Yeltsin

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Endgame

The effective length of Yeltsin’s second presidential term was less than half of the first. Constitutionally limited to four years, it got off to a late start owing to the heart operation and was foreshortened by early retirement in December of 1999. Indeed, the nomination of Vladimir Putin as prime minister and heir apparent put him partway out the door that August. If the front half of term two was about taking power back, the back half was about letting go of power and, in so doing, not rubbing out everything he had tried to achieve. His behavior at the time, ridiculed by some contemporaries as impulsive and unserious, accomplished his short-term goals, against the odds. The long-term effects are still being acted out and debated today.

The Yeltsin endgame began in earnest with his government. He first gave thought to revamping it in November–December 1997. The brunt of his disaffection was borne by the man who had been his prime minister since 1992. While Viktor Chernomyrdin and his ever-changing roster of ministers had rendered faithful service, they, in Yeltsin’s estimation, were not up to the task of bringing about sustainable development in a marketized economy. The strength of Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin set down in Presidential Marathon, was his “exceptional capacity for compromises…. But that was also the problem. The main compromise Chernomyrdin ‘sat on’ all these years was… between market relations and the Soviet directors’ corps,” a bargain from which Russia had to move on. Yeltsin, moreover, was looking ahead to the making of the next president, a prize Chernomyrdin had lately grown hopeful of attaining. Yeltsin was sure that his love for “the commonplaces of cautious administration” and the masses’ weariness of “the same old faces” in politics would make him unelectable when the next presidential campaign rolled around. Chernomyrdin would have to make way for someone younger, more resolute, and with “another view of the world” in his head.¹

Testimony on all sides makes it plain how greatly Yeltsin at the conclusion of his career relied on personnel renewal within the executive branch as the key to presidential leadership. In the role of political impresario, he was to gloat in 2000, he and no one else had populated Russia’s blank public stage. “By giving a politician the chance to occupy the premier’s or a vice premier’s seat, I instantly made him famous, his actions significant, and his personage notable.” Yeltsin acknowledged that this role flourished out of necessity: “I sometimes think I had simply no other way to bring new people into politics,” and through them new ideas and approaches.²

There was no other way because Yeltsin’s energies were depleted and his charisma blotted, and because of his past choices. He had refused to create a political party that would furnish a Yeltsinist organizational framework for those seeking office and a Yeltsinist conceptual framework for those holding it. A last gasp at drawing him into partisanship occurred right after the 1996 election. Georgii Satarov sent him a memorandum in July about a new party of power that he would head and that would subsume Chernomyrdin’s Our Home Is Russia and a raft of centrist and liberal organizations. It would consolidate the new political system and “the pro-system political elite.” The sketch interested him, Yeltsin assured Satarov. But he was unfit and awaiting coronary surgery, and took no steps to implement after the operation.³

Yeltsin met with contenders for prime minister under “various pretexts,” on the lookout for a technocrat free of “debts and obligations to his party or his section of the political elite.” This ruled out party heads and power brokers, national and subnational. The search narrowed to three members of Chernomyrdin’s latest cabinet, another person who held economic positions earlier in the decade, the director of the central bank, and a former commander of Russian border troops.⁴ As lists go, it was an obscure one, and only one on it (the former minister, Boris Fëdorov) had ever run for election or worked in a party. Two ministers were excluded for closeness to the sectors they controlled; Fëdorov was “too politicized and ambitious”; the banker, Sergei Dubinin, and the military officer, Andrei Nikolayev, were quick-tempered and unsteady.⁵ Yeltsin’s later conduct makes the otherwise unmemorable Nikolayev noteworthy. Yeltsin knew and respected him in Sverdlovsk and was full of praise for him in the border-guards job, which he left in December 1997 after squabbles with other security officials. That the general was a candidate at all shows that the soldierly style was exercising an appeal to Yeltsin well before the rise of Putin.⁶

By a process of elimination, Yeltsin went to the sixth name on his list. Sergei Kiriyenko, a protégé of Boris Nemtsov in Nizhnii Novgorod, had worked in the Komsomol, commercial banking, and oil refining; he relocated to Moscow with Nemtsov in the spring of 1997 and made energy minister in November. He was by far the youngest on the short list, at age thirty-five, and had a mild manner and a decidedly boyish appearance. Yeltsin valued his business experience and restrained articulateness, yet conceded there was “something of the honor-roll graduate student” to him.⁷ The two first met on the 1994 layover in Nizhnii at which Yeltsin spoke improvidently of Nemtsov as his successor. In early March 1998, Kiriyenko handed Yeltsin a clipped report about streamlining the Russian coal industry; Yeltsin liked it and Kiriyenko’s “youthful maximalism” on market principles.⁸ More than Chubais and Nemtsov in 1997, Kiriyenko was Yeltsin’s second-term Yegor Gaidar, the well-connected wunderkind who would accelerate change as the agent of an impatient president.⁹

Yeltsin precluded doing in 1998 what he suspected he should have done in 1997: put the seasoned young reformers around Chubais in unqualified control of the government. Svyazinvest had cheapened the stock of Chubais and Nemtsov, who had far more hands-on experience of government and elite folkways than Kiriyenko. Practiced junior members of the team, untouched by the incident, were available for promotion. Yeltsin knew whom he wanted, and it was Kiriyenko. First thing on March 23, 1998, he informed Chernomyrdin. Kiriyenko took on the nomination and Yeltsin signed the papers making him acting prime minister. Yeltsin, according to Kiriyenko, shed a tear when he briefed him on the exchange with Chernomyrdin.¹⁰

The nominee had to be confirmed by an absolute majority of 226 votes in the State Duma. The deputies were of no mind to oblige. The constitution’s Article 111 stated that if they rejected the president three times in the two weeks allowed, he was to disband the house and call a parliamentary election. Were there to be an initial turndown, it did not lay down whether he was free to resubmit the name of his preferred candidate. After Kiriyenko took only 143 votes on April 10, Yeltsin unflinchingly asserted that right and renominated him; in the second ballot, on April 17, Kiriyenko sank to 115 votes. Yeltsin pulled out all the stops on a third try. He hosted a roundtable for politicians in Catherine’s Hall of Kremlin Building No. 1, importuned leaders of the Duma factions, and got the Federation Council to sanction Kiriyenko. Vladimir Zhirinovskii of the nationalistic LDPR, with the third largest bloc of Duma votes, swung them to Yeltsin and Kiriyenko—to ensure political stability, he said (“A bad government is better than no government”), and for pecuniary benefit, it was widely believed.¹¹ Nikolai Ryzhkov, Yeltsin’s old foe and now the kingpin of a small socialistic caucus, helped by rationalizing a positive vote as a strike “against the destruction of the Duma.” The Duma speaker, Gennadii Seleznëv of the KPRF, came out solidly in the affirmative and warned that dissolving the Duma for the first time ever would endanger the unity of Russia. “The president,” he said for good measure, “is tightening the screws on us and we have no alternative.”¹² Seleznëv got the chamber to conduct the third ballot anonymously, enabling many communists and others to elude party discipline. Unpopular though Yeltsin was, he was able to play on fears by rank-and-file deputies that in a new election they might not secure nominations and seats, would have to campaign without their Duma office base, and would be blamed for economic side effects. As icing on the cake, Yeltsin went on television to say he had asked Pavel Borodin of the Presidential Business Department “to tend to the deputies’ problems” if they took a “constructive” approach to the confirmation vote—the problems being those of housing and perks. “One can only guess whether this should have been understood as responding to their material needs or as classic bribery.”¹³

The Duma knuckled under on April 24. When the division bells rang, 251 deputies voted to confirm Kiriyenko as head of government.¹⁴ Yeltsin showed him around his new office in the Russian White House. For them both, it was all downhill from here.

