Yeltsin

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Autumn of a President

President Yeltsin’s fourth proven heart attack, on June 26, 1996, was the most invasive to date and came on the heels of indication after indication that he was at the end of his rope.¹ The consilium of ten physicians watching over him during the campaign had sent a letter to Aleksandr Korzhakov on May 20 warning of “changes of a negative character” in his state of health, the result of “the mounting burdens on him, physically and emotionally,” and of his sleep allotment dwindling to three or four hours a night. “Such a work regimen poses a real threat to the health and life of the president.” The Yeltsins were apprised of the findings, although Korzhakov inexplicably withheld the letter.² El’dar Ryazanov, filming a conversation for broadcast, found Yeltsin on June 2 “a whole other man” than the last time they spoke, in November 1993: sallow-complected, careworn, and churlish. Had a rival obtained the unedited footage of the interview, Ryazanov is sure Yeltsin would never have been re-elected. “When I left, I was disheartened. I thought to myself, My God, if he wins, in whose hands will Russia find itself?”³ He still voted for Yeltsin.

The second inauguration, on August 9, was low-key, in contrast to July 1991. Plans for another inaugural address went by the boards. The event was moved indoors into the Kremlin Palace of Congresses instead of Cathedral Square, in the sunlight. Onstage, looking pudgy but frail, Yeltsin swore the oath in forty-five seconds, his hand on a bound copy of the constitution and his eyes on a teleprompter primed to help him notice the pauses. The speaker of the upper house of parliament, Yegor Stroyev, slipped the presidential chain of office around his neck.⁴ It was done within sixteen minutes:

On July 16 Yeltsin appointed Anatolii Chubais, his campaign mastermind, as presidential chief of staff, sending Nikolai Yegorov, a political soulmate of the demoted Korzhakov, back to Krasnodar as governor.⁶ The press dubbed Chubais Russia’s “regent.” For prime minister, Yeltsin stayed with the old pro Viktor Chernomyrdin, whom the State Duma confirmed uncomplainingly on August 10.

The theme of the next half year was apolitical—Yeltsin’s fight for elementary survival and recovery. Injections of a clot-dissolving drug eased unstable angina in July. After the induction, a battery of tests, beginning with the coronary angiogram he had refused in 1995 (an X-ray of the heart arteries, using iodized liquid), was done at the Moscow Cardiology Center. German surgeons tapped by Helmut Kohl advised from afar that the Russians consider an arterial bypass and have it done abroad. The conferences with the family were awkward, as Yevgenii Chazov, the director of the Moscow center, was the one who, as USSR health minister, had supervised Yeltsin’s care on behalf of the Politburo after the 1987 secret speech. Some of the medicos feared Yeltsin would not withstand a multiple bypass operation and were hopeful he could get away with balloon angioplasty. Chazov thought the risk was “colossal” but Yeltsin had to chance it.⁷ The blood ejection fraction from the left ventricle, a standard index of operating efficiency, was 22 percent; a healthy person’s is 55 to 75 percent. Without an intervention, Chazov and his deputies gauged the life expectancy of someone with these symptoms to be one and a half to two years. The choice, they told the family, was either bypass surgery or curtailment of Yeltsin’s activities to several hours a day and an end to most exertion and travel—diminution from governing president to a figurehead.

Yeltsin was apprehensive of the dangers of open-heart surgery and the loss of control it would entail. His daughter Tatyana took Sergei Parkhomenko, the editor of the newsmagazine Itogi, into her confidence. In late August she came into possession of a draft of an article Itogi was about to print on the pros and cons of an operation; she thought it would help ease his fears, provided she and her mother could share it with him before publication. Parkhomenko delayed the piece by one week and was rewarded with a written interview with the president. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, a former heart patient, also sang the therapy’s praises to Yeltsin.⁸

Sifting through the not very good alternatives, Yeltsin decided to go under the knife. He revealed to Russian television on September 5 that he had a sick heart and would submit to an unspecified procedure at the end of the month, and in Moscow: “The president is supposed to have operations at home [in Russia].” In that he had been noncommittal in his last meeting with the doctors, his statement was to them “like a thunderclap in an unclouded sky”—a vintage Yeltsin surprise.⁹

Acting in character, Yeltsin put a brave face on the situation to Itogi and posed it as a test of his abilities and self-command: “Some say to me, Take care of yourself, don’t go to any special difficulty, spare yourself. But I can’t spare myself! A president should not allow himself this…. Russians didn’t vote for me so that I would spare myself.”¹⁰ If consenting to the surgery could be rationalized as an affirmative act, it was also a blow to Yeltsin’s ego, as he was to admit in his memoirs:

He was admitted to the TsKB, the central Kremlin hospital, on September 12. The Yeltsins took Chazov’s advice to bring in a group of consultants from Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, headed by the pioneering cardiac surgeon Michael E. DeBakey, whose professional contacts with Soviet and Russian peers went back to the 1950s. The Americans came to the conclusion that his heart was failing and the bypass operation was the patient’s only hope. DeBakey delivered his verdict on September 25. He informed Yeltsin the bypass should let him live comfortably for ten to fifteen years. “I’ll do what you say if you can put me back in my office,” Yeltsin replied, which DeBakey told him was doable.¹²

Yeltsin took a month more to lose weight, overcome transient anemia from gastrointestinal bleeding, and improve his thyroid function. Reconciled to his fate, he was wheeled into the cardiology center’s operating theater at seven A.M. on November 5. Before going under, he temporarily ceded his constitutional powers, among them those of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, to Chernomyrdin.¹³ The twelve-member operating team was led by Renat Akchurin, who had spent a sabbatical in Houston and was Chernomyrdin’s surgeon in 1992. DeBakey, four American colleagues, and two Germans watched them on closed-circuit television from an adjoining room, with devices for ventricular assistance at the ready if needed. Yeltsin’s chest was opened and portions of his left internal mammary artery and saphenous vein were transferred to form five grafts on the heart. The painstaking work took seven hours. For sixty-eight minutes, heartbeat was stopped and his blood was circulated by a heart-lung machine. The muscle restarted on its own without chemical stimulation.¹⁴

The operation was a lifesaver. Yeltsin’s coronary ejection fraction rose to 50 percent, still subnormal but not menacing. In gratitude, he was to have the Presidential Business Department quietly allocate larger apartments to Akchurin and six anesthesiologists and nurses.¹⁵ But rehabilitation was long and uncertain. Yeltsin was taken off the ventilator on November 6 and initialed a decree taking authority back from Chernomyrdin, twenty-three hours after giving it away. He pestered the doctors into moving him on November 8 to the TsKB, where the VIP suite had secure communication lines. On November 20, the sutures removed, he was allowed a stroll in the hospital park. The yard “was dank, quiet, and cold. I went slowly along the path and looked at the brown leaves and the November sky. It was autumn, the autumn of a president.”¹⁶ On November 22 he was taken to the Barvikha sanatorium to rest.

Yeltsin went home on December 4. Home until 2001 was not Barvikha-4, which came under renovation that summer, but Gorki-9, a state dacha in Usovo, just upriver on the Moskva. (The household kept the apartment in Krylatskoye as a Moscow address, but Yeltsin seems not to have stayed one night there in his second term.) His medical condition would force him to spend far more time at Gorki-9 than he had at Barvikha-4. The house had been built in the late 1920s for Lenin’s successor as chairman of the Soviet government, Aleksei Rykov; it was Vyacheslav Molotov’s country place for twenty-five years and Nikita Khrushchev’s from 1958 to 1964. After then, it was used mostly as a governmental guest manor. Gorki-9 was nondescript, with narrow Grecian columns in front and a hotel-style layout; long corridors on two floors opened left and right onto small rooms. It was rather dilapidated ; in 2000 part of the second-floor ceiling was to fall in.¹⁷ To regain his strength, Yeltsin perambulated the extensive grounds where Khrushchev, who fancied himself an agriculture expert, had in his day planted vegetables, flowers, and berries. Khrushchev liked the path around the property because it was level, and this no doubt was an attraction to Yeltsin.¹⁸

Yeltsin was restricted to thirty minutes of business conversation daily, signing decrees and bills (a facsimile signature was used for protocol decisions), and meeting several times weekly with Chubais.¹⁹ On December 23 he finally made it to his Kremlin desk for an hour or two. He was on top of the world. “I had a palpable sensation of impatience, a desire to work…. I was another person. I could deal with any problem.”²⁰ On December 31 he attended the mayor’s annual tree-trimming party in the Kremlin. Several days later he went to a steambath. It had not been properly heated, and he caught cold. He was hospitalized on January 7 with double pneumonia and could not drag himself back to the office until the last week of the month. One of his first foreign visitors, on February 21, was the new U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. She found him “like a figure made of wax,” his face pasty and his body “startlingly thin” (he was sixty pounds lighter than at his inauguration). Nonetheless, “Yeltsin’s voice was strong and his blue eyes sparkled.”²¹

Healthwise, 1997 was the best year of Yeltsin’s second term. He made rapid strides that spring. Foreign statesmen saw it in Paris on May 27, at the signing of the “founding act” that formalized Russia’s begrudging acceptance of the eastward expansion of the NATO bloc. In the grand ballroom of the Élysée Palace, he gave an earthy reminder of the Yeltsin of old:

Yeltsin was in similarly fine fettle at the G-8 meeting in Denver in June, when the G-7 club of industrial powers was enlarged to include Russia. On his summer vacation at Shuiskaya Chupa and Volzhskii Utës in July and August, which Russian television cameras were allowed to show, he was tanned and relaxed. He did not have another setback until December, when he had to be treated for a respiratory infection.

