, but to paper over cracks in the post-Soviet institutional edifice. During the strife with Ruslan Khasbulatov and the Supreme Soviet, he played this card adroitly, especially with holdovers from the communist establishment:

Parliament at first had an independent apparatus for granting supplies and perquisites to members, as did the prime minister’s office and the judiciary. In November 1993, a month after coming down on the parliamentary rebels, Yeltsin centralized the servicing of the federal government under one roof, a unified Presidential Business Department with more than 30,000 employees. The Fourth Chief Directorate of the old Soviet Ministry of Health, of which he had been so critical when in opposition, had been under presidential control since 1991. It was renamed the department’s Government Medical Center.²⁶ Yeltsin selected Pavel Borodin, a Siberian city mayor championed by Aleksandr Korzhakov, to head the department and exhorted him to “feed the administration [executive office] and the government well.”²⁷ The department’s budgetary demands “grew in geometrical progression” the moment Borodin was appointed, says Boris Fëdorov, the finance minister in 1993.²⁸ The Kremlin quartermaster also showed great inventiveness in giving his unit a market aspect—primarily to finance operations and special projects such as the Kremlin reconstruction, although many suspected it was also to provide emoluments to officials. The business department not only operated facilities taken from its Soviet antecedents (such as office and apartment buildings, the TsKB and other clinics, hotels, farms, construction organizations, and ateliers) but diversified its funding by going into for-profit healthcare, banking, commercial real estate, and oil exports.²⁹ Borodin spent the next six years on Yeltsin’s behalf meting out perks—offices, apartments and dachas, travel and vacation vouchers, hospital stays, and even books and cellphones—to lawmakers, bureaucrats, and judges.

Borodin—known to one and all as Pal Palych, a contraction of his first name and patronymic—was a bon vivant and reputed to be the best joketeller in the government, able to hold his ground with professional comedians. He emceed many presidential lunches and dinners and was the only official permitted to tell gags at them. The function of the Ministry of Privileges, as the press christened his agency, was no laughing matter. For the good of Yeltsin and democracy, it systematized service provision for the elite on a scale surpassing Soviet precedent. The soil was fertile: Housing and other goods and services were starting to be distributed commercially in Russia; state officials could not afford the best of them on their wages; and any revision of individual status still required a sheaf of permissions. “Goodies” that could be granted could also be withheld. When Yeltsin wanted to turn up the political heat on the Duma in the summer of 1995 and the spring of 1996, deputies were put on notice that, were the Duma to be dissolved, they would lose their offices and attendants, franking privileges, and VIP apartments in Moscow.

None of this establishes that Yeltsin governed as a CPSU secretary reborn, pure and simple. Regional party bosses until the 1980s, while all-powerful in their fiefdoms, reported to the general secretary, and that was a party role Yeltsin had never filled. Yeltsin as president took orders from no one and owed his post to the electorate. His refusal to be over-absorbed in detail was a character trait over and above what he learned in his party career. Some of the administrative levers associated with the Soviet partocracy, such as the personnel weapon and administration of perks, have been found in other times and places—for example, in the heyday of machine politics in big American cities. The Soviet formula was an alloy of machine techniques with the police state, the planned economy, and communist ideology, and those combinatory variables were absent after 1991. Yeltsin either would not or could not lock up dissidents, censor the press, or take 99.99 percent of the votes in a single-candidate election, and he had no hard-and-fast ideology and no propaganda mechanism at his fingertips. In the privileges area, he stayed aloof from the dross of Pavel Borodin’s decisions.³⁰ The operation was constrained by a body of legislation on official benefits and by muckraking journalism, neither of them operative under the communist regime. Only when a good was in very short stock and the queue was long—state dachas are the best example—did Borodin and his office have much of an ability to play favorites.³¹ Once out of government service in the 1990s, most at the level of government minister, presidential adviser, or provincial governor were left to their own devices, without a helping or a hindering hand from Building No. 1.

The historicist, monarchial, and apparatchik paradigms all underplay the gnarly complexity of Yeltsin’s part in governing the state. Of the three, the first, with its sense of mission, is closest to his self-conception. But how effective was the Yeltsin recipe of governance in practice? As an oppositionist, he had presented himself as an improvement on Gorbachev, whose means of rule were rusting out. In power, he rammed through a constitution vesting him with the prerogatives he had lacked until then. The optimist would have forecast that state behavior in the new Russia would be more proactive and coherent than in the old, and it was some of the time but not consistently so. Presidential leadership was constrained by the disorganization of Yeltsin’s surroundings and by institutional counterweights. It was further influenced by his own conception of politics in an era of transition.