Yeltsin could not resist the temptation to make a few balancing ministerial changes, notably the removal of Chubais and of Anatolii Kulikov, the relatively conservative interior minister, and to insist that his ex-favorite Boris Nemtsov be retained as a deputy prime minister. That done, he gave Kiriyenko as much latitude in selecting cabinet members and defining program initiatives as Gaidar and Gennadii Burbulis had enjoyed in 1991–92. Passionately wanting him to succeed, Yeltsin conferred with Kiriyenko in the Kremlin or at Gorki-9 two or three days a week until his summer break.¹⁵ Vigorous young ministers took over finance (Mikhail Zadornov),¹⁶ economic coordination (Viktor Khristenko), tax collection (Boris Fëdorov), and labor (Oksana Dmitriyeva). Draft bills on economic liberalization were submitted to the Duma. In May Kiriyenko and Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev, seconded by Tatyana Dyachenko, asked Yeltsin to dismiss Pavel Borodin and get to the bottom of allegations of corruption in the Kremlin business directorate, and they had him almost sold on the idea. After a heart-to-heart with Borodin, the president ordered him to institute competitive bidding for future contracts but kept him in the job.¹⁷

If Kiriyenko had some of the properties of the right man to reform the reforms, the timing was wrong and it would be all he could do to tranquilize a volatile situation. The deus ex machina was a downturn in the overheated economies of southeast and east Asia, hit in 1997 by falling commodity prices and runs on the local currencies. Contagion from the “Asian flu” gave Russia financial sniffles in October–November. Government intervention to shore up the ruble did not restore full confidence, as is demonstrated by the slide in the RTS stock index from its high of 572 points on October 6 to 397 points on December 31.¹⁸ Economic uncertainty played into Yeltsin’s agonizing over Chernomyrdin: He was unhappy with the prime minister’s inability to answer pointed questions about finances, and conveyed this to insiders.¹⁹ By March, observers were beginning to see an Asianstyle crisis as in the making. In the second week of May, as the world price of crude oil fell to $12 a barrel (it had been $26 in January 1997) and the RTS average careened toward 200 points, the press predicted an imminent devaluation of the ruble. Yeltsin, with Kiriyenko and Dubinin, could have acted then to give in to the inevitable and cushion the effects. But the new cabinet was “terrified” by the prospect and of its political consequences.²⁰ When no one acted, speculation reached a fever pitch. Defense of the ruble cost an estimated $4 billion per month in reserves that summer, bringing hard-currency and gold reserves down to less than $15 billion.

The pain would have been less were it not for a domestic background factor—the fiscal overexposure of the government. Yeltsin stated later that he had shone a flashlight on the problem at a meeting of the Council of Ministers in December 1997. “I said [to Chernomyrdin and the ministers], ‘You always explain everything in terms of the world financial crisis. Sure, the financial hurricane has not spared Russia and it did not originate in Moscow. But there is another aspect to the problem: the deplorable state of the Russian budget. And here you have no one to blame but yourselves.’”²¹ What Yeltsin did not say was that the red ink in the budget was something for which he himself had no small part of the responsibility.

The condition was chronic and dated back to the macroeconomic stabilization program of 1992 to 1995. Soviet-era social guarantees having been liquidated, Yeltsin did not want to antagonize the population further by cutting back on social allowances and services, or to alienate public-sector workers by doing away with their jobs or not paying their wages. As Aleksandr Livshits, his assistant for economics, put it, the president “felt there were limits to ordinary people’s patience” and “was afraid of a social explosion” if living standards deteriorated without relief.²² An attempt in May 1997 to sequester unfunded items in the federal budget was dropped after several months, and then revived without lasting success in 1998. On the revenue side, the weak post-communist state struggled to collect taxes, often accepting nonpayment, promissory notes, or goods in kind in lieu of money. Anxious not to drive firms into layoffs or bankruptcy, it instructed Gazprom and the electric grid to follow its lead and did not force them to honor their debts to the government. The 1996 election campaign engendered a new round of promises for bailouts and special projects and more unwillingness to squeeze out additional revenues. Post-election endeavors to increase tax yields cut little ice, as we saw in Chapter 15. A federal deficit that was reduced from 10 percent of GDP in 1994 to 5 percent in 1995 was back to 8 percent in 1997, only 1 percent less than tax revenues in total—meaning that the government of Russia was spending almost two rubles for every one it took in. As a noninflationary tool to finance the deficit, it relied on treasury bills known as GKOs (the acronym for State Short-Term Obligations), distinguished by their ultrahigh yields and fast maturity. The GKOs were purchased by domestic banks and by nonresident portfolio investors, who in 1996 acquired the right to convert their earnings to hard currency at will. The public borrowing required to float the GKOs produced a major overvaluation of the currency.²³

Soft oil prices, capital managers’ aversion to country risk, fear of a global recession, and the ensuing hike in interest rates made the mountain of state debt untenable. In Ponzi fashion, the Ministry of Finance begat ever more GKOs to cover the shortfall and boosted the annual yield from 18 percent in July 1997 to 65 percent in June 1998 and 170 percent in mid-August. Russia went further out on a limb by issuing several billion dollars in Eurobonds and making cash loans that would have to be repaid in dollars. Interest payments on the debt, which were 17 percent of the budget in January 1998, gobbled up 34 percent by July of 1998.²⁴ The RTS stock index went down in tandem to 135 points in early July, on its way to a low of 38 points on October 2, 1998—seven cents on the dollar for those who bought in at the high one year before.