Memories of the cover-up of his June 1996 heart attack and of his long nonappearance at the Kremlin were fresh, though, and more than anything explain the subsidence of Yeltsin’s approval ratings to the depths they had hit before the 1996 campaign.²³ Aleksandr Korzhakov, elected to the Duma in a February by-election, came out with his voyeuristic book about Yeltsin in August 1997; it gave details on his health problems and first-term drinking extravagances.²⁴ Armchair diagnoses of some untreatable condition circulated in the press and the Moscow rumor mill—that he suffered from Alzheimer’s, diabetes, Parkinson’s, dropsy, a brain tumor, or cirrhosis of the liver. All were false, but suspicions lingered. Aleksandr Salii, a KPRF legislator, claimed in June to have evidence that Yeltsin was so far gone that a body double had been standing in for him, and demanded that the procurator general’s office investigate. This featherbrained line of questioning would go on for years, reaching a low point in a potboiler published in 2005 whose thesis was that Yeltsin died during a heart-transplant operation in 1996, before the election, and was replaced by an imposter on the payroll of the CIA.²⁵

The fact remained that Yeltsin was getting on in years, was in compromised general health, and was prone to emergencies and indispositions, which were to recur with greater frequency and harshness in 1998 and 1999. He put back on most of the girth he lost in 1996. The last flecks of gray in his mane had given over to snowy white and his voice had deepened from baritone to a raspy bass. His walk was stiff. Staff plotted itineraries at home and overseas that got around high staircases; three or four doctors, one of them a cardiologist, flew with him on all his foreign travels (this practice was begun in the first term); a larger medical area was built into the new presidential jet, an Ilyushin-96, delivered in 1996.²⁶ By this age, political leaders in societies with far higher levels of well-being and healthcare than post-Soviet Russia may be hard-pressed to discharge their duties. Yeltsin had marked his sixty-sixth birthday shortly before returning to the Kremlin in 1997, which made him one year older than Dwight Eisenhower when he was felled by his big heart attack in 1955—and only one year younger than Yeltsin’s father when he had a devastating stroke in 1973.

Gone were the swagger and stamina that had been Yeltsin trademarks in Berezniki, Sverdlovsk, and Moscow. His beloved tennis and cold-water swims had to be put aside, and there were no more road shows or boogeying à la Ufa or Rostov.²⁷ He was left with tame leisure pursuits like swimming, in heated pools, trout fishing, driving powerboats and snowmobiles, and billiards, in which he could still run the table and shoot from behind his back. And he was somewhat more given to verbal faux pas and dizzy spells. In Paris for the NATO confab in May 1997, for example, he proclaimed that Russian forces were going to take the nuclear warheads off their strategic missiles; they were not, and aides spent the rest of the meeting doing damage control. His visit to Stockholm in December 1997 brought stray claims about nuclear weapons and momentary confusion about whether he was in Sweden or Finland. A highlight of his call on Pope John Paul II in February 1998 was his declaration during a Vatican banquet of his “undying love for Rome, Italy, and Italian women.” Yeltsin referred to glitches like these by the abstruse Russian word zagogulina, which stands for “curlicue,” “squiggle,” or “bit of mischief.” The mishaps sometimes had a physical aspect. At a news conference at Stockholm city hall, for instance, his knees buckled and press secretary Sergei Yastrzhembskii had to prop him up, “trying to make it appear as if he were handing Yeltsin some important pieces of paper.”²⁸

Russian journalists reported these occurrences in gory detail, as they had every right to. Memories were short, for there had been malapropisms when Yeltsin was healthy, too, and some observers had thought them endearing at the time (and this is not to mention those made over the years by leaders in other countries—think no further than the forty-third president of the United States).²⁹ The misstatements and also the stumbles were interpreted much less charitably in the altered Russian context.

Anxiety over the condition of his circulatory system persisted after the operation. Yeltsin was bothered by insomnia, as before 1996, and used prescription sleeping pills. He took analgesics for pain in his back and asked doctors whether the pangs were connected with his heart condition; the doctors said they were not. Conspiracy buffs hypothesized that illness excused Yeltsin from answering tough questions about policy and was helpful as a loyalty test, in clarifying who was willing to stand by him and who was not.³⁰ Maybe there was something to these theories, but Yeltsin on any given day was more apt to feel caged in by his limitations. Family members say that the one great regret of his second term was the failure to recover bodily vigor, as he had trusted he would when he consented to the surgery.

Yeltsin’s medical situation necessitated a substantial reduction in his time at official workplaces. He was still an early bird (rising for a freezing shower at five A.M.), but many days he stayed at home and his spokesmen told the media he was “working with documents.” When he did come to the office, it was usually at 9:00 or 9:30, and stays after the midday meal around two P.M. were the exception rather than the rule. In January, February, and March of 1998, for instance, Yeltsin lasted after four P.M. on only seven or eight days; on two of them, it was for state dinners (for the king of Belgium and the Ukrainian president). The correspondent who disinterred this information titled her exposé “Yeltsin in Gorki.” Russian readers would have seen the double entendre. Gorki (not to be confused with Gorki-9 or Gorki-10) is a former nobleman’s estate south and west of Moscow where Vladimir Lenin lived as an invalid from his cerebral hemorrhage in May 1922 to his death in January 1924. A photo of a sunken-eyed Lenin in a rattan wheelchair, a blanket draped over his knees, was reprinted in many Soviet history texts.³¹

While it was patent that Yeltsin was not his former self, some of the coverage of his condition was misleading. He was acutely ill in hospital eight times between November 1996 and December 1999, and while on vacation he was out of touch with most staff for one or two weeks a year. The rest of the time, if and when his departure from the Kremlin was on the early side, he would indeed work “with documents” at Gorki-9. Yeltsin went on long, restful vacations, true, but so do many other world leaders with fewer health concerns. Ronald Reagan, for example, took 436 vacation days in eight years, or an average of fifty-five days a year, spending many of them at his ranch in Santa Barbara, California. George W. Bush had taken 418 days by mid-2007, or sixty-four a year, mostly in Crawford, Texas, and President Eisenhower is said to have spent 222 days playing golf in Augusta, Georgia.³² Yeltsin’s vacation time after 1996 was of the order of thirty or forty days a year. When in the country near Moscow, he made more use of the telephone than in the past. Politicos and bureaucrats were expected to come to him when invited, which a handful were on most workdays. Unlike Lenin in the 1920s, he was not dying, was not a shut-in, and had not lost cognitive capacity.³³

The bottom line politically was that when the second-term Yeltsin rationed his effort and expended it purposefully, he still had the last word in national affairs. As it was put by Sergei Stepashin, who filled a number of positions in the second administration and was his next-to-last prime minister, Yeltsin made “all decisions about goals and strategy” in his government.³⁴

One fortuitous byproduct of worsened health was that it prompted a near cessation of Yeltsin’s drinking. Consuming alcohol in volume, daily or almost daily, stopped for him in 1996. The craving diminished greatly during his reclusiveness before and after surgery. Self-preservation supplied the most hardheaded of motives: Akchurin and Chazov told him bluntly that not to give the habit up would be the death of him, and Yeltsin took their word for it. He was instructed to hold himself to a glassful of wine a day—advice he followed to the letter, he wrote in Presidential Marathon.³⁵ The fall of Aleksandr Korzhakov and the faction around him removed the small-group medium in which Yeltsin had found drinking most congenial. Naina Yeltsina’s say over his diet and routine increased markedly. For state receptions and dinners, the family had the Kremlin kitchen lay in red wine adulterated with colored water, specially prepared for the president’s table. On social occasions, according to his daughter Tatyana, he might allow himself one, two, or, rarely, three glasses of dry red wine or champagne, but he knew when to stop.³⁶ These restraints seem to have been breached on a limited number of occasions, although even domestic and foreign observers who record them note the contrast with the first term.³⁷ Alcohol had ceased to be the part of Yeltsin’s life that it was in the first half of the 1990s, and no longer figured significantly in his relations with others.