The results were there to see inside his organizational home, the executive branch in Moscow. Yeltsin was as well-spoken as anybody on the pathologies of government after communism. He titled his maiden state-of-the-country address to parliament in 1994 “On Strengthening the Russian State.” It began with “the gap between constitutional principles and the real practice” of rule. Russia had repudiated autocracy but not found a workable replacement, and this was undermining the whole course of reform:

The Yeltsin constitution of 1993 cleared up the struggle between the executive and the legislative wings. Other than excising the vice presidency, which Aleksandr Rutskoi had made a base for attacking the president, it did little to bring order to the executive. One option would have been to snuff out its structural duality. Gennadii Burbulis had wanted to scrap the office of prime minister and make the president a U.S.-type chief executive, with agency heads reporting to him and forming a presidential cabinet. He saw Yeltsin’s combination of the posts of president and premier in the autumn of 1991 as a first step toward realizing his goal. Initially open to the suggestion, Yeltsin was unalterably against it by mid-1992, wanting someone else do the legwork on reform and be a lightning rod. As Burbulis put it in an interview, “The president’s path [Yeltsin thought] would be the main source of will on questions of direction. The difficulties, pain, and burdensome decisions at any given moment would be undertaken by others, who could be removed [if they failed].”³³ The new constitution reaffirmed the separation between a popularly elected president and a prime minister confirmed by parliament and in day-to-day charge of the civilian bureaucracy and the budget. The arrangement resembled the Gaullist Fifth Republic in France. In a way, it also honored the Soviet legacy: For most of the communist period, different individuals served as general secretary of the Communist Party and chairman of the USSR government, with the former, like the post-Soviet Russian president, very much in the driver’s seat.

The dispersive undercurrents within the state apparatus were never enough to prod Yeltsin into radical action. The bureaucracy, no longer the handmaiden of the CPSU apparatus, and with its economic monopoly burst by market reform, seemed to him a headless monster and not an immediate threat. Making it less corrupt and more responsive were desirable objectives but low on his to-do list. A ranking official who was caught red-handed peddling influence stood to be fired. In August 1993, for example, Yeltsin released Viktor Barannikov, the minister of security, for taking bribes. Barannikov then switched sides in the constitutional dogfight and was arrested after the October violence. In November 1994 Yeltsin removed Deputy Defense Minister Matvei Burlakov, who had been accused in the press of profiteering from the evacuation of troops from Germany, but the general was never prosecuted. On systemic graft, kickbacks, and falsification, Yeltsin promulgated ameliorative decrees to little effect. To the demand of Grigorii Yavlinskii, the leader of the liberal Yabloko Party, that he make a full-scale attack on corruption as a condition of Yavlinskii supporting him in the 1996 presidential election, Yeltsin came back with a shrug of the shoulders: “So what can I do about it? This is Russia, after all.”³⁴

Boris Yeltsin as decision maker should be measured by an appropriate yardstick. Innovative statesmen in democracies or half-democracies do not address the dilemmas of the day singlehandedly. They identify problems, stir the pot, and begin to act. When followers join in, it may mainly serve the leader’s requirements and ramify his influence; empower followers to mold the relationship, so that leaders wind up following the followers; or mutually empower, as it was with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition in the United States in the 1930s. The most successful leaders respond to the material and psychic needs of followers and motivate them to invest in the shared cause and to help fix its terms.³⁵

The early Yeltsin fostered mutual empowerment with acolytes on the street and in the halls of power. Once in the Kremlin, he still did, only with the difference that his empowerment of others tended to be ambiguous and, one could say, schizoid—the authorization of persons with multiple outlooks to speak and act in his name, either serially or simultaneously. The president’s team was deficient in teamwork.

Captaincy of the team was not up for debate. An underperforming player might be slighted for months before Yeltsin let him go. In July 1994, aboard a steamship on the Yenisei River in Siberia with the governor of Krasnoyarsk province, Valerii Zubov, Yeltsin was out of sorts at japes made by press secretary Vyacheslav Kostikov and ordered him thrown into the drink, fully clothed. Pavel Borodin rescued Kostikov with only his self-regard harmed.³⁶ Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev was on the receiving end in 1995. Yeltsin complained of him at press conferences in July and September. When they traveled to the United States in October, the Americans were astonished to see Kozyrev disembark the presidential airplane in New York through a rear door. He was assigned to the hindmost car in the motorcade and forbidden to accompany Yeltsin to the United Nations, after which he “went forlornly off to his hotel.”³⁷ In January 1996 Yeltsin replaced Kozyrev with Yevgenii Primakov.

In meetings scheduled for briefing purposes, Yeltsin never tipped off the questions he would ask of the reporting official. No exception was made for his Tuesday A.M. update from the prime minister, the number two in the Russian state. “Prompting would not have corresponded to the style of Boris Yeltsin. He wanted the weekly performance to have some suspense about it, something unexpected for the prime minister. The latter, of course, was not overjoyed.”³⁸ The prime minister had the same right to ask questions as the president, and Yeltsin had no interest in seeing them before the meeting. In one-on-one meetings the president initiated, he would call for a summary of the recommended course, then ask to hear in a nutshell which pieces of it were spornyi, debatable—likely to cause implementation and political problems. If the discussion had been initiated by a subordinate, it was not unusual for Yeltsin to stare poker-faced for most of the encounter. I heard in interviews that the guest often felt as if trapped in a magnetic field, or like a rabbit in the gaze of a boa constrictor that could strike without warning. Kostikov convincingly attributes Yeltsin’s silence at many meetings to his work in the CPSU apparatus, “when you could pay with your career for a careless word or an overly frank glance,” as well as to an instinct to protect yourself from people “who are prepared to change their opinion depending on the eyebrow movements of a powerful person.”³⁹ But there was personal style at work, too. Yeltsin reflected on it in the last volume of his memoirs: “In conversation, I love sharp turns, gaps, and unexpected transitions. I hold to my own rhythm and cannot stand stupid monotony.”⁴⁰