Yeltsin’s infant government had limited options. Kiriyenko got Boris Nemtsov to meet with coal miners who were on strike over unpaid wages and blockading the Trans-Siberian Railroad; the pledge to redress their grievances added to the government’s obligations. Dubinin and the Central Bank of Russia pressed what monetary buttons they had. With Anatolii Chubais as head negotiator, Russia talked with the IMF about disbursement of a tranche from earlier loans and about new credits. The $5 billion of a $14.8 billion rescue package to make it to Moscow in August disappeared without a trace.²⁵ Boris Fëdorov proposed a cut in tax rates tied to a crackdown on tax debtors, targeting the 1,000 wealthiest Russians. In July, as an olive branch to the communists in parliament, Yeltsin appointed Yurii Maslyukov, a defense industrialist, former Politburo member, and KPRF lawmaker, as minister of industry and trade. But efforts to get the Duma to pass an austerity program fell flat. Refusing to trim spending, reduce subsidies, or introduce a sales tax and other new charges, legislators adjourned for a summer recess.

Yeltsin issued pronouncement after pronouncement about budget discipline, but did not swear off using the power of the purse, albeit a nearly empty purse, to please constituents. In late June he passed a day in Kostroma, on the Volga River two provinces northeast of Moscow, with local managers, students, and peasants:

As part of the consultations, Yeltsin had his fourth meeting with the oligarchs, ten of them, on June 2. Bankers Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinskii, Mikhail Khodorkovskii, Vladimir Potanin, and Aleksandr Smolenskii had been at previous gatherings; Vitalii Malkin of the Russian Credit Bank joined them; and four industrialists were added—Chubais, wearing his hat as head of electricity wholesaler YeES (the position he was given when he left the cabinet in March), Vagit Alekperov of Lukoil, Vladimir Bogdanov of the Surgutneftegaz oil and gas company, and Rem Vyakhirev of Gazprom. Kiriyenko sat in, unlike Chernomyrdin, who had not been present at the meetings in 1995, 1996, and 1997. Yeltsin described the state of affairs as ominous and enjoined the moguls to pay their taxes, keep their money in Russia, and keep faith in his government. He asked what they most needed from him; Fridman replied that it was stability. Perhaps, Yeltsin volunteered, I will make an announcement that Kiriyenko will chair the Council of Ministers until 2000.²⁷ No such announcement came forth, which was not lost on Kiriyenko. The prime minister met separately on June 16 and 18 with most of the June 2 participants, and his spokesmen said leading capitalists and state officials would form a joint Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. But Yeltsin did not express an opinion. The attempt to give business-government cooperation a formal cast died on the drawing board.

Yeltsin claimed on several occasions that the emergency had passed, even as he spoke more frankly with his subordinates. On August 13 the Financial Times of London printed a letter from U.S. financier George Soros about Russia being at “the terminal phase” of a “meltdown” of its financial markets. He recommended a prompt devaluation of 15 to 25 percent and turning over management of the ruble to an expert currency board. At the request of Kiriyenko, his economic team, and Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin made one last demurral. On August 14, in Novgorod, he stated “firmly and concisely” that there would be no devaluation. Kiriyenko, Yumashev, Chubais, and Dubinin (accompanied by Yegor Gaidar) went to Zavidovo two days later to tell him the game was up. Yeltsin concurred and, as was typical of his style, asked them to spare him the fine print. “The head of government started describing the details, but I stopped him. Even without them, it was clear that the government, and all of us along with it, had become hostages to fate…. ‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘Do take emergency measures.’”²⁸

On August 17 Russia let the exchange rate float, defaulted on its treasury bills and bonds, and imposed a ninety-day moratorium on payments to foreign creditors. In two frantic weeks, the ruble lost half of its exchange value, going from 6.3 to the U.S. dollar to 9.3; it was to plummet to 21 to the dollar by September 21. GKOs were reduced to all but worthless scraps of paper. The three-month moratorium favored Russians over foreigners without keeping hundreds of the banks from going under in a triage process that stretched into 1999. Citizens queued at tellers’ windows to withdraw their deposits. Prognoses of economic and social breakdown swamped the domestic and world media.²⁹

Political change came inexorably in the wake of the financial bulletins. The alternatives facing Yeltsin, as one writer put it in September, were “the bad, the atrocious, and the bloodcurdling.”³⁰ The leftist and nationalist majority in the Duma, and especially the far-left communists, were out for nothing less than the president’s head. On August 21 the house met and passed a nonbinding resolution calling on him to step down, with 248 votes for and just thirty-two against. Opinion makers had been scoping out an abdication in earnest since early summer, some pitching ideas for institutional innovations that might grease the skids. In an essay in Nezavisimaya gazeta on July 10, the sagacious Vitalii Tret’yakov pointed the finger at Yeltsin and his loyalists for following an “ostrich policy.” Without a change of course, Russia was in for popular insurrection, a coup d’état, or civil war; if the last were to break out, the country would come under foreign military occupation, since the world could not abide the breakup of a former superpower with a nuclear arsenal and ten atomic power stations. To stave off a cataclysm, Russia, he said, needed to hold special legislative and presidential elections within three months. The Federal Assembly should establish a Provisional State Council consisting of main ministers, parliamentary leaders, party heads, and representatives of Russia’s macroregions and trade unions. Yeltsin was to be barred from chairing the council and to be a member only if he consented in writing not to stand for another term in the extraordinary election for president. To head the council, Tret’yakov suggested Foreign Minister Yevgenii Primakov; he also recommended that Viktor Chernomyrdin be returned as the caretaker prime minister for the interregnum.³¹

Tret’yakov was right in the presentiment that there would be a shakeup and that Chernomyrdin and Primakov would be players in it. The Provisional State Council, though, was too contorted an idea to fly.³² And Tret’yakov miscalculated about the president. Yeltsin did not consider renouncing power in 1998, to a Supreme Council or anybody else, despite repeated testimony in the press that he was on the verge of doing so.³³

Yeltsin notified Kiriyenko on August 22 that his premiership was done, after four months. The choice to replace him was the amazing one foreseen by Tret’yakov in July—Chernomyrdin, the same veteran of the red directors’ club whom Yeltsin had deposed in March. As he made the offer to Chernomyrdin in his Kremlin office on August 23, Yeltsin made a fulsome apology for the past spring and offered to repeat it on the airwaves. Chernomyrdin said the confidential amends were sufficient. It was made clear in this meeting and others that Yeltsin expected Chernomyrdin to sit until 2000 and to run for president then with his support. Yeltsin was more acceptant of Chernomyrdin’s return than excited by it.³⁴ He divulged his decision in a televised speech the next day. “Today we need the people who are usually called ‘heavyweights.’ In my view, the experience and weight of Chernomyrdin are needed.” Yeltsin drew a link to the succession question, saying the reinstatement would help assure “continuity in power in 2000” and that human qualities such as Chernomyrdin’s “will be the decisive argument in the presidential elections.”