More’s the pity that he received no political dividends from this sobriety. Most Russians did not know his conduct had changed, and most analysts of those years write as if it had not. Yeltsin’s privacy fetish and embarrassment over past miscues deterred him from providing any kind of explanation. It would have been undignified, as he put it in his final memoir volume, to “beat my breast” about the issue, and many would never have taken his word for it anyway.³⁸ He was in a when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife trap: He could not say he had licked the vice without admitting he had it in the first place, which he was not willing to do until after retirement. Without a signal from him, no one in the government or the Kremlin could talk about the subject, and the press corps, for its part, considered it taboo.

Another change for the better was in psychological humor. The truncated second term was on the whole, his daughter said in an interview, “a calmer period” mentally for Yeltsin than the first.³⁹ He was less subject than back in the day to the mood swings between sleeping giant and snarling tiger. Physical debilitation precluded the spikes of supercharged effort, and the letdowns in their wake, that punctuated the first term: “I had endured a lot and, you could say, I had returned from the dead. I could not solve problems as I used to, by mustering all my physical strength and charging headon into frontal clashes. That wasn’t for me anymore.”⁴⁰ Objectively, Russia’s “reformist breakthrough,” as Yeltsin termed it in October 1991, was behind him. The foundations of a post-communist order had been laid, for better or worse, and his re-election ruled out a communist restoration for now. Although there would be political exigencies—the 1998 financial crash and the 1999 attempt to impeach him stand out—nothing would measure up to the initiation of shock therapy, the constitutional donnybrook of 1993, the first Chechen war, or the 1996 election. About his own role, Yeltsin seems to have been more philosophical following his second inauguration, more accepting that his main work was done and judgment of it would be up to history. And, in his presidential autumn, the end of his time at the top, and the transfer of power to friend or foe, were on the horizon. Someone else would soon be opening the color-coded files in Building No. 1.

From the summer of 1996 to the spring of 1997, Yeltsin’s leadership was in reactive mode. Besides weathering his parlous recovery and enforced leave, he was limited to tying up loose ends from the campaign. Promises that were affordable or whose costs could be deferred until better times were satisfying to return to. Small-change works projects and giveaways authorized during the campaign went ahead, at considerable expense to the budget. The cities of Ufa and Kazan used federal and provincial resources to start tunneling their subways in 1997; they opened to riders in 2004 and 2005 and are supposed to be under construction until the year 2040.

Cleaning up unpaid wages and social allowances was like rolling a boulder up a steep hill again and again. To give the government the wherewithal to make good on claims, Yeltsin in October 1996 appointed a Temporary Extraordinary Commission for Strengthening Tax and Budgetary Discipline. Chaired by the prime minister, it went colloquially by the name VChK, a contraction of three of the Cyrillic letters in its tongue-twisting title—the very same acronym as the first version of the Soviet secret police in 1917, and taken as instilling the Kremlin’s seriousness of purpose. Yeltsin thought the problem well on the way to solution until he met with the commission in January 1997 and learned there was no timetable for catching up in the state sector. He threatened to issue a decree mandating full back payment of pensions by April 1 and then settled grumpily for a July 1 deadline.⁴¹ There was no fix by July 1. Only strenuous effort got the total nonpayments in the economy by year’s end down to the level of about $8 billion where they had stood in January, and they were to rise in the first half of 1998. Individuals and Russian families made adjustments on their own, as well as they could.⁴²

The most urgent item on the presidential agenda was Chechnya, where fighting had resumed right after the electoral runoff. On August 6, 1996, Chechen units commanded by Aslan Maskhadov attacked Grozny. The Russians under Konstantin Pulikovskii counterattacked, and the city was ablaze as Yeltsin took his oath of office. On August 11 he made Aleksandr Lebed, the electoral rival whom he had brought into his administration in between rounds of the election, his personal envoy to the republic and ordered him to hammer out an agreement that would honor his pledge to put a stop to the war and bring the boys home. With General Pulikovskii’s troops encircled and running short of supplies, Lebed and Maskhadov signed an armistice at Khasavyurt, Dagestan, on August 30. Yeltsin may have been able to push around the Chechen delegation in the Kremlin in May; on the field of battle, the superior morale and mobility of the rebels gave them the edge over the Russian conscripts. Khasavyurt deferred determination of the province’s final status until 2001 and made provision for the exodus of all army and MVD forces. Yeltsin and Maskhadov, by then the elected president of Chechnya, would formalize the agreement as a treaty on May 12, 1997. The Chechens had won de facto recognition, the expunging of all Muscovite influence, and a promise of economic aid. Yeltsin had bought peace, at a heavy price but one that public opinion at the time wanted paid.

Dissension over Chechnya between Lebed and Anatolii Kulikov, the free-spoken interior minister who had helped talk Yeltsin out of canceling the presidential election, and who was on close terms with Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, broke into the open in September 1996. Kulikov, not without reason, felt the Khasavyurt terms were ambiguous and that it was only a matter of time before the war restarted. Lebed further antagonized him by reproving the MVD troops under Kulikov’s command and, says Kulikov, by scheming to institute a “Russian Legion,” a crack military force that would report to Lebed as national security adviser and would be reinforced by 1,500 Chechen guerrillas. Anatolii Chubais publicly backed Kulikov and drew counterfire from Lebed.⁴³

As Yeltsin saw it, the general in mufti was after bigger game than Kulikov or Chubais. It was no coincidence that Lebed had picked this moment to strut his stuff: “All that went on in the Kremlin during those months was closely connected with one specific circumstance—my illness.” Yeltsin disliked Lebed’s pugilism about everything under the sun and, worse, his transparent attempt to come across as the alternative to an infirm civilian leader: “With his demeanor, he was trying to show that the president is doing badly and I, the general-politician, am ready to take his place… [and] I alone know how to communicate with the people at this trying moment.” The last straw was when Lebed had the impertinence to call on September 28 for the president to step down from office until he was fully recovered from surgery. Yeltsin stayed his hand for several weeks because, interestingly, Lebed “someways reminded me of myself, only in caricatured form.”⁴⁴ On October 17 Yeltsin came out of preoperative quarantine to fire Lebed and found the strength to shoot a clip about the decision for the evening news, in which he compared Lebed, not to himself, but to another politicized general, Aleksandr Korzhakov.⁴⁵ Lebed had made it through nearly four months on the job. As was his way, Yeltsin did not further punish the defrocked comrade. Lebed spent the coming year networking and raising funds; in May 1998 he won election as governor of the Siberian province of Krasnoyarsk.

A further spinoff from the just-concluded presidential campaign was the accord reached with Aleksandr Lukashenko in April 1996 to form an interstate community between Russia and Belarus. Details were left to be negotiated. As Yeltsin convalesced that first winter, Dmitrii Ryurikov, his presidential assistant for foreign policy, worked out a treaty of “union,” a deeper association than Yeltsin had in mind. Like Lebed, Ryurikov, confident he was free to act, got too far ahead of himself. He had the document approved by the Belarusians and by Gennadii Seleznëv, the communist speaker of the Russian State Duma, and, before sharing it with his boss, informed the press that Yeltsin had agreed. The draft treaty would have fathered a bicameral union parliament (with equal representation for Belarus, a nation of 10 million, and Russia, with more than 140 million), a rotating presidency, and a ratification referendum within three months. Its neo-Soviet and pan-Slavic harmonics pleased Lukashenko, as did the possibility of a political presence within Russia, where he had built a provincial following since taking over in Minsk in 1994. Yeltsin was not a bit pleased. The draft was impossible to reconcile with his constitution (it would bring into being a second legislature and budget and open up bothersome questions about the federal structure), and sharing executive powers with anyone else was the farthest thing from his mind. It would have midwifed “a new country,” he told his chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev, and he had done that once before in the 1990s.⁴⁶ On April 4, 1997, Yeltsin unceremoniously dismissed Ryurikov, who was soon appointed ambassador to Uzbekistan. A vague and saccharine agreement was agreed to and signed by the two presidents in the Kremlin on May 23.