At meetings with many policymakers present, Yeltsin kept them on their toes by arbitrarily assigning seats at the table and sometimes changing the order at the last second, moving them toward or away from his chair. If he had already made a decision on an issue, he might hear out advice on how to do it better but hated to be contradicted. Were he to revise a position, it was by stealing the critic’s thunder without explicitly endorsing the critique: He “came out in public support of the stand he had previously spurned, without naming names.”⁴¹ During a discussion he thought unproductive, Yeltsin could vacate the room to stunning effect, leaving the others to cool their heels for twenty or thirty minutes. The signing of a memorandum or position paper—though not of a decree or law, which would have undergone laborious review—could evoke “the Yeltsin pause.” The president would take up to sixty seconds to reread the text word for word, pan over the spectators, and then roll up his shirt sleeve and scratch out his signature with a fountain pen. There were days when Yeltsin, pen uncapped, spied a problem in the document and discarded it. The sponsors would go scurrying for cover, and Yeltsin would take the unsigned document away with him.

Another expression of this same approach was Yeltsin’s acting as a court of appeal for suppliants. It was a partial continuation both of his populism, which implied listening to voices from below, and of his CPSU bossism, which gave the chief the right to settle disputes over resources. Yeltsin acted in this mode with the greatest frequency in his first several years in the Kremlin. “Witnesses say,” wrote one political journalist, “that from morning to evening Yeltsin’s reception area is under attack by foot-messengers and applicants with draft decrees in their pockets.” Since there were many more requests than Yeltsin could give thoughtful consideration to, the process let well-placed bureaucrats decide whom to give “access to the body” (Yeltsin’s) and which edicts to give priority to, with no one looking out for coherency and comprehensibility. “They commission expert reviews of the drafts and assess their results. They ‘report’ drafts for [the president’s] signature, correcting the texts by their lights. As a result, today’s decrees often contradict yesterday’s decrees and the-day-before-yesterday’s.”⁴²

Mindful of the danger, managers on the Kremlin staff tried throughout the first term to rationalize the process by restricting access to Yeltsin by suitors for loans, subventions, and pork-barrel projects. Decree No. 226 in February 1995, written by Aleksandr Livshits and Anatolii Chubais, lifted the bar by requiring that any presidential decision touching on the budget kitty first be authorized by the Council of Ministers. Yeltsin found ways around this rigmarole, mostly by issuing offhand rulings. The Presidential Business Department and the Center for Presidential Priorities, headed by Nikolai Malyshev, provided convenient off-the-books funds, and provincial governors could always be enmeshed in the same spirit. Yevgenii Yasin, Yeltsin’s economics minister in 1995, shortly after adoption of Decree No. 226, protested a promise to extend financial credits for retooling to the Krasnodar Automotive Works. Yeltsin remonstrated, “And who is president of Russia? They have told me you are a saboteur, and now that is obvious. I gave you an instruction. How to carry it out is your problem.” A loophole was eventually found and the loan funded.⁴³

The phenomenon was larger than Yeltsin. It was rooted also in the governing cohort he assembled, which sector by sector and across them all was fractious and fluctuating. Why so? Some of it was out of Yeltsin’s hands, in that he had to split the difference over personnel and policy with other forces in the political system. Inside the executive, the CPSU horse collar was not succeeded by the norms of rule of law and collective responsibility that prevail in the cabinets and bureaucracies of established democracies. Faced with uncertainty, government bureaus strove for autarky, and jurisdictional boundaries among them, not crisp to begin with, were imprecise in the extreme—“everyone was interested in everything.”⁴⁴ The legislature was another serious constraint on Yeltsin. The Congress of People’s Deputies was the main factor behind the removal of economic liberals like Yegor Gaidar and the promotion of more conservative figures like Viktor Chernomyrdin. Although the State Duma had fewer powers than the congress, Yeltsin continued to make concessions, “willing to sacrifice… executive officials at critical junctures in order to placate a parliament that was hostile to zealous reformers.”⁴⁵ This happened after both the 1993 and the 1995 Duma elections. Gaidar left the government for the second time after the first; Chubais and Foreign Minister Kozyrev were among those demoted after the second.