The Duma would have none of it. In the first round of the voting, on August 31, only ninety-four deputies voted for the former and acting prime minister, worse than Kiriyenko had fared in April. Meeting on September 2 with Bill Clinton, in Moscow to show the flag, Yeltsin was truculent. He was not afraid to provoke a system-wide crisis if the Duma would not confirm his nominee: “Yeltsin seemed ready for that, even to welcome it. He could use his presidential powers, he said, to ‘wreck the Communist Party once and for all.’ The communists ‘have committed plenty of sins in the past. I could make a list of those sins and take it to the Ministry of Justice and prosecute them.’ Clasping his hands and gritting his teeth, he added, ‘I could really put the squeeze on them.’”³⁵ But Yeltsin also shared with the Americans that he was debating alternatives, and Chernomyrdin knew it full well.³⁶ Doubts only grew when, upon resubmission, Chernomyrdin could garner no more than 138 votes. While this was more than Kiriyenko received in the second round in April, the climate of opinion was different: Gennadii Seleznëv would not arrange a secret ballot; the communist caucus stuck to its guns; the Federation Council was not on board; Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin were damaged goods. There was also a constitutional complication. The communists were preparing to introduce a bill to impeach Yeltsin. Under Article 109, the president was not empowered to dissolve the Duma and force a new parliamentary election if an article of impeachment had passed the lower house. Had Yeltsin persisted, militant KPRF deputies had a chance to tie his hands by railroading through an impeachment bill before the nomination of Chernomyrdin came to a vote.

Yeltsin now executed another U-turn: As in December 1992 with Chernomyrdin, he agreed to a compromise candidate. Yevgenii Primakov, two years older than Yeltsin (and thirty-three years older than Kiriyenko), had been Russia’s spymaster and latterly its minister of foreign affairs. Before that he was a journalist, academic, and nonvoting member of the Gorbachev Politburo, always working hand in glove with the security services. Primakov was portly, avuncular in comportment, and center-left in his politics. He wanted a broad-based government, heightened state regulation of the market, and a more muscular foreign policy, all of which fit better with what parliament and the populace wanted than Chernomyrdin or Kiriyenko had. Primakov needed to be talked into taking the position of prime minister. After three meetings with Yeltsin and many more with staffers, he acquiesced on September 10. The nomination sailed through the Duma on September 11, with 317 votes in favor to sixty-three against.

Yeltsin’s back-to-back reversals, in a setting of economic distress, led some to the surmise that his star had set irretrievably. “The Yeltsin factor, with his… utter unpredictability in the struggle for personal power, has departed for all time from Russian politics,” Tret’yakov submitted in Nezavisimaya gazeta the morning after the Primakov confirmation. “In the larger scheme of things, politician Yeltsin no longer exists”; all that was left now was “citizen Yeltsin,” yesterday’s man. He had failed to “appoint” an heir, Tret’yakov continued, and would be unable to appoint one in future.³⁷

But Yeltsin was not yet ready to fade from the scene, and he was not bereft of political resources, as would be evident in 1999. What Tret’yakov’s diagnosis also overlooked was that the Primakov solution was in some ways a blessing in disguise for Yeltsin. Defeat in a third Duma ballot, if that was the alternative, held more dangers for him than it did for the communist-led opposition, which most likely would have come back from an election strengthened. Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow was a much-bruited option for prime minister in September. Put off by his ambition and forwardness, Yeltsin was passionately against the candidacy and sacked several close aides for pushing it.³⁸ Had a Chernomyrdin restoration come about, it would have been a standing reproach to Yeltsin for his poor judgment in ousting him earlier. Unlike Primakov, Chernomyrdin had open presidential aspirations that Yeltsin would need to manage. Chernomyrdin had reason to feel aggrieved at Yeltsin’s treatment of him and to reckon that he could feed off it politically.³⁹ And parliamentary approval for Chernomyrdin would have come at the price of a huge power-sharing concession, to be in effect until 2000. During the negotiations Yeltsin had offered to waive his right to dissolve the legislature (it would waive its right to vote no-confidence) and to give it a veto over the appointment of deputy premiers, the minister of finance, and the heads of the force agencies. Gennadii Zyuganov renounced the pact on August 30, thinking there were more concessions to wring out of Yeltsin.⁴⁰ Yeltsin took it off the table when he submitted Primakov’s name, leaving him able in future to put his new prime minister through the same meat grinder he subjected Chernomyrdin and Kiriyenko to in 1998.

Primakov, most importantly, was in a position to pursue the needed course correction with far more credibility than Chernomyrdin. Talk of a constitutional revision to dilute Yeltsin’s presidential powers withered on the vine in October. Yeltsin was prepared to give Primakov as much autonomy to select collaborators as the young liberals Gaidar and Kiriyenko had in their time. Primakov filled many positions in his White House apparat with reserve intelligence officers. In staffing the cabinet, he would say in a memoir, “The president and his entourage… desisted from imposing… particular people on me.”⁴¹ As his first deputy premier for economic affairs, he lined up the communist and dirigiste Yurii Maslyukov.⁴² At Primakov’s urging, Viktor Gerashchenko, evicted from the position by Yeltsin in 1994, came back on September 12 to chair the central bank.

Primakov on the whole was a moderate and pragmatic prime minister. He ran for Yeltsin what was essentially a coalition government. Fourteen of thirty-one cabinet members, among them reformists like Finance Minister Zadornov, were carried over from Kiriyenko, and he blended in leftists, centrists, and clients of Luzhkov and other politicos. Primakov and his ministers employed administrative levers to put failed banks into receivership, slow capital flight, and force the payment of some back wages to civil servants and the disgruntled miners.⁴³ The budget they submitted had a deficit of only 3 percent of GDP. Primakov and Gerashchenko financed the deficit that remained through the printing press, thereby ramping up inflation to 84 percent in 1998 (from 11 percent in 1997) while short-circuiting the ruinous lending cycle. The feeble economic growth of 1997 yielded to still another slump in output, by 4.9 percent in 1998, but the bottom did not drop out of the system, as had been feared. Primakov, in Yeltsin’s assessment, “chose the perfect intonation” to reassure the nation. “With his confident unhurriedness, Yevgenii Maksimovich managed… to convince almost everybody that things would calm down.”⁴⁴

Counter to the doomsday talk, the Russian economy after those first jumpy weeks commenced a dramatic upturn that has continued to this day. There were signs as early as October and November of 1998. The annual figures for 1999 were music to Yeltsin’s ears—5.4 percent growth and inflation under 40 percent. The seemingly disastrous decision to mark down the currency ended up being a revitalizing tonic. The devalued ruble made petroleum and other exports more affordable to external buyers and formed a nontariff barrier against imports, which sparked a recovery in the domestic supply of food, apparel, and consumer durables. Shut out of international capital markets, Russia was at last pressed to harden its state budget and restructure the sovereign debt. Crisis let these revisions, undoable in normal times, be imposed and locked in against regression. In the worldwide economic environment, trends turned in Russia’s favor for the first time since the 1980s. Most critically, oil prices more than doubled between 1998 and 2000. That surge, compounded by an increase in production and exports, tripled revenues from the oil and gas trade, which in turn restored liquidity to cash-starved commerce and put an end to the demonetization and nonpayment syndromes.⁴⁵

In his survey of the financial collapse in Presidential Marathon, Yeltsin revisited the therapeutic imagery he had applied to shock therapy six or seven years beforehand. “A political crisis,” he wrote, “is a temporary phenomenon and is even useful in a way. I know from my life that the organism uses a crisis to overcome an illness, renew itself, and return to its customary, healthy state.”⁴⁶ The passing of the great panic of 1998, however, was not followed by a revival of Boris Yeltsin’s fortunes. Instead, he was increasingly beleaguered and preoccupied by finding a way out of the jam he was in.