The final case of overreach by a refractory subordinate came again from the field of national security. In July 1996 Yeltsin, having let Pavel Grachëv go with the Korzhakov-Soskovets group, appointed Igor Rodionov his second minister of defense at the strenuous recommendation of Aleksandr Lebed. Rodionov was a four-star Soviet general whose career had been wrecked when soldiers under his command killed twenty civilian protestors in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1989. Since then he had been commandant of the General Staff Academy and branched into military doctrine and organization, which is what won Lebed’s respect. Yeltsin asked Rodionov to come up with a design for “military reform”; the desiderata were a gradual switch from conscript to professional troops (as Yeltsin had agreed to do during the election campaign), holding the line on defense spending, and development of airborne and mobile forces. Instead, Rodionov sat tight on conscription, clamored for a budget increase, and tried to transfer airborne regiments to the infantry. Yeltsin was most affronted by Rodionov’s speeches and media leaks, feeling they were intended to put pressure on him through popular opinion, and by what he saw as the minister’s going back on his word to do army reform on a shoestring.

In September 1996, in an effort to limit Lebed’s influence as secretary of the Security Council, Yeltsin created a separate consultative board, the Defense Council, which he put under Yurii Baturin’s management as executive secretary. It was the Defense Council that Yeltsin chose as the place to clear the air on May 22, 1997. The scene in the General Staff’s white marble quarters on Arbat Square has been set down by Baturin and his coauthors of The Yeltsin Epoch:

Yeltsin… was cold, stern, and forbidding. He said hello and gave the floor to the minister.

“You have fifteen minutes for your report.”

“Fifteen minutes is insufficient,” replied the minister.

“Fifteen minutes,” the president snapped.

“If we want to talk seriously about reform, I need fifty minutes,” Rodionov stated.

“We are losing time, let us begin.” Yeltsin’s voice was getting sterner.

“In that case, I refuse to make my report,” the minister declared.

Yeltsin called on [General Viktor] Samsonov: “Chief of the General Staff, please go ahead.”

“I also refuse.”

“Igor Sergeyevich Sergeyev,” the president said, misstating the patronymic of the commander-in-chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces (which is Dmitriyevich).

Sergeyev stood up and, thinking he was supposed to report, moved toward the desk where the president was sitting.

“Hold on,” said Yeltsin, stopping him. “Will you take on the duties of minister of defense?”

“Very good, sir!” Sergeyev retorted curtly.

“Viktor Stepanovich Chechevatov,” the president went on in the same self-assured voice. For some time, he had known and respected this general, who had gone up the service ladder to commander of [the Far Eastern] Military District; in the summer of 1996, Yeltsin had received him in the Kremlin as a candidate for defense minister. “Do you agree to take the position of chief of the General Staff?”

“If you don’t mind, Boris Nikolayevich, I would like a private word with you when the session of the Defense Council is over, and I will give you an answer then.”

“Fine, sit down.”

The president turned to the secretary of the Defense Council [Yurii Baturin], seated at his left hand, and uttered a single word: “Decrees.”

Baturin left to phone the State Legal Directorate, which was responsible for composing presidential decrees. While Yeltsin was delivering an irate and not exactly fair speech berating the generals, several alternative draft decrees were brought over from the directorate—alternatives, since there was no clarity about the chief of the General Staff. Having had his say, the president headed off to the defense minister’s office for the talk with Chechevatov. All of a sudden, on his way there, he handed his aide a form on which he had written, “Call in [Anatolii] Kvashnin [the commander of the North Caucasus Military District] for a chat.” Yeltsin had made up his mind that Chechevatov was not to be chief of the General Staff. If he had not agreed to the offer right away, so be it. The president does not offer twice. He almost never made exceptions to this rule of his.

Soon [on May 23] Anatolii Kvashnin was appointed chief of the General Staff. And Yeltsin was to work well with the new defense minister, Igor Sergeyev, and always respected him greatly.⁴⁷

Yeltsin had evidently all but made up his mind to dismiss Rodionov before the meeting. The flow of it confirmed his decision and then had unexpected knock-on effects in the General Staff.⁴⁸

Out of uniform, Rodionov turned to forming a lobby organization for retired officers; in 1999 he was elected to the Duma on the KPRF ticket. Like Lebed and Ryurikov, he may have had reasons to feel abused on the substance of policy, and he and Samsonov (and the poor Chechevatov) had more reason than the others to dislike the way they were disciplined.⁴⁹ All, however, had brought this penalty on their own heads by misreading Yeltsin and poaching on presidential turf. As the saying goes, when the cat’s away, the mice will play. The cat was back from limbo, though not for too long.

Right after his second-round victory over Gennadii Zyuganov, Yeltsin tested the turbid waters of cultural and symbolic politics. Speaking laboredly at a reception for several hundred campaign workers on July 12, 1996, and presenting them with wristwatches as souvenirs, Sverdlovsk-style, he thanked them for their assistance and asked them not to twiddle their thumbs now that the election had been won. The new Russia, he said, in contradistinction to the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union, lacked a “national idea” or “national ideology,” “and that is too bad.” He asked them to give it some thought and promised to ask for a report by one year later, saying it would come in handy then or when his successor was elected in 2000.⁵⁰ Yeltsin appointed an advisory committee chaired by his Kremlin assistant for political affairs, Georgii Satarov, and the government newspaper Rossiiskaya gazeta offered 10 million rubles (about $2,000) to the reader who produced the best essay on the topic, in seven pages or less.

The project fizzled on the launching pad. Satarov denied that Yeltsin meant to enact some Soviet-type ruling doctrine. No, what was being proposed was a consensual process to discover an idea that already existed in the minds of Russians, as opposed to inflicting one on them: “A national idea cannot be imposed by the state but should come from the bottom up. The president is not saying, ‘I’m going to give you a national idea.’ On the contrary, he is asking, ‘Go out and find it.’”⁵¹ Rossiiskaya gazeta made a preliminary award in January 1997 to Gurii Sudakov, a philologist from Vologda province, for an essay on “principles of Russianness,” by which time it was apparent that the exercise would be about navel-gazing and vaporous futurology. The newspaper never did decide on a grand winner and discontinued the essays in mid-1997. To the panel, Satarov commended as a model postwar West Germany, where an economic miracle was complemented by an outlook of “national penitence” after Nazi totalitarianism. Few members agreed, and the group was no better positioned to enunciate a nonexistent societal consensus than Yeltsin or Satarov would have been on his own. On the anniversary of its establishment, Satarov published an anthology of papers of liberal and centrist coloration. He then called it a day, and the commission fell into disuse.⁵²

Yeltsin, knee-high in other concerns, did not weigh in and ignored his one-year target date. It is unlikely he could have salvaged much from the process, since it flew in the face of his own efforts to debunk Marxism-Leninism and of the very concept of “propaganda for the new life.” Intellectual critics of the idea of a national idea sounded like no one more than Boris Yeltsin. “It is intolerable to cultivate and instill in public consciousness something that has not formed spontaneously,” one of them wrote. “The banefulness of such experiments was evidenced by the socialist system,” which had a moral that reminded him of an alcohol-free wedding “where mineral water sits on the table and under the table they are pouring liquor.” Were post-communist Russia to be capable of working out a unifying idea at all, it could not possibly be done in one year or in several, and the hardships of daily life put no one in the mood for trying: “Ideologies come and go, but people always want to eat.”⁵³ Yeltsin’s silence in the face of these strictures tells me that he came to realize he quite agreed with them.

If he felt free to orphan his national-idea initiative, Yeltsin did not wash his hands of myth making and the reckoning with the past. In his first official act after reclaiming statutory powers on November 6, 1996, he signed a decree renaming November 7, the celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, as the Day of Reconciliation and Accord, and unveiling a Year of Reconciliation to last until the following November. The edict was composed by Kremlin staff under Anatolii Chubais, who was of the belief that the vehement anti-communism of the re-election campaign had to be muzzled and that it was more important to get the KPRF-controlled Duma to approve progressive economic legislation than to refight 1917 or 1991 ad infinitum. Yeltsin supporters who were more interested in political change, like Satarov, were against the renaming but lost the argument.⁵⁴ The pronouncement might be interpreted as an enhancement of pluralism or, alternatively, “as profoundly uncritical, in the sense that it embraced all perspectives on the past without acknowledging the contradictions inherent in different views.”⁵⁵ It was, as a matter of fact, a smidgen of both, and Yeltsin’s ambivalence on historical questions continued throughout his second term.