But Yeltsin and his preferences were also centrally involved in building disunity into the executive. For one thing, he liked to take his chances with individuals whose egos were as strong as his. He several times told Chubais that “he really liked working with bright people and even with people brighter than he.”⁴⁶ He would never select a collaborator who was after his throne or discourteous toward him. Within those doughy limits, personal qualities weighed almost as much as opinions. Policy intellectuals and semi-intellectuals, red directors from the planned economy, ex-apparatchiks, journalists, security officers, oligarchs and their tagalongs—Yeltsin found room for all of them under his institutional big tent. Were someone not to work out, he would be handed his walking papers, and that would be that.

Yeltsin, furthermore, custom-built some positions for individuals whose contribution or company he valued, and when he did so he gave scant thought to the whole chessboard. In 1990–91, still head of the RSFSR parliament, he designated a Supreme Economic Council as a consolation prize for Mikhail Bocharov, who had been a candidate for prime minister; Bocharov quit after failing for five months to get an appointment with him to discuss the council’s program.⁴⁷ Yeltsin in 1990 gave Gennadii Burbulis the title of “authorized representative of the chairman of the Supreme Soviet”; in 1991–92 it was “state secretary of Russia.” Undefined in legislation, both offices amounted to carrying out those tasks Yeltsin commissioned him to do.⁴⁸ For almost a year in 1992–93, the government had two press agencies, one headed by his former Moscow workfellow Mikhail Poltoranin and the other by the jurist and journalist Mikhail Fedotov. This situation was the upshot of Yeltsin’s desire to protect Poltoranin from the Supreme Soviet and of some prevarication on relations between the state and the mass media.⁴⁹ From 1992 to 1994, Shamil Tarpishchev, the skipper of the Russian tennis team and Yeltsin’s coach and doubles partner, served as presidential “adviser for sports and physical culture” and had a Kremlin office.

Yeltsin’s creed of personal independence inclined him against micromanagement of bench members’ discharge of their duties. He would speak briefly with a new appointee, ask him to check in on issues of principle only, and leave him to go to it. Presidential assistants submitted weekly reports of one or two pages; most others turned to him only on time-urgent matters and only with short messages.⁵⁰ This did not mean that the appointee could breathe easily, for the president’s eye was peeled: “Although Yeltsin rarely gave concrete assignments to workers in his apparatus, he watched carefully to see how self-reliant and energetic these workers were and rewarded such self-reliance.”⁵¹ Self-reliance was no salvation if political breakers were encountered, and it was secondary to presidential wishes, if and when these could be ascertained. The most benignant outcome would be like that accomplished by Viktor Chernomyrdin: “He [Yeltsin] did not interfere in my work… or in what the government was supposed to do. But I did not do anything without clearing the basic questions with him.”⁵² Any number of others did not thread the needle as adeptly.

A panoply of points of view nearby had additional utility for Yeltsin. In an overloaded and underpowered state, redundancy and rapid turnover provided some protection against local failure: If the first underboss and his outfit let you down, the second or third might be better. This is how Oleg Poptsov explains the anomaly of Russia having several armies and quasiarmies (the military, MVD, border guards, railway troops, and so on) when it could not really afford one of them. “It is all for the same reason: because of hesitation, because of uncertainty. If one does not come to your defense, you can always call on another.”⁵³ In a fractionated society, it was apropos, the president felt, that the executive and not just the legislature contain representatives of the fractions. “I had to go this way,” Yeltsin explained to me in 2001. “It should have been so. The situation [at the top] mirrored the interplay of forces in the country.”⁵⁴ The Yeltsinesque system of checks and balances was there less to shield society from state encroachment, as The Federalist Papers told Americans how to do in the 1780s, than to sub for a stunted civil society, shield the sovereign from state dysfunction, and facilitate divide-and-rule in the innards of the government.

In economic policy, even as he gave the liberals license to marketize and privatize, Yeltsin was determined to find a place in his government for more conservative voices from the Soviet industrial conglomerate, and was unapologetic about the conflicting signals it sent about his policy and the standing of the prime minister. Red director Yurii Skokov, whose specialty had been power systems for spacecraft, was first deputy premier in 1990–91, secretary of a presidential board on federalism in 1991–92, and secretary of the president’s Security Council in 1992–93. He was a backstairs negotiator with the putschists in August 1991 and was distinguished by a go-slow economic policy and political ambition. Wrote Yeltsin:

Yeltsin lost faith in Skokov and fired him only when he dissented from Kremlin policy toward the parliament in the spring of 1993.