One reason this was so was that the economic turnaround seemed fragile and did not improve the well-being of the average Russian family for some time to come. Per-capita income and consumption reached pre-crash levels only in 2001, by which time Yeltsin was in retirement.

A more immediate problem was with the president’s personal health and ability, actual and perceived, to do his job. Yeltsin maintained mental equilibrium after the blur of events in August–September, largely out of relief that things were not worse and that Primakov had taken the bit between his teeth. It was his physical condition that worsened noticeably. One month after Primakov’s installation, Yeltsin’s occasional appearances at the Kremlin were being played up by the Russian media as “breaking news.” On a visit to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the second week of October, he had coughing spells, several times lost his footing, and returned to Moscow early.⁴⁷ He checked into the Barvikha sanatorium at the end of October, went on a threeweek layoff attributed by his staff to exhaustion, and was admitted to the TsKB on November 23 with double pneumonia, staying there for better than two weeks. On January 17, 1999, he was hospitalized with a bleeding stomach ulcer. He emerged from the sanatorium in early February to fly to the funeral of King Hussein of Jordan, where Primakov had been announced as Russia’s representative. His doctors were unconditionally against the expedition. “No one understands me,” Yeltsin declared to his staff, ordering a six A.M. departure for the presidential plane.⁴⁸ He was on the ground in Amman for only six hours.

The ulcer flared up again in late February. Yeltsin was readmitted for three weeks in hospital and sanatorium. The Izvestiya columnist Maksim Sokolov floridly summed up the contrast with Yeltsin in his prime: “The material out of which nature made Yeltsin is the wood from which kings are carved. Yeltsin’s and all Russia’s misfortune is that nine years of transitional burdens have managed to chew this wood into dust.”⁴⁹ Attendees at the G-8 meeting in Cologne in June 1999, where Yeltsin dropped in on the final day, found that he “looked like a battered statue that might topple over at any moment.”⁵⁰ After an even-keeled summer, he was in hospital for several days in October 1999 for influenza and laryngitis and, following a short visit to Istanbul—his last as president—went through it all over again in November and early December, for pneumonia.

The decline in Yeltsin’s health provoked repeated pleas in parliament and the media for him to resign. Some went so far as to appeal to Naina Yeltsina and the family to intercede to put a stop to the “public spectacle” of him “dying away” in office—unsolicited advice that the Yeltsins found deeply wounding.⁵¹

There were multitudinous markers of poorer political health after August 1998—poorer than Yeltsin had ever been in as national leader. Public-relations and policy-planning endeavors begun in 1996–97 were inaudibly abandoned. The Friday brainstorming group did not convene after the 1998 crisis. The Saturday radio chats were canceled rather than having to make amends each time for “the disaster of the week.”⁵² In the monthly ratings of influence in Nezavisimaya gazeta for October, the superpresident, Yeltsin, was put in third place, below Prime Minister Primakov and Mayor Luzhkov; he remained there until the February 1999 poll, when he was back in second place, with Primakov still in first.⁵³ A corruption scandal broke out early in 1999 around the Swiss construction company Mabetex. Prosecutors in Switzerland alleged that it had paid kickbacks to Pavel Borodin and other high-level officials to secure the main contract for the reconstruction of Building No. 1, in Yeltsin’s first term. The procurator general, Yurii Skuratov, who had long been estranged from Yeltsin’s administration, launched an internal investigation. It eventually was claimed that the owner of Mabetex, Kosovar-Albanian businessman Behgjet Pacolli, had transferred a million dollars to a Hungarian bank account for President Yeltsin, supplied him and his two daughters with credit cards, and paid for expensive purchases through them. Guilt or innocence is impossible to ascertain with certainty, owing to the secrecy surrounding all these transactions, but the finger pointing at the Yeltsin family lacks credence and none of the charges was ever proved. Still, the affair was of sufficient magnitude for Yeltsin to mention it on the telephone with President Clinton in September 1999.⁵⁴

Proof of an embattled presidency could not be missed in various areas. In center-periphery relations, provincial governors were among those who summoned Yeltsin to cede power during and after the 1998 crisis, and there was a spike in regional noncompliance with central laws and policy at this same time. Chechnya, brutalized by the war of 1994 to 1996, remained an open sore. Leader Aslan Maskhadov proved incapable of reining in gangsters, terrorists, and Islamic fundamentalists; dealings with Moscow became tenser by the month.⁵⁵ Foreign policy had its own frustrations, as Yeltsin could not stop NATO from retaliating against Serbia for its repression of rebel forces and civilians in Kosovo. An air war against the Serbs began on March 24, 1999, leading Russia to freeze relations with the alliance.

Yeltsin’s hesitancy showed in the pattern of executive appointments. More than in unsettled periods in the past, he was prepared to select helpers who would score points for him with audiences that found him deficient. On Yumashev’s suggestion, Yeltsin on December 7, 1998, named career KGB officer Nikolai Bordyuzha to replace Yumashev as chief of the Kremlin administration. Bordyuzha retained the position of secretary of the Security Council that he had held since September. Yeltsin wrote afterward that he had doubts about Bordyuzha; they were only partly offset by assurances that at the beginning he would clear all big decisions with Yumashev. But Yeltsin swallowed his doubts, hoping the choice would send the message that he still meant business. His office “needed some force behind it, at least for show.” Let the opposition shout at him as much as they wanted. “It would be harder to do that when next to the president there stands the figure of a colonel general who simultaneously holds two of the principal positions in the state.” Yeltsin likened the decision to castling (rokirovka in Russian), the chess move that shelters the king beside a rook, away from the middle of the board.⁵⁶

Yeltsin saw himself as taking cover in a storm. Contemporary analysts often concluded, though, that he had made the more drastic step of surrendering control to a collectivity termed, in the parlance of this period, “the Family” (Sem’ya). The Family, so it was said, consisted of relatives of the president, high state officials, selected financiers, and hangers-on; at its hub were Tatyana Dyachenko, Valentin Yumashev, and especially Boris Berezovskii. The unspoken reference was to the Sicilian Cosa Nostra or the clan of Suharto, the corrupt president of Indonesia forced out of office in May 1998. The group was portrayed as bound together by consanguinity and marriage, frequent socializing, shared economic interests, and Berezovskii’s powers of persuasion. And it was Russia’s real government. “Few people do not know,” journalist Yelena Dikun wrote breathlessly in 1999, “that the Family rules our country. In the popular mind, it is the highest institution of power—higher than the president himself.”⁵⁷ The picture of an unassailable cabal, with a chief executive, unwell, acting as its stooge, has been a part of the conventional wisdom about the Yeltsin era.