One piece of the past where his views evolved only slowly concerned Mikhail Gorbachev, the last head of the Soviet state. Yeltsin stroked Gorbachev’s name off the guest list for his second inauguration and made it hard for associates to maintain friendly relations with him. The president of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, Askar Akayev, bid welcome to Gorbachev in his capital, Bishkek, and honored him at a public event in July 1997. Yeltsin, a friend since they were deputies in the Soviet congress in 1989–90, refused to shake Akayev’s hand for the next year, asking him at one point, “Askar, how could you?” He did not apologize to Akayev until 2004.⁵⁶ Yeltsin did relax the hostility some by inviting Gorbachev to attend a number of state functions in 1997, 1998, and 1999, but Gorbachev never accepted.⁵⁷ When Raisa Gorbacheva took ill and died of leukemia in a German clinic in September 1999, Yeltsin sent condolences and had a government airplane return her body to Moscow for burial. Naina Yeltsina consoled Gorbachev at the graveside service. Boris Yeltsin did not attend.

The second-term Yeltsin did continue to rehabilitate visual markers of pre-Soviet Russia. The biggest architectural project was the restoration of the Grand Kremlin Palace, a building to which few Russians ever gain entry. It was reopened in June 1999. Several blocks away, workmen constructed a carbon copy of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, designed by Konstantin Ton as the largest church in Russia, which Stalin had dynamited in 1931. Yeltsin gave it his approval and laid the keystone, but the moving spirit, and the one to profit politically, was Yurii Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow.

An issue that would not go away was what to do with the body of Lenin in his shrine on Red Square. Yeltsin’s stance was a reprise of his first-term position. In May 1997 several aides gave him a plan for raising the issue afresh and bringing it to a “revolutionary resolution.” He agreed to the advice and to recast it as an ethical choice, and requested Patriarch Aleksii in a private audience to get the Orthodox hierarchy behind it.⁵⁸ Aleksii, with some reluctance, spoke out directly and through lesser clergy, pointing out that prisoners had once been executed in Red Square and that it was now being used for rock concerts, and so was unsuitable to be a graveyard. On June 6 Yeltsin poured fat on the fire at a meeting in the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. While Lenin and communism were part of the tapestry of Russian history, it was indecent, he said, for any person not to be buried in the ground. That autumn he called for a national referendum to settle the question: “Let the people decide whether to give him a Christian burial or to leave things the way they are.” The president did, though, deviate from the depoliticization line, saying with some relish that the communists would be opposed: “The communists, of course, will fight it. No need to worry, I know all about struggling with them.”⁵⁹ Polls in 1997 showed Russian popular opinion to be evenly divided, but the numbers fluctuated over the next two years.⁶⁰ And the intensity of feeling was greater among the enemies of reinterment, who took their cues from the KPRF and from the closest relative of Lenin’s to survive, his niece Olga Ul’yanova.⁶¹ Some threatened to use lawsuits, protest, and even violence to prevent the mausoleum from being emptied.

As had happened before 1996, Yeltsin was unwilling to chance it. “There was not enough time” to prepare Russia for the move, he said in an interview in 2002, and the social tension raised by holding the referendum or moving Lenin without a vote would have been intolerably high. He pointed out that those still queuing to view the body were mostly pensioners who were raised in Soviet days to revere the founder—“and it is hard to accuse them of anything.”⁶²

A second entombment issue had more of a connection with Yeltsin’s previous life. This one was settled positively, though not without soul-searching and disagreement. The mortal remains in question were those of Russia’s last monarch and his family, executed by Bolshevik riflemen in Yekaterinburg in 1918. The skulls and bones of Nicholas II, his German-born spouse (Alexandra), three of their five children (Olga, Tatyana, and Anastasia), and four royal attendants (a cook, two servants, and a physician) had been exhumed in 1991 from the unmarked forest grave at the village of Koptyaki, north of Yekaterinburg. Yeltsin knew the story only too well, as he had supervised the demolition of the place of their deaths, Ipat’ev House, while Sverdlovsk CPSU boss in 1977. Remorse at his part in the drama gave it an immediacy that the Lenin-in-Red-Square soap opera did not have.⁶³ DNA analysis at the Yekaterinburg morgue by Russian, American, and British laboratories had verified the identities. Predictably, the KPRF, which no longer excused the killings but considered the Romanovs parasites, came out against the project. What was unexpected was that the communists’ political bedfellow was the Orthodox Church. Aleksii II met with Yeltsin twice, in May and June, to express opposition to the burial and spoke out openly against it. He and the Holy Synod thought the DNA evidence less than ironclad, and the relics were under discussion between them and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, a diaspora organization with which the incountry hierarchy was to reintegrate in 2007.⁶⁴

Yeltsin, in short, faced more by way of elite resistance to relocating the Romanovs than to doing the same with Lenin. But this time he was willing to use his plenary powers to steamroller it and follow his conscience, and without much head-scratching about mass reaction—Kremlin pollsters seem not to have surveyed the population. It was decided in February 1998 to lay the royals to rest in the chapel of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. The stout-walled fort on the bank of the Neva had been the burial place for all tsars from Peter the Great in 1725 to Alexander III, Nicholas’s father, in 1894. Yeltsin, having said he would not attend out of deference to the patriarch, changed his mind twenty-four hours before the observance—setting himself up once again to catch his political competition short. Foreign ambassadors, who had planned to stay away unless Yeltsin came, had to make plans on a few hours’ notice. Aleksii boycotted, as did communist spokesmen and Yurii Luzhkov, who was mad that the city of Moscow was not the site.⁶⁵ The reburial took place on July 17, 1998, the eightieth anniversary of the murders. A church choir sang and twelve white-robed priests and deacons officiated without mentioning the deceased’s names. After the coffins were lowered into a crypt under the floor, more than fifty members of the Romanov family who had flown in for the occasion threw fistfuls of sand on them. Yeltsin said the final rites were an act of atonement and not of vengeance. “The gunning down of the Romanov family was the result of the implacable schism within Russian society into one’s own and the others.” Those who put them to death and those “who justified [this crime] for decades”—and the former first secretary in Sverdlovsk was surely one of them—were equally at fault. “We are all guilty…. The burial of the remains… is a symbol of the unity of the people and an expiation of our common guilt.”⁶⁶ A commemoration service was held the same day on the vacant Yekaterinburg lot where Ipat’ev House had stood. A five-cupola Church on the Spilt Blood was to be built as a memorial on the site and consecrated in 2003.

The second Yeltsin administration resembled the first in that the daily grind was about down-to-earth issues of power and policy, especially economic policy, and not primarily about ideas and symbols. Its rhetorical beginning was Yeltsin’s annual address to parliament on March 6, 1997, his first presentation after returning to work. Wanting to get off to a fast start and not to have the scene stolen by Duma deputies, his staff worked with a director of stage plays, Iosif Raikhel’gauz, to plot and rehearse his every step and word on the Kremlin stage. Lights were dimmed in the hall before the president and the chairmen of the two chambers entered from the wings, with a break before Yeltsin’s appearance to draw the crowd’s attention. Were legislators to try to make statements at the end of the speech (none did), Raikhel’gauz was poised to pipe the national anthem over the loudspeakers to drown them out. He also had a teleprompter installed, which Yeltsin ordered removed.⁶⁷

The talk itself was as alarmist as some of Yeltsin’s jeremiads against the Soviet regime a decade before, only now the choler was directed at his government. Russia was carrying, he said, “a heavy load of problems,” and there had been no improvement to speak of since the election: “Spinelessness and indifference, unaccountability and incompetence in addressing public issues—this is how Russian government is being assessed today. And one has to confess that this is correct.” Although the state was supposed “to soften the inevitable costs of the transformations” which Russia was in the throes of, “we have not done that.” Yeltsin in 1991 spoke of the transition being about finding and adhering to the pathway leading toward world civilization. He now chose a less cheery metaphor. It was as if Russia after communism was in a river whose fast-flowing waters run crosswise to the line of advance. The boat was “stuck halfway” in this uninviting and unforgiving stream. “We have shoved off from the near shore but continue to flounder midstream in a current of problems [that] carries us along and keeps us from making it to the far shore.”⁶⁸

Yeltsin did not put forth a spic-and-span approach or methodology for resuming the passage from one shore to the other. The emphasis was on two more measured points. The first was the need to reinvigorate economic reform through a stronger effort to draw the line between the public and the private arenas. Over the five years since the introduction of shock therapy, “the state has not mastered effective methods for regulating the market” and was standing in the way of a resumption of growth. Government, the president complained, “interferes in the economy in areas where it should not be doing that, and in places where it should be doing something it is inactive.” The second moral of the March 6 speech was that national government had to put its own house in order. The executive branch needed fundamental reform and to learn how to coordinate its efforts within a range of duties narrowed down from the all-embracing socialist state. Without that, it would continue to act like a fire brigade, rushing from one minicrisis to the next.⁶⁹