Chernomyrdin, who got the prime minister’s job in December 1992, would not have lasted for almost two-thirds of the Yeltsin presidency if he had not been forbearing toward his leader’s juggling of people and interests and had not displayed some of the same aptitude himself. The construction organizer Oleg Lobov, from Sverdlovsk, acquired some of Skokov’s and Deputy Premier Georgii Khizha’s military-industrial responsibilities and fought to decelerate the privatization program. Lobov wrote several memorandums to this effect to Yeltsin: “He never expressed dissatisfaction about what I wrote. He never said I was not right. No, he was surprised that my memos were not moving forward or being looked into.”⁵⁶ Metallurgist Oleg Soskovets was named the ranking of the deputy premiers in the autumn of 1993, answering for heavy industry and the defense complex and chairing the cabinet’s committee on daily “operational questions.” He lobbied unabashedly for state credits, bailouts, and tariff barriers and, through Korzhakov, had a privileged relationship with Yeltsin. He was a thorn in Chernomyrdin’s side until his dismissal in June 1996.⁵⁷

President Yeltsin was not unobservant of the hazards of his polycentric modus operandi. Beginning in 1991, he deployed several safeguards to prevent balkanization from degenerating into chaos. One of those was to declare proprietary rights over the ultrasensitive precinct of national security and foreign policy and put it out of bounds to all but him and the agency heads. Yeltsin met one-on-one weekly with his foreign minister, spy chief, and police ministers and shut the prime minister and most of the Kremlin staff out of those colloquies.

Another low-cost response was to infiltrate protégés from earlier in his career into strategic positions, as Soviet party bosses had always done. Because Yeltsin’s term as head of the Moscow party organization had been so brief and doleful, few products of it worked in his presidential office. The main exceptions were Viktor Ilyushin (who started with him in Sverdlovsk), Valerii Semenchenko, and Mikhail Poltoranin. The best pool Yeltsin had at his disposal was the “Sverdlovsk diaspora,” the old-boy network whence he drew his chief of staff from 1991 to 1993 (Yurii Petrov), his senior presidential assistant from 1991 to 1996 (Ilyushin), the head of the Kremlin business department before Pavel Borodin (Fëdor Morshchakov), and a representative in the Council of Ministers and Security Council (the peripatetic Oleg Lobov).⁵⁸ Gennadii Burbulis, head speech writer Lyudmila Pikhoya, and her colleague Aleksandr Il’in were Sverdlovskers but low-ranking members of the professoriate—advantageously for them, at Yeltsin’s alma mater, UPI.⁵⁹ “You feel more confident, you feel certain warmth, among people from your area [zemlyaki],” says Pikhoya.⁶⁰ Yeltsin’s reliance on people from his province of birth, though, was quite limited, since he wanted to avoid charges of cronyism and to be free to recruit outside the group. Burbulis left office by the end of 1992, Petrov by early 1993, and the others followed. No new Sverdlovskers were brought into the administration after then.

A related habit for Yeltsin was to find new favorites. These might be all-round comrades and purveyors of good cheer with whom he had ryumochnyye otnosheniya (shot-glass relations); examples would be Soskovets or Vladimir Shumeiko, a first deputy premier in 1992–93 and chairman of the Federation Council in 1994–95. Or they might be Young Turks who pushed reforms—like Anatolii Chubais, Boris Fëdorov, and Sergei Shakhrai. As a show of favor, Yeltsin several times followed up on a Fëdorov complaint by telephoning Chernomyrdin, with Fëdorov seated in the office. Fëdorov saw it a sign of confidence when Yeltsin did not tell Chernomyrdin that Fëdorov was there and made gargoyle faces at him during the conversation.⁶¹

A corrective to personalization and governmental disconnectedness would have been a collegial entity for sharing information, arbitrating conflicts, and inculcating common purpose. Yeltsin was stubbornly against such a linchpin—as should come as no shock, given his individualism and his intuitive approach to political action. Acquaintance with the communist era’s plenteous underbrush of committees, bureaus, and secretariats seems to have helped sour him on communal decision making. This aversion shows the selectiveness of his attitude toward the Soviet legacy.

During the seven months in 1991–92 when Yeltsin did double duty as prime minister, it was up to him to chair sessions of the Council of Ministers. He had nothing but distaste for the unwieldy council and the eye-glazing detail that marked its meetings. Several months of watching him sleepwalk through the proceedings won Burbulis and Gaidar over to two events per week—a working session on Tuesdays over sandwiches and tea, which Yeltsin did not attend, and one with him on Thursdays, to approve the decisions made on Tuesday. Yeltsin was relieved to make Burbulis and, after the spring of 1992, Gaidar his proxy for cabinet paperwork.⁶² The Yeltsin constitution gave the president the right, which he wrote into the draft, to chair any sitting of the Council of Ministers. He did it once in a blue moon after 1993 (and only twice in the second term), and then it was mostly to make announcements for the television cameras. Size and practice disqualified the Council of Ministers as a serious decision maker, as was the case with its Soviet predecessor. The fifty or sixty officials in attendance sat in rows facing forward, like pupils in a classroom. All remarks were made from a microphone and lectern at the front of the hall. Votes were almost never taken.