Fragments of this image had cropped up before. Ruslan Khasbulatov, remember, had attacked Yeltsin in 1993 for surrounding himself with a “collective Rasputin.” Other fragments did not necessarily have sinister connotations. It was no revelation that the president would take counsel from his chief of staff, which Yumashev was until the end of 1998, or from a daughter whom he had appointed a Kremlin adviser and who lived under the same roof as he. The economic and non-economic ties that purportedly bound the Family together vary from one story to another; the evidence for them is uneven and in some cases missing entirely.⁵⁸ Leonid Dyachenko, the then-husband of Tatyana, took up oil trading in the mid-1990s for a firm called Belka; a Belka specialty was the sale of products from a Siberian refinery run by Sibneft, the petroleum company owned by Berezovskii and his partner Roman Abramovich. But the information about his business operations is inconclusive, and no one has suggested that Yeltsin knew much about them or that Leonid had any great affinity for or competence in politics.⁵⁹ Meanwhile, in the spring of 1997, Valerii Okulov, Yeltsin’s other son-in-law, was made director general of Aeroflot, a blue-chip company in which Berezovskii also had a stake. Within a year, he started to purge Berezovskii allies from the board and to cut the financial apron strings to the oligarch—for which Berezovskii sharply criticized him.

Narratives of the Family in action exaggerate the power and unity of its putative members, including Berezovskii—who missed no chance to toot his own horn. Sibneft, Berezovskii’s acquisition through loans-for-shares, was Russia’s sixth or seventh largest oil company. Some of the other oligarchs got choicer industrial assets, and Berezovskii lost out to Vladimir Potanin on Norilsk Nickel, which he very much wanted to take over in 1995. Berezovskii and Vladimir Gusinskii were bested in the Svyazinvest battle of 1997; in May 1998 Berezovskii was prevented from merging Sibneft with fellow oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovskii’s company, Yukos. In the political sphere, Berezovskii after the 1996 election had his ups and downs. Yeltsin took away his position in the Security Council in November 1997. In April 1998 Berezovskii bounced back as executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States, for which he had lobbied extensively with the CIS presidents; Yeltsin had him stripped of that post in March 1999, following a criminal inquiry into embezzlement at Aeroflot. On some questions on which he took a position, Berezovskii came out on the winning side; on others, he found himself on the losing side.⁶⁰

As for Yeltsin, it is apparent that he had not the slightest fondness for Berezovskii. “I never liked and I do not like Boris Abramovich,” he wrote in Presidential Marathon, where he skewered Berezovskii’s overconfident manner, his “scandalous reputation,” and “the fact that he was ascribed a special influence on the Kremlin that he never had.” He valued Berezovskii as an ally on an issue-by-issue basis, one who was talented and energetic if “painful” to work with. What pained Yeltsin most was the combination of personas Berezovskii presented. He posed as the offstage kingmaker and the intimate of the present king, the very point that was infuriating about Gennadii Burbulis in the early 1990s. Then again, on the issues of the day Berezovskii expounded loudly and demandingly, often reaping more publicity than members of the elected government and, on some points, than the president. To continue with the section in Marathon:

In people’s eyes, Berezovskii was my constant shadow. “The hand of Berezovskii” was seen behind the Kremlin’s every decision. Whatever I did and whomever I appointed or dismissed, they always said the same thing: “Berezovskii!” And who was creating this mysterious halo, this reputation of the éminence grise? Why, it was Berezovskii himself…. Every time the situation heated up, Berezovskii would go on television and say, “For my part, I am dead set against this…. I believe that… I am certain that…” He always got a lot of airtime. And the people would think: This is who is really governing the country.⁶¹

So far as the actuality and not the myth of influence goes, it bears mentioning that Yeltsin as president had only several direct conversations all told with Berezovskii. He did not give the tycoon telephone access; in fact, the two never seem to have spoken on the phone. Nor was Berezovskii ever once invited into the Yeltsins’ home or to an out-of-Moscow residence like Zavidovo or Bocharov Ruchei.⁶² Their dialogues were purely business. “I felt that Yeltsin was not fond of me personally,” Berezovskii said in an interview in 2002; “he did hear out what I had to say and took it seriously.”⁶³ But listening was not the same as agreeing, on either one’s part. When Berezovskii saw it as in his interest, he was not afraid to come out against the government line (as on Svyazinvest in 1997) or even to have his newspaper, Nezavisimaya gazeta, in 1998 predict devaluation of the ruble and question the fitness of Yeltsin to finish out his term. At a press conference in September 1999, Berezovskii spoke disparagingly of Yeltsin’s lack of a master plan and his “abominable” cadres decisions.⁶⁴

What, then, of an oblique connection to Yeltsin? Berezovskii got together with Tatyana Dyachenko once every two or three months in the late 1990s. With adversaries, he found it useful to brag that he played Svengali to the unsophisticated daughter of the president and had psychological sway over her.⁶⁵ Asked in 2002 whether she was his gateway to number one, he was much more guarded. This would be “a worse than mistaken judgment,” he replied. “I was well acquainted with her, but mark my words: Tatyana is in the same genetic mold as Boris Nikolayevich. And Tatyana also kept her distance [tozhe derzhala distantsiyu]. It was as if she constantly felt that she was the daughter of the president.” Tatyana acknowledged that she thought well of Berezovskii’s intellect and drive but at the same time related to him with “great caution,” as she was unsure of his motives and did not want to favor or be seen as favoring one particular plutocrat. Chief of staff Yumashev, who had worked with Berezovskii in the publishing industry, was friendlier. “A lot of what I wanted to say to Boris Nikolayevich,” Berezovskii has stated, “I said to Yumashev.”⁶⁶ And yet, Yumashev’s primary loyalty was unambiguously to Yeltsin, and he and Berezovskii were not on the same wavelength on every issue. To give one example, Yumashev and Dyachenko, fearing that Berezovskii would be deadweight on Yeltsin, both opposed his appointment to the CIS position in 1998 and favored his removal from it in 1999. To give another, in March 1999 the Yeltsins and Yumashev were reliably reported to be livid at stories in the press that Berezovskii was using one of his companies to record their cell phone calls and that Dyachenko was financially dependent on him.⁶⁷ In other words, mutual wariness between Berezovskii and the other two set the tone within the threesome as much as mutual appreciation.