The end to the Kremlin tenure of Aleksandr Korzhakov in June 1996 convinced Yeltsin to tame the sulfurous discord within the Presidential Executive Office. Korzhakov’s mini-KGB lost its surveillance rights and was folded into the larger body (headed by Mikhail Barsukov until he went down with Korzhakov) henceforth known as the Federal Protection Service. It steered clear of high politics for the rest of the 1990s. The crash-and-burn of Aleksandr Lebed in October quickly removed another threat to amity in the executive.⁷⁰

Yeltsin brought Anatolii Chubais into the Kremlin establishment in July 1996 so as to give it a long-needed overhaul. The first Yeltsin lieutenant to carry a laptop computer, Chubais wasted no time weeding out parallel subunits and positions, centralizing decision making, and imposing a managerial style with a stricter division of labor and command hierarchy. The supernumerary post of senior assistant, held until the election by Viktor Ilyushin, was done away with. All aides now reported to the president through the one chief of staff and his deputies. The pre-1996 presidential assistants, most of them intellectuals by background, were allowed to stay with pruned responsibilities. The new crowd had less experience in academe and more in public administration, communications, and, in some cases, private business.⁷¹

This change came at the expense not only of the infighting of earlier days but of their restless energy. The old crowd did not take kindly to it. As a group of them were to write in 2001, “The time had passed when Yeltsin needed ‘eggheads’ to help him figure out pieces of ‘the transition to democracy.’… Now the inconveniences presented by independent people outweighed their merits.”⁷² The eggheads left one at a time, the last departures being in mid-1998. At least one of the separations took a strange turn. Yurii Baturin, who had been the presidential assistant for legal and security policy, made inquiries about satisfying his life’s dream of training as a cosmonaut. Yeltsin heard of it, said all was well, and then fired him on August 28, 1997. Rushing back to Moscow from vacation, Baturin received a handshake, a two-minute audience, and an autographed photo portrait. Unhindered by Yeltsin, he was accepted into the space program in September and flew on two space missions.⁷³ The duplicative Defense Council he had run for a year was abolished soon after.

Besides policy implementation, Yeltsin’s reshaped team immersed itself in public relations, the art that had allowed him to keep his job in the 1996 election. The Chubais “analytical group” was continued after inauguration as a session on “political planning” that met every Friday at ten A.M. and was chaired at first by Maksim Boiko, a Chubais deputy.⁷⁴ Yeltsin agreed to give a weekly address to maintain contact with the electors. The chosen medium was national radio, which was judged friendlier than television and better at masking his infirmities. Ten-minute chats, taped on Fridays, went on the air every Saturday morning until the summer of 1998.

A regular in the Friday group was Valentin Yumashev, the Urals-born journalist and editor, amanuensis for the Yeltsin memoirs, and friend of the family. At age thirty-nine, he was made head of the executive office on March 11, 1997, in place of Chubais, who went to the government chambers in the White House. Yumashev stuck in the main to the Chubais mold, although, with no governmental experience, he had nothing like Chubais’s political heft.

Another member of the coterie was Tatyana Dyachenko, who had no formal role in government after the 1996 campaign. When Yeltsin returned to work in 1997, he realized that he wanted her involvement, yet was illpositioned to ask for it since he had always segregated home from work and had censured Gorbachev for nepotism in making his wife a public figure. He recalled hearing that Claude Chirac, the daughter of President Chirac of France, had been a special adviser to her father since 1994. He asked the Chiracs to receive Tatyana and explain how the arrangement worked. She went to Paris and was satisfied, and on June 30, 1997, Yeltsin had Yumashev name her to the Kremlin staff and assign her an office on the presidential floor of Building No. 1. It was explained that she would be his image adviser (sovetnik po imidzhu).⁷⁵ Her alliance with Yumashev was close and at this point political and platonic only. They would marry in 2001, after Yeltsin and the two of them were out of politics.

Dyachenko’s meteoric rise, her familial relationship with the chief, and his frequent nonattendance stoked the impression that she filled a void and was a major power in Russian politics. In the savants’ ratings of influence carried monthly by Nezavisimaya gazeta, she showed up in the top twenty-five in September 1996 and in the top ten in July 1997, where she remained until the end of 1999. She was to be ranked as high as third in the nation in June, October, and November of 1999.

That Dyachenko was a significant presence is beyond doubt. She busied herself with much more than Yeltsin’s image, as she traveled with him, made the odd foray to the provinces as his surrogate, sat in on staff meetings, edited speeches, and was the back-channel communications conduit to him. Her main role, she said in an interview, “was that I could tell Papa certain unpleasant things, which for other people, you see, it was not so comfortable to do…. I was better able to find the right moment and the necessary words.” But the understanding between father and daughter was that in general she was to express opinions only on matters that he broached to her or that flowed from assignments she had been tending to at his request. She had no right to raise questions about personnel unless invited and never weighed in on security-related issues. She did not make public statements or deal with journalists. Neither did she possess anything like the standard bureaucratic toolkit. She had only one aide and no authority whatsoever to sign directive documents or commit government funds.⁷⁶ Unlike Boris Yeltsin and her older sister, and like her mother, Tatyana did not have much talent for organization or time management.⁷⁷ And, in the grand scheme of things, she did not have a political agenda or preferences of her own. Dyachenko was no vizier, and there never was a Dyachenko program or strategy autonomous of Yeltsin’s.

Yeltsin’s iffy health necessarily affected decision making in other regards. Yurii Yarov, who supplanted Ilyushin as superintendent of his schedule, cut back on meetings, which made for glancing contact with some of his officials and next to none with others. Early in the 1990s, Yeltsin had hosted up to twenty visitors a day to his study, and a prime minister, first deputy premier, or foreign minister could count on running into him five days a week. After 1996, only his chief of staff and press secretary (and Dyachenko) were in daily touch and the names on his calendar for weekly or biweekly meetings were down to a half dozen. The Kremlin’s lead speech writer, Lyudmila Pikhoya, who huddled with Yeltsin once or twice a day in the first term, usually at her initiative, was seeing him once or twice a month, and communicating with him mostly on the telephone hotline, when she departed in the late 1990s.⁷⁸ As the press reported, formal Kremlin briefings were quite often canceled. In the first three months of 1998, Yeltsin called off nine of his scheduled get-togethers with Chernomyrdin and met only once in his office with the foreign minister, twice with the minister of the interior, three times with the head of the FSB (Federal Security Service), four times with the defense minister, and not once with the chief of foreign intelligence.⁷⁹ What the press rarely divulged was that many of these meetings were held at Gorki-9, Zavidovo, a vacation spot, or, if Yeltsin was under the weather, in the Barvikha sanatorium or even in hospital. Failing that, telephone calls replaced face-to-face conversations. With top functionaries, Yeltsin clung religiously to the weekly reports in whatever form was available.⁸⁰ The further down the line an official was, the more likely he was to have phone contact only. That was tolerable for workers who knew the boss well but not for new recruits, some of whom were never to have a single substantive talk with him. Yeltsin’s travel outside of Moscow was also restricted, and provincial leaders found it much harder to get in the door than before, although some did manage to take appeals to him to reverse decisions made by other federal officials. Nonstaff advisers, who had intermittent access in the first term, had little in the second. Yeltsin’s Presidential Council, though never disbanded, was not to meet after February of 1996.

The mooted “fundamental reform” of the state was explored but never brought to life. Kremlin assistants Mikhail Krasnov and Georgii Satarov got Yeltsin to write the commitment into his March 1997 address to parliament. Although they preferred a reform that encompassed rule-of-law questions and the judiciary, the task was narrowed to the executive branch. By August 1997 Krasnov had produced three drafts of a conceptual document, and by March of 1998 twelve. The thrust was to simplify the bureaucratic estate, make it less opaque, and institute a merit-based, Western-style civil service. Yeltsin was agreeable but unprepared to invest in the project. Yumashev did not make it a high priority, either. In the summer of 1998, as economic and political problems accumulated (see Chapter 16), the report was quietly tabled and Krasnov left office.⁸¹

The ouster of Lebed, Ryurikov, and Defense Minister Rodionov showed that Yeltsin kept the capacity to make mincemeat out of any lesser official who dared provoke him. The passage of time did not tranquilize the governing stratum. Far from slowing down, the revolving door for officials swung faster in the second term than in the first. Deputy premiers served for an average of eight months in the second term, compared to sixteen months in the first; for other government ministers, the drop was to fifteen months in the second term from twenty-three months in the first term. Of the informal coordination mechanisms on which Yeltsin placed some reliance in 1991–96, several were inapplicable after 1996. The extramural fraternization withered as tennis matches, collective soaks in the steambath, and like pursuits became but a pleasant memory. The Presidential Club ceased to function; in 1997 the buildings on the Sparrow Hills were turned over to receptions and conferences. The inflow of trusted townsmen from Sverdlovsk also dried up. Those associates Yeltsin valued most had made their contribution and gone on to other things, and he did not want to be identified with a territorial subgroup.⁸² Yeltsin was as antipathetic as ever to collegial procedures for bringing about more coherent governance. Interior Minister Kulikov proposed to him twice that a new State Council be created, “with the powers of the Politburo,” partly to correct for Yeltsin’s physical incapacity. He says he explained to Yeltsin, “One head is good but ten are better!” The president indicated sympathy but did not reply when Kulikov sent him a memorandum elaborating on the idea.⁸³

Even as he went along with the limited cleanup Chubais promoted, there was something in Yeltsin that made him continue to abhor an overly systematic, impersonal approach to governing Russia. Sergei Kiriyenko, who was first deputy minister and then minister of fuel and energy for a year until taking over the prime ministership in the spring of 1998, remembered the attitude well from the safaris outside of Moscow on which he accompanied the president:

Heart and soul, the late Yeltsin still believed in his right to make decisions on the go. No amount of organizational streamlining could have gotten him to give it up.