A more propitious attempt to rejoin the threads was the Russian State Council of 1991–92. The council was born in July 1991 as the brainchild of Burbulis and a subset of the Westernizing intellectuals who had congregated around Yeltsin during his drive for power. They wanted a summit-level panel that would deliberate direction and priorities and not bog down in detail. Members were to have entrée to the president as individuals; as a group, they were to sit down with him in the chair to consider the big picture. Burbulis intended to make the State Council the modernizing center of policy making and to have its role as clearing house for ideas given constitutional sanction. The council was “to work out for the head of state questions about the country’s development overall and gather under its roof people of the same turn of mind who were scattered around other structures.”⁶³

The core members of the State Council were Burbulis and five “state counselors” whom Yeltsin made responsible for reform sectors: Yekaterina Lakhova (women’s and social issues), Sergei Shakhrai (legal affairs), Yurii Skokov (defense), Sergei Stankevich (politics), and Galina Starovoitova (nationalities). Burbulis, Shakhrai, Stankevich, and Starovoitova were progressive academics; Lakhova, a pediatrician from Sverdlovsk, was a political centrist; Skokov was a secretive conservative. Added to them were five cabinet ministers of liberal outlook.⁶⁴ Yegor Gaidar and Vice President Rutskoi, fearful of exclusion, asked for the right to participate as well. Burbulis, who had begged off the job of organizing Yeltsin’s presidential office, was not the optimal salesman for the council. Yurii Petrov, Viktor Ilyushin, and the veterans of the CPSU apparatus to whom Yeltsin had turned for assistance gave it a chilly reception, as did ministers and parliamentarians who stood to give up powers.⁶⁵

The backbiting would have been extraneous unless Yeltsin had the reservations he did. They went back to the rationale for the State Council, which, as Stankevich was later to say frankly, was “to make up for [Yeltsin’s] shortcomings” and for his “inadequate vision of the future.”⁶⁶ Getting his back up at the tutorship, Yeltsin waffled. He would not commit to a firm schedule or appoint more counselors, and missed most of the early sessions. This left Burbulis to lead them, which it was hard to do when political heavyweights sat around the table. Yeltsin took offense at press reports that the council would elevate the tone of government and that Burbulis was his “gray cardinal,” pulling wires from backstage: “This, of course, was balderdash. For there to be a ‘cardinal,’ the person in the president’s chair would have had to be spineless, soft, and apathetic,” adjectives inapplicable to the first president of Russia.⁶⁷ The State Council convened about twice a month until Yeltsin abolished it in May 1992. Of the counselors, now “presidential advisers,” Shakhrai made a good career as a government minister, Lakhova entered electoral politics, and Skokov stayed on in the Security Council Yeltsin established by decree in April 1992. Burbulis and Starovoitova walked the plank in November 1992 and Stankevich, after losing his Kremlin office and hotline connection to the president, in December 1993.⁶⁸ A Presidential Council, chaired by Yeltsin, continued to function throughout his first term as an unpaid sounding board for thirty or so opinion makers and an audition chamber for future aides.

From time to time, journalists and analysts would proclaim that some other body was succeeding where the State Council had not. Invariably, speculation about the latest candidate petered out. Modest requests by staffers for small-group meetings with the president were laughed off. At the reception for Yeltsin’s sixty-third birthday in 1994, assistant Georgii Satarov saluted him and said it would be good if all his aides sat down with him once a week. Yeltsin said no: “Why is this necessary? After all, each of you can come to see me and chat. What do you want to do, bring back the Politburo?”⁶⁹

Yeltsin put higher stock in two other ways of mitigating the unruliness of the executive branch. The first was the extramural hobnobbing that he had practiced in the Sverdlovsk committee of the CPSU. An aspect of it was the new apartment house in Krylatskoye, which the Yeltsins made their legal Moscow domicile in 1994. Chernomyrdin, Korzhakov, Gaidar, Borodin, and Yurii Luzhkov were among the tenants who danced to a live orchestra at the housewarming. The building was a poor stimulant of friendly feelings, since the family rarely overnighted in their flat and those registered there, like them, lived mostly at country homes. Those who stayed behind avoided their neighbors due to political disagreements and to a psychological reaction against being cooped up in the same company.⁷⁰

Yeltsin sank more effort into an association named the Presidential Club. It was established in June 1993 in a facility taken over from the CPSU Central Committee at 42 Kosygin Street, on the Sparrow (formerly Lenin) Hills. Yeltsin got the idea, through Korzhakov and Shamil Tarpishchev, from the Il’inka Sports Club attached to the Council of Ministers. The plant combined a sports complex (covered tennis courts, a swimming pool, a weight room) with lounges, a restaurant, and a movie theater. Yeltsin played doubles tennis at the club with Tarpishchev twice a week and others when possible. His most rollicking steambath parties and dinners were held there, and some political scuttlebutt was digested with the meals and drinks. Yeltsin was president of his club, which was to be for “people who are close in spirit and in views, who like one another, and who want to see one another regularly.”⁷¹