As he did repeatedly in his first term as president, Yeltsin in his second term sent out mixed signals about whether he intended to seek another. He and aides talked both sides of the question. He mostly said he had no interest in a third term; they tended to qualify his disclaimers and say nothing should be ruled out. The State Duma asked the Constitutional Court in October 1997 to review the question of his eligibility to seek another four years. Although Article 81 of the basic law prescribed that no one could hold the office for more than two consecutive terms, lawyers for Yeltsin reasoned that, since he had been elected to one term before the constitution was ratified, he was eligible to stand again. On November 5, 1998, the justices ruled in favor of the Duma brief. There was “an absence of uncertainty” on the merits, they said. Yeltsin had begun a second term in 1996 and had no right to stand for re-election when it ended in the summer of 2000. That was fine by Yeltsin, since “I long ago answered for myself the main question—about the fact that in 2000 I will not participate in the presidential election.”⁶⁸

The issue of a third term was more theoretical than practical. Yeltsin had made a solemn vow to his wife that the 1996 campaign would be his last and never once indicated that he would go back on it.⁶⁹ His infirmity, the many setbacks of the second term, and his unremittingly low scores in the opinion polls only reinforced the case. As long as Yeltsin remained Yeltsin, there was always the chance he would reconsider. It lingered until the very end. In mid-December 1999, two weeks before the handover to Putin, Yeltsin staggered his long-serving head of protocol, Vladimir Shevchenko, with the question, “What do you think? Should I or shouldn’t I go for a third term?” Shevchenko believes the query was part of the process of Yeltsin accommodating himself to the loss of power and that by then his mind was made up.⁷⁰ No one can be sure. After the Constitutional Court judgment, the only way to cling to power would have been something like what Korzhakov and his sympathizers favored in 1996—martial law, postponement of the mandated presidential election, a suspension of the Duma and of many liberties, and the rest. Yeltsin’s physical and political weaknesses being what they were, it was an all but impossible scenario. The premise for Yeltsin, his family, and his political team was, therefore, that he would retire, and a new president would put on the chain of office, in July 2000, four years after his second inauguration.

Until then, Yeltsin was going to have his hands full. The harbingers of post-crisis normalization did not assuage the oppositionists who favored his impeachment, as had been tried without success in 1993. Article 93 of the new constitution set an obstacle course for those who would depose the president more difficult to traverse than the one in place in 1993. The only lawful justification was guilt of “high treason or another grave crime.” Upon motion of one-third of the Duma deputies, the chamber was to appoint a special committee to investigate presidential conduct; two-thirds of the deputies in the Duma had to vote in favor of any motion to remove; the Supreme Court had to certify the criminality of the president’s actions and the Constitutional Court to confirm the procedural regularity of the proceedings; and then the Federation Council, composed of regional leaders, needed to concur.

The Duma struck an impeachment committee in May 1998. It reported out a first charge on September 7. By February 1999 Yeltsin had been arraigned on five counts: for destroying the USSR by signing the Belovezh’e accord; abetting murder during the crackdown on the congress and Supreme Soviet in 1993; exceeding his powers by taking up arms in Chechnya; deliberately ruining the army; and bringing about “the genocide of the Russian people.” On May 13 and 14 Viktor Ilyukhin of the KPRF, a procurator by profession, read out the charges to the whole Duma and made a pitch for a yes vote. During hearings on the genocide charge, Ilyukhin had “stunned many… by declaring… that fewer Russians would have perished under Yeltsin’s rule had the president not surrounded himself with Jewish advisers.”⁷¹ The accusations were mostly about Yeltsin’s first term, ignoring the facts that the legislature had approved the Belovezh’e agreement, that Russians had elected him to a second term, and that the Duma derived its own legitimacy from the referendum that approved the Yeltsin constitution in 1993. In his defense, the most that liberal and centrist deputies were willing to do was plead that a bad status quo would get worse if parliament acted rashly. Impeachment “may lead to complete chaos,” one said. “Have we not had enough foolhardiness from the president? Do we want to add a parliamentary contribution to the destabilization of Russian democracy?” The constitution, he added, did not provide for the dethroning of the head of state “for weakness and incapacity as such…. And this is only fair. The country should have the president it has elected,” unless he has perpetrated high crimes, and not the trumped-up offenses listed in the indictment.⁷²

Just as the impeachment motions were coming to a vote, Yeltsin, written off for dead only months before, grabbed hold of the initiative. Keeping the Duma in his sights, he began in March and April to make the most of a weak hand. In foreign policy, Yeltsin appointed Viktor Chernomyrdin as his personal envoy on the Yugoslav crisis, sent several warships into the Mediterranean, and offered in a telephone conversation with Bill Clinton, in a shocker even for Yeltsin, to meet him for negotiations aboard a Russian submarine he would send specially for the occasion; the Americans passed on the invitation.⁷³ Once the NATO bombing campaign got the Serbs to agree to terms in June, Yeltsin approved the dispatch of two hundred Russian troops from Bosnia to establish a presence in Kosovo. It was Moscow’s only unilateral use of force in Europe since the Cold War and caused a deep division on the NATO side between Wesley Clark, the American supreme commander, who wanted to block the Russians, and Michael Jackson, the British officer in command on the ground, who was alarmed by the risks of trying. “I’m not going to start World War III for you,” Jackson told Clark.⁷⁴

In domestic politics, Yeltsin on March 19 fired his KGB-reared chief of staff, Nikolai Bordyuzha, and appointed Aleksandr Voloshin, a civilian with business experience, some of it with Berezovskii. The Kremlin inner circle had found Bordyuzha unresponsive to political concerns and readier to listen to Primakov than to the president. Bordyuzha had tried to get Yurii Skuratov, the procurator, to resign. Skuratov at first agreed, only to rescind his agreement and then to have the Federation Council refuse on three occasions to exercise its constitutional right to approve his removal. The Kremlin’s response was to deploy kompromat of the tawdriest sort: It authorized the showing on Russian television of a videotape showing the procurator in bed with two prostitutes. On April 2 Yeltsin suspended Skuratov from his duties. Although Skuratov was not properly dismissed for another year, he was locked out of his office and unable to carry out further inquiries.⁷⁵

Tension between Yeltsin and his prime minister mounted over the winter of 1998–99. The specifics mattered less than the overall point that the president was coming to the conclusion that their continued cohabitation was no longer in his interest. Primakov posed an opposite political problem to the one posed by Chernomyrdin a year before. The Russian public was tired of Chernomyrdin and blamed him for governmental failures; it warmed to Primakov and gave him credit for recent successes. Polls in early spring showed that two-thirds of the electorate approved of his work as head of government, that he was trusted by more Russians than any other leader, and that he was being put in the category of potential president. Given Primakov’s age and socialistic proclivities, that was not an outcome Yeltsin could live with. He was nervous that Primakov, while not disloyal to him, could be a focal point for dissent and opposition if he chose to speak out on policy differences from inside the establishment, not unlike Yeltsin had in 1987.⁷⁶