A few changes were made in the Council of Ministers after the confirmation of Viktor Chernomyrdin by the Duma in August 1996. Vladimir Potanin, appointed first deputy premier for macroeconomics at Chubais’s behest, was the first private businessman to take high political office. Boris Berezovskii was the second when he was made deputy secretary of the Security Council in October. Chernomyrdin brought in miscellaneous red directors, and Viktor Ilyushin and Aleksandr Livshits moved over from the executive office. The cabinet was adrift, disparate, and, in Yeltsin’s view, “not capable of resolving the country’s slew of economic and social problems.”⁸⁵

Only on March 17, 1997, did he intervene to replace Potanin with Anatolii Chubais and to recruit Boris Nemtsov, the photogenic governor of Nizhnii Novgorod province and longtime favorite of his, to work alongside Chubais as first deputy prime minister. Chubais (forty-two years old) and Nemtsov (thirty-eight) in turn selected like-minded members of their generation for many of the economic and social portfolios. The press labeled them the young reformers, and it was hard not to see echoes of the Gaidar team of the early 1990s.

There was, though, one difference: Yegor Gaidar as acting prime minister ran the show in the Council of Ministers in 1992; in 1997 Yeltsin would not take Chernomyrdin out of the premier’s chair and award it to one of the upand-comers. It would be another year before he would, and the delay cost them and him dearly. In his memoirs, Yeltsin defended the combination as a way to harness the talents of both sides: “to get [Chernomyrdin] going” by flanking him with “two young and in a good way pushy and aggressive” deputies who would keep him under “high tension and steady, positive pressure.”⁸⁶ The arrangement was too byzantine by half. Having learned his lesson and excluded antagonistic factions from his Kremlin sanctum, Yeltsin consciously wove them into the machinery of the government. Chernomyrdin still worked quite amicably with Chubais. He did not warm to Nemtsov and required constant reassurance from Yeltsin that his job was not in jeopardy. A specific source of tension was policy toward Gazprom, the hugely profitable gas producer Chernomyrdin had founded. Nemtsov supervised the energy sector and headed the energy ministry until November 1997, and made attempts to limit Gazprom’s operational autonomy. He also scuppered a deal under which the Gazprom president, a Chernomyrdin man named Rem Vyakhirev, would have acquired a large block of the company’s shares for a few million dollars. Nemtsov came to rue that he had not held out for the retirement of Chernomyrdin, and the hoopla he generated—such as his campaign to have bureaucrats driven only in Russian-made limousines—led Yeltsin to suspect he was not prime-ministerial or presidential timber. Chubais had the aptitude for the premier’s job but was not willing to ride roughshod over Chernomyrdin to get it, and in any event would have had difficulty gaining a majority in the Duma.⁸⁷

Yeltsin got a kick out of demonstrating to the young reformers he had taken under his wing—and perhaps to himself—mastery of the Soviet functionaries who still predominated in the federal and regional governments. Mayor Luzhkov, long in disagreement with Chubais on privatization, decided to show his annoyance by fouling up Nemtsov’s registration for residency in Moscow, a communist-period formality still required in the capital and routinely expedited for newcomers at his level. Making small talk with Nemtsov, Yeltsin repeatedly asked him if the registration had gone through. Told that it had not, he at some point, with Nemtsov sitting there, picked up his hotline telephone, clicked the Luzhkov button, and without a how-do-you-do or explanation boomed, “You are behaving pettily, Yurii Mikhailovich!” and hung up. Nemtsov was befuddled: How would Luzhkov know what Yeltsin was talking about? Luzhkov was “a Soviet boss,” Yeltsin said. Leave him be, “young fellow”: Luzhkov would call the duty officer, ask who was in the president’s office, and do what was expected. Nemtsov’s registration went through the next morning. But Yeltsin did not identify completely with the Chubais-Nemtsov faction, as his clinging to Chernomyrdin showed. In one conversation, something in Nemtsov’s manner irritated him and Yeltsin accused him and Chubais of laughing at him behind his back and believing “that I don’t understand anything.” “Keep in mind,” Yeltsin said to Nemtsov, “that I am the president and you are simply boyars” (the nobles of Muscovy to Yeltsin’s tsar). “Yes, you are smart and you are educated, but all you are is boyars. I am not afraid of you. It is you who should be afraid of me.”⁸⁸

All these intramural frictions make it impressive to a double degree that the young reformers, with a pat on the head from Yeltsin, put forward a program for reforming the Russian reforms and made a start on implementing it. The timing was auspicious in one regard: The decline in the country’s economic output had halted, and it experienced a boomlet of 0.8 percent growth in 1997. Its stock market was the best-performing in the world in percentage gains from the summer of 1996 through 1997. The benchmark RTS (Russian Trading System) index of publicly traded stocks, set at 100 on September 1, 1995, and having lost value in late 1995 and early 1996 in anticipation of a communist election victory (it reached a low point of 67 in March 1996), rose to 201 points by the end of 1996 and to a peak of 572 on October 6, 1997. In January 1998 the government redenominated the ruble, lopping three zeros off the old notes, in a sign of confidence that inflation had been conquered. It was understood on all sides that a new round of changes to build on these gains could not be accomplished by executive edict. After issuing a high of thirty-eight decrees per month in 1996, many of them election-related, Yeltsin lowered his monthly output to sixteen in 1997, eighteen in 1998, and twelve in 1999, well below the pace of his first term.⁸⁹ The volume of legislation was up at that same time, and it was laws, adopted by the federal parliament and approved by the president, that Russia required to underpin its market economy.

The progress made was skimpy, for one simple political reason—lack of support in the legislature elected in December 1995. An attempt to tie old-age pensions to workers’ lifetime earnings rather than rely exclusively on the public purse, on the model of a number of Latin American countries, was debated by the Duma in 1997, then taken out of consideration by the government in July 1998, when it was apparent that it would not pass. A new tax code had been under discussion since 1995. It was with difficulty that Yeltsin got the leftist and nationalist majority to approve a first part, setting out general principles and duties, in July 1998; the remaining parts had to await a new president and a new Duma. Yeltsin was especially eager to get through the legislative pipeline a framework that would permit the commercial sale of rural land and knock down barriers to private farming. A conservative land code drafted by socialistic deputies from the Agrarian Party passed the two houses of parliament in 1997 but was blocked by a presidential veto that July. Yeltsin emceed a forum on the statute with lawmakers and interested parties in December. “Life itself” and the failures of collectivized agriculture had put the question on the agenda, he said, and he was prepared to accept restrictions on the resale of land and a ban on foreign ownership.⁹⁰ The compromise bill that emerged fell one vote short of the majority needed for adoption in the State Duma on July 16, 1998. This proposal, too, was in abeyance until 2000.⁹¹

In the first leg of Yeltsin’s second term, the most portentous event in Russia’s evolving political economy was, on the face of it, one of the more esoteric. On July 25, 1997, the government entertained bids for a 25 percent share in Svyazinvest, a company formed in 1994 to hold the assets of regional telecommunications firms. Chubais and Nemtsov organized the equity sale to revive the privatization process and to help with the budget deficit, and did it in such a way as to prevent the pitfalls of loans-for-shares. Bids were submitted to a state auctioneer (the property ministry), and they were sealed, making collusion difficult. Nemtsov wanted the new rules to signal a break with what he called “bandit capitalism”; although Chubais did not use this phrase, he agreed with the sentiment and with the criticism of the corruption bred by the loans-for-shares mechanism. Two groups entered bids, one led by Vladimir Gusinskii of NTV and one by Vladimir Potanin, now back in the private sector. Potanin, who partnered with American trader George Soros, was victorious with an offer of $1.87 billion; Gusinskii bid $116 million less and lost.