The generic resemblance to Urals precedent cloaked dissimilarities. Kosygin Street was far plusher than anything in the hinterland. Tennis, the main athletic pursuit, had snob appeal—it was not part of the Soviet sports machine until the 1980s—and, in singles and doubles, was less cooperative than the volleyball favored in Sverdlovsk. Yeltsin as regional boss had enrolled party workers in his volleyball league inclusively, but the Moscow lodge was exclusive. Entrants were issued cards and paid token dues; cursing was forbidden; enrollment was capped at 100 members; recruits were approved by Yeltsin in annual batches. It was not enough for the candidates to like one another: The president had to like them. A spot on the members’ directory was a mark of honor, which did not always fit with protocol position. Vice President Rutskoi, for example, was out, as were the head of the president’s staff (Sergei Filatov), all of Yeltsin’s liberal advisers, the mayor of Moscow (Yurii Luzhkov), and the chief of foreign intelligence (Yevgenii Primakov); for some reason, Yeltsin wanted at first to bar Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, then allowed him in.⁷² But Yeltsin’s senior aide (Viktor Ilyushin), who was equal to Filatov in status, was clubbable, and was joined by the head of the Presidential Business Department (Pavel Borodin), the ghostwriter of Yeltsin’s memoirs (Valentin Yumashev), the commander of the palace guard (Korzhakov) and top security officers, several elite intellectuals (Mark Zakharov and Yurii Ryzhov), and two comedians (Gennadii Khazanov and Mikhail Zadornov). An invitation into the club could recognize newly won standing. In 1994, for instance, businessman Boris Berezovskii, industrialist Vladimir Kadannikov (whose factory made the cars marketed by Berezovskii’s main business, Logovaz), and Ivan Rybkin, the new speaker of the State Duma, were asked to join. At his induction, in June, Berezovskii was in bandages for injuries suffered in an assassination attempt the week before.⁷³ The organizers had planned to add a substantial number of figures from business and the arts but found limited interest in those they approached, and some of those who did accept came to the place only once. It was, in the end, “a club of chiefs,” in the words of Yumashev, and the membership was never over sixty.⁷⁴

More than all these mechanisms, Yeltsin relied on top-down administrative resources to supply policy input, check on underlings, and impose his decisions. The instrument was the Presidential Executive Office created by Yurii Petrov and modeled in part on the Central Committee Secretariat. Petrov wanted it to have the planning and monitoring capacity of the high party apparatus in its prime, without it getting mired in operations, and to this end did not give it divisions for sectors of the economy, such as Yeltsin knew so well from an earlier life. Much of Petrov’s time went to the organizational tangles brought on by the change in regime, including the appropriation of the property of the CPSU, and he was struck by how little sway he had over the provinces—the obkoms and gorkoms were as extinct as the Central Committee—and over his boss.⁷⁵ The intelligentsia-based Democratic Russia movement, with Gennadii Burbulis’s support, attacked Petrov in early 1992 as a symbol of nomenklatura revanche. He in April offered his resignation, which Yeltsin refused to accept. Petrov lost Yeltsin’s support in December 1992 when he dickered with communist legislators about his being selected as prime minister.⁷⁶ In January 1993 the president supplanted Petrov with Sergei Filatov, a bookish Moscow academic and a vice speaker of the Congress of Deputies. Although Yeltsin was to slight Filatov in Presidential Marathon for having “turned the executive office into some sort of research institute on the problems of democracy in Russia,”⁷⁷ staff strength grew under his aegis from about 400 to the level of about 2,000 office workers. That is higher than the circa 1,500 in the American White House staff (the U.S. population is more than twice Russia’s) and much more than the several hundred in the Élysée Palace in France, which, like Russia, has a dual executive.⁷⁸

Petrov and then Filatov had some substantive impact on policy, but had to compete for Yeltsin’s ear with a squadron of policy experts reporting to him through separate ganglia. In 1993 Yeltsin began to appoint thematic presidential assistants (pomoshchniks), who were either former party or state placemen of a technocratic stripe or Moscow intellectuals, mostly of a democratic orientation. In the group of about twelve assistants, Anatolii Korabel’shchikov (who managed relations with the provinces) and Dmitrii Ryurikov (a professional diplomat who coordinated foreign policy) were the most prominent representatives of the first category; Yurii Baturin (assistant for national security), Georgii Satarov (domestic politics), and Aleksandr Livshits (economics) were the most prominent from the second category.⁷⁹ These individuals, a generation younger than the president, were required to communicate with him not through Filatov but through Viktor Ilyushin, the tight-lipped apparatchik from Sverdlovsk who was responsible for blocking out Yeltsin’s workday. Filatov, Ilyushin, and their respective groupings were rivals from the start. This was no accident. “For a long time, the president’s apparatus had two leaders…. The president saw the contradictions but did nothing to efface them…. Often Yeltsin even encouraged antagonism between parts of his executive office and between individuals. It seemed to him that this would make it easier to control things and avert any one person increasing his influence unduly.”⁸⁰