Yeltsin waited for his moment, one of the very last he was to have in the political arena, and acted. Some on his staff wanted to wait until the impeachment vote was held before handling the Primakov problem, reasoning that a dismissal would increase the chances of impeachment going through. Yeltsin saw it differently in part due to a technical point: He knew that the adoption of even one impeachment motion would take away the weapon of threatening to dissolve the Duma in the case of a disagreement over chairmanship of the government. But the essence of his thinking was intuitive, as it had been so many times before. “A sharp, unexpected, aggressive move,” he wrote about the choice, “always knocks your opponent off his feet and disarms him, especially if it appears absolutely illogical and unpredictable. I was convinced of this more than once over the course of my presidential career.”⁷⁷ The “utter unpredictability” that Vitalii Tret’yakov wrote off the preceding summer was not yet gone from the scene.

Yeltsin had been sending out hints that he was restless with Primakov and had someone else in mind to put in his place. That someone was Sergei Stepashin, the easygoing interior minister, with a background in police administration, whom Yeltsin had known since 1990. Stepashin, generally viewed as a liberal but uninvolved in electoral politics, headed a string of law and order–related ministries (security, justice, and interior), recovering from his loss of the directorship of the FSB (Federal Security Service) as a result of the Budënnovsk terror incident of 1995. On April 27 Yeltsin appointed him first deputy premier.⁷⁸ On May 12, three days before the scheduled Duma vote on impeachment, Yeltsin dismissed Primakov and named Stepashin acting prime minister. Commentators were incredulous that Yeltsin had done it again. For the third time in fourteen months, he had made a splashy move to “deflect the country from discussing the president’s inadequacy for his job” or so it was seen.⁷⁹

The Duma roll calls on impeachment were carried live on television. A Lenin double paraded in front of the entranceway, flanked by died-in-thewool communists with placards denouncing “Führer Boriska.” Many of the witnesses invited to testify at the two days of committee-of-the-whole hearings failed to show. Fire-breathing rhetoric did not carry over into coherent legislative action on the part of the opposition, and Yeltsin’s representatives craftily played on divisions among the parliamentarians. Two hundred and ninety-four deputies voted on May 15 for at least one of the five motions, but no individual motion received that many. The Chechnya resolution got 283 ayes, or seventeen fewer than required; the motion on the 1993 events got 263, that on the Belovezh’e accord 241, that on the army 240, and that on genocide 238. The Chechnya motion, which was championed by the reformist Yabloko Party, was seen as the only one having a realistic chance of passing. A number of legislators who were willing to vote yes on another motion abstained or spoiled ballots on Chechnya. The LDPR refused to let its deputies participate at all; Yabloko ended up allowing its members to vote their conscience (nine of them voted against the Chechnya resolution); and a small caucus of regional representatives asked their members to lodge one positive vote each.⁸⁰

Yeltsin had gambled and won on impeachment. Sergei Stepashin needed only one ballot to win Duma confirmation on May 19, with 301 votes in favor, almost as many as Primakov took in 1998.

Was the endgame without larger purpose, a contest entered into for the sheer pleasure of it? Yeltsin’s delight in dealing and playing the cards is undeniable and is confirmed in the chapter in Presidential Marathon about the summer of 1999, one titled “Prime Ministerial Poker.” There Yeltsin recounted a double ruse. Shortly before sending Stepashin’s name to the Duma, and knowing full well that he was going to do so, he phoned Speaker Seleznëv to say that he was nominating somebody else entirely—Nikolai Aksënenko, the Russian minister of railways. Tall, burly, and Siberian-born, Aksënenko had worked his whole life in the transport system. In Yumashev’s words, he “reminded Yeltsin of himself in his days as a builder of apartment houses in Sverdlovsk.”⁸¹ He was one of the candidates Yeltsin had considered for premier in the spring of 1998 and had scant backing on the Duma benches. Yeltsin says at one point that the Aksënenko feint had the tactical motivation of making Stepashin look good by contrast. But he also paints it as an enjoyable test in its own right: “I liked the way I had ginned up intrigue around Aksënenko. It was a nice little bit of mischief [zagogulina].”⁸² Minutes after Seleznëv passed on word about Aksënenko to the members, the envelope containing Yeltsin’s letter of nomination for Stepashin was delivered to him. Seleznëv voiced annoyance and helplessness at the trickery: “The president has five Fridays in his week.”⁸³

If Yeltsin’s memoir is to be believed, a second deception, on the strategic and not merely the tactical plane, lay behind the shenanigans of May 12. He meant to execute a final change in headship of the government, in favor of a dark horse, Vladimir Putin. He had decided to make Putin not only prime minister but his successor as leader of Russia—metaphorically, “to transfer to him Monomakh’s Cap,” the fur-trimmed crown of gold worn by the rulers of medieval Moscow. But the time was not yet right. Only the impending electoral struggle, in late 1999 over parliament and in 2000 over the presidency, would give Putin the chance to shine. For two or three months, Stepashin was to be the placeholder. The whole scheme had to remain Yeltsin’s secret, not known to Putin himself, to the Duma, to Stepashin, or even to Tatyana Dyachenko and his close advisers. “I did not want the public to get too used to Putin in those lazy summer months. This mystery, the suddenness of it all, could not be allowed to evaporate. It would be so important for the elections, this factor of the expectations aroused by a potent new politician.”⁸⁴

Not every piece of this tale is a true guide to what happened in 1999. The ill-fated Stepashin’s stretch of time in the Russian White House was pure “torture.” He called the president on the telephone every day, wanting him “to feel something from me in a purely psychological way,” but never felt appreciated in return. He is convinced that Yeltsin very nearly made up his mind to appoint Aksënenko in May and that Aksënenko, not Putin, was at first the intended beneficiary of the shell game. He has no explanation for why Aksënenko lost out to Putin.⁸⁵ Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s confidant and, after retirement, his son-in-law, is convinced Aksënenko was never really in the running and that Yeltsin left open the possibility that Stepashin would be the chosen one. Yeltsin abandoned Stepashin when he was wishywashy in the face of the two big crises of the summer of 1999—a renewal of violence in the North Caucasus and the attempt by a coalition of anti-Kremlin elites to field a winning slate for the Duma election—and when Stepashin did not deal firmly with lobbyists for governmental favors, passing on some of the pressure to Yeltsin himself.⁸⁶

So why did the needle spin around to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin? Yeltsin had time and again shown a partiality for younger politicians