That would have been the end of it were it not for the refusal of Gusinskii, “blinded by greed and wounded pride,”⁹² to accept the result. He had not participated in loans-for-shares, unlike Potanin, and felt it was his turn at the trough; being in the media business, he saw Svyazinvest as a natural fit. Boris Berezovskii, whom Potanin had outmaneuvered to get control of Norilsk Nickel in 1995, was barred as an officeholder from formal involvement, yet took part informally as an impassioned ally of Gusinskii. Berezovskii and Gusinskii had their press and television outlets vilify Potanin, the auction, and the integrity of the public servants, chiefly Chubais, who stood by it.

Much ink was expended in the late 1990s on the thesis that Russian big business had “captured” the post-communist state and subordinated it to its purposes.⁹³ The Svyazinvest fiasco, and Yeltsin’s role in it, suggests the outcome was more complex than that.

In their several prior encounters with the president, the moguls gathered the impression that he was well disposed toward them. Yeltsin, Mikhail Khodorkovskii said in an interview in 2001, looked upon the oligarchs the way CPSU bosses used to see members of the Komsomol—as individuals of a different generation, with strange opinions, perhaps, but on the right track and “following the defined rules of the game.” Mikhail Fridman of Alpha Group felt Yeltsin regarded them as “the product of his hands” and as “one of the instruments for realizing his plans,” and that he was sure “that all he needed to do was snap a finger and we would do what he said.” To Potanin, Yeltsin’s attitude was akin to that of a headmaster toward star athletes who sometimes break windows in the schoolyard: He approved of their talents more than he disapproved of their hooliganism. Yeltsin’s tsarist self-regard and playacting, all report, inoculated him against envy of their money and influence, and he was untouched by the anti-Semitism common in the old CPSU apparat (many of the most successful businessmen were of Jewish origin).⁹⁴ As it had been with other players, Yeltsin badly wanted not to appear beholden to the nouveau riche. He needed prodding to accept their help in 1996, and they would have donated almost any sum to fund his campaign if ordered to do so. Had he wished, Yeltsin without question could have financed his campaign from state coffers.⁹⁵ After the election, he had no patience with warnings that the oligarchs were capable of causing him trouble. When he recruited Nemtsov from Nizhnii Novgorod, Nemtsov shared with him the perception that they were beginning to behave as if Yeltsin no longer counted. “Nonsense,” Yeltsin replied. “That is what they think.”⁹⁶

Yeltsin received intelligence about the budding conflict over Svyazinvest and had Yumashev confer with Potanin and Gusinskii before July 25. Yumashev’s recommendation was that they divide the company down the middle—a notion hard to reconcile with the principle of market competition—but Chubais would not hear of it. One week after the auction, Berezovskii took advantage of a phone call Tatyana Dyachenko made to him on another matter to bend her ear on the injustice of the result.⁹⁷ He addressed her in the second person singular and struck a cloying tone which she did not reciprocate.⁹⁸ Dyachenko sounded politely receptive, although she did have doubts about Gusinskii’s belligerency. “Some kind of compromise” should be found on the case, she said, and on the whole the rules should require “normal competition” for state assets. Tatyana did not indicate her father’s opinion and Berezovskii did not ask her to influence it. When he opined that the minister for privatization, Al’fred Kokh, should be dismissed, she replied that would be up to Chubais, who supervised his department. Berezovskii went on to put in a good word for another cause close to his heart (and wallet)—a general amnesty for back taxes owing, with “a normal tax regime” instituted only after previous illegality had been forgiven. “Let me tell you with certainty,” he said knowingly, “no one [in Russia] has filed an honest tax return, except for the president, naturally.” Dyachenko took exception. Her entire family had paid all its taxes; a free ride for tax delinquents would be unfair to the upstanding majority of Russians; and, by some formula or another, business should pick up more of the tab for government.⁹⁹ Berezovskii signed off by telling her he had been talking with “Valya” (Yumashev) and giving her his cell phone number. She had to ask him what codes to use to dial. The conversation demonstrated that the country’s best-known businessman had access to the president’s daughter and adviser in 1997, but also that they were not close and she had a mind of her own.

Whatever Dyachenko may have preferred, Yeltsin was opposed to reconsideration of the Svyazinvest auction, as Gusinskii and Berezovskii were demanding, but made oracular comments that sounded more critical of Potanin and his government backers than of the sore losers. He did not want to meet with the parties. Yumashev brought him around after an alarming article in the Berezovskii-owned Nezavisimaya gazeta painted Chubais as power-mad, Potanin as in cahoots with him, and the two of them as conspiring to find a “Trojan horse” candidate for president in 2000; in the interim, they meant to castrate Yeltsin politically, and would be much more devious at doing so than Aleksandr Korzhakov and Oleg Soskovets before them, who could not see “beyond the tennis court and the steambath” (no compliment to the president who whiled away so many hours with them in those locations).¹⁰⁰ Potanin’s Russkii telegraf and Izvestiya, which his conglomerate partly owned, replied in a like manner.

On September 15, in the Oval Hall of Building No. 1, Yeltsin hosted the third of his four roundtables with high-flying businessmen. At the table with him and Yumashev were five of the six (Gusinskii, Khodorkovskii, Potanin, Aleksandr Smolenskii, and Vladimir Vinogradov) who had conferred with Yeltsin in February 1996 (see Chapter 14), plus Fridman as a substitute for Berezovskii. Yeltsin maintained neutrality between Gusinskii and Potanin but tested Potanin with a barb about how much government money (from taxes and customs duties) he had on deposit in his bank. Hearing that, Potanin feared the Svyazinvest auction was going to be overturned. Then Yeltsin pulled back. Potanin was at once relieved and let down: “Essentially, [Yeltsin] said, ‘Guys, I have had a look at you, and in principle I remind you that I am the chief here, so everybody should go ahead and live in friendship !’ But nobody was arguing with him about whether he was the chief. The chief is the chief. How were we to live from now on, and by what rules? He didn’t explain anything about the rules.” Yeltsin was to recount in his memoirs that he could tell as the conference broke up that no good would come of it. He does not say why. Be it out of fatigue, confusion of the oligarchs with state employees whose standing depended completely on him, or some other cause, Yeltsin had failed to lay down the law.¹⁰¹

For the Svyazinvest combatants, the only law for the moment was the law of the jungle. President and government did not act to change the auction result. After another six weeks of mudslinging, Yeltsin on November 4 agreed to a proposal by Chubais and Nemtsov to remove Berezovskii from his position in the Security Council. The decisive consideration was conflict of interest: He was mixing business and politics. Yeltsin was disgusted with Berezovskii and made a show of firing him by minor executive order (rasporyazheniye) rather than full-dress presidential decree (ukaz).¹⁰² On November 12 Berezovskii and Gusinskii struck back by releasing “kompromat,” compromising material put together by their corporate security branches, to the effect that Chubais and four of his young reformers had accepted honorariums of $90,000 each for a not-yet-written book on the history of Russian privatization. The money had come from a firm that was soon to be purchased by Potanin. Within days, Yeltsin felt compelled to dismiss all of the coauthors except Chubais, who had to relinquish his second cabinet title, as minister of finance, on November 20.¹⁰³ Nemtsov was also lowered a notch, losing his second position as minister of fuel and energy to Sergei Kiriyenko. After that, writes Yeltsin, “My meetings with Chubais became much less frequent.”¹⁰⁴ Nemtsov noticed the same, as he dropped from two audiences a week to one every several weeks.

The Svyazinvest imbroglio turned into a loss maker for all, and not least of all for Boris Yeltsin. On business’s role in the new politics, he had to concede after the fact that he “did not immediately grasp the scale of this phenomenon and all the dangers it posed.”¹⁰⁵ The winners of the auction did not make money from it, and George Soros sold his stake in 2004 at a loss. The oligarchs as a group also lost and were revealed, not as omnipotent, but as selfish and even rapacious and as politically inept—disunified, shortsighted, overplaying their hands. The scandal would have echo effects for years to come. After the 1996 election, it had been understood in all quarters that the cream of Russian business and the Yeltsin government, to quote Nemtsov, were “in the same boat.”¹⁰⁶ The question was now not only about who had captured whom but about whether anyone would be moving the boat forward, and toward what destination. In certain regards, as the Washington Post’s David Hoffman has written, the business elite and Westernizing politicians, with Yeltsin looking on at a regal remove, had been functioning as a comfortable club. When the members came to blows over one obscure company, “the club of tycoons and reformers began to fall apart.”¹⁰⁷