There was another generator of dissonance: Aleksandr Korzhakov and the Presidential Security Service. The service was founded in 1990 as a small bodyguard for Yeltsin as parliamentary chairman. Upgraded in 1992, it was on paper part of the Main Protection Directorate (previously the Ninth Directorate of the KGB), but that agency was headed by Mikhail Barsukov, a brother officer Korzhakov had known since 1979, whose son was married to Korzhakov’s daughter, and who was willing to give him autonomy. Korzhakov freely admits in his memoirs that he was given to role expansion even in the first leg of his service to Yeltsin, in the Moscow party committee from 1985 to 1987.⁸¹ In national government, his star soared after the principal security forces flubbed the operation against parliament in October 1993. Yeltsin took to calling the service his “mini-KGB” and acceded to Korzhakov’s demand for status parity with Filatov and Ilyushin, enlargement of the service—it went from 250 men in September 1991 to 829 by June 1996—and improvement of their pay, housing conditions, and weaponry. Korzhakov convinced Yeltsin that, beyond keeping him safe, the service would fight corruption in the Kremlin and in the bowels of the bureaucracy.⁸²

Armed with an unpublished presidential decree dated November 11, 1993, Korzhakov tapped telephones and fed Yeltsin dossiers of surreptitiously gathered compromising material (kompromat) on officials. Filatov, a target, sounded off in the press about Korzhakov turning the executive office into “a team of stoolpigeons.”⁸³ Yeltsin, he said in an interview, “began to toss [Korzhakov’s] letters back to him,” but they kept coming, and some were directed to Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and other cabinet ministers.⁸⁴ Unfazed, Korzhakov formed an in-house “analytical center” that made proposals on a wide range of public issues and badmouthed market reforms. Beginning in 1994, he wrote sharp letters on economic and other policy problems unrelated to his job description, not only to Yeltsin but to high-ranking leaders, including Chernomyrdin, and leaked information about his views to the media.⁸⁵ By this time, Korzhakov was also a force in personnel decisions. Pavel Borodin and First Deputy Premier Soskovets were friends and allies of his, and in his last year in the Kremlin he had the principal say over the designation of a chief of the FSB (Barsukov), procurator general (Yurii Skuratov), and press secretary to Yeltsin (Sergei Medvedev).⁸⁶ In January 1996 he engineered the replacement of Filatov by Nikolai Yegorov, the former governor of Krasnodar province, a hard-liner on Chechnya (who had been demoted from a ministerial position after Budënnovsk), and a man of “haughty manners and a slighting attitude toward those occupying more modest posts than he in the hierarchy of state service.”⁸⁷ Korzhakov pressed Yeltsin to make Soskovets prime minister in Chernomyrdin’s place.⁸⁸ And in the early months of 1996, he and Soskovets controlled the organization of Yeltsin’s campaign for re-election (see Chapter 14).

Yeltsin was later driven to lament the wideness of Korzhakov’s reach:

Yeltsin came to this wisdom in the rearview mirror. During his first term, though, it was his indulgence of Korzhakov that taught the Moscow high and mighty that the ex-watchman was a man to be feared and propitiated. Korzhakov family celebrations, such as his daughter’s nuptials and his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, became must-show events. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin gave the newlyweds a handsome china set. When Yeltsin dropped in on the silver anniversary party, Chernomyrdin, if Korzhakov can be believed, pouted because he had not been invited.⁹⁰ Korzhakov’s public reputation shot to rarefied heights. To go by the experts’ poll published monthly in newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta, beginning in late 1994, he was ranked among the ten most powerful political figures in the country. In November 1995 he placed fourth, behind no one but the president, the prime minister, and Mayor Luzhkov; in January 1996 he was fourth again, trailing only Yeltsin, Gennadii Zyuganov (the communist leader, who was about to run for president against Yeltsin), and Chernomyrdin.

The subdivision of executive authority between president and prime minister was sanctioned by Russia’s constitution and laws. It created, as Yeltsin observed in 1994 in Notes of a President, “a second center of power” within the state—existing on the sufferance of the first center yet still formidable—and this did not disturb him.⁹¹ To curb centrifugal tendencies in the formal structures of the state and to make decisions as he saw fit, Yeltsin had recourse to informal and personalistic means, some of them concocted anew, some of them out of the Soviet or pre-Soviet Russian armory. In Midnight Diaries, published in 2000, Yeltsin looked back at the Kremlin of the early and middle 1990s and remarked that it harbored a multiplicity of “informal leaders” and “centers of power” pushing in contradictory directions.⁹² The institutional remedy for polycentric government, Yeltsin’s shop within the executive branch, was itself wantonly polycentric—more tower of Babel than beacon of strength.

This outcome was reached with Yeltsin’s cooperation. It was a fine example of a paradox of post-communism, as dissected by the sociologist Alena Ledeneva—“that informal practices are important because of their ability to compensate for defects in the formal order while simultaneously undermining it.” This contradiction, Ledeneva adds, “serves to explain why things in Russia are never quite as bad or as good as they seem.”⁹³ Governing the state from 1991 to 1996 the way he did allowed Yeltsin to maintain his power within it and avail himself of diverse talent and knowledge. He orchestrated a leader-centered ruling coalition by cowing and cajoling political and bureaucratic actors into compliance, playing potential rivals off against one another, and accepting—even glorying in—compromise and ambiguity in policy. That same mix of tactics, however, came at a price. It left the program for transforming Russia less integrated in its content, and jerkier in its phasing, than it ought to have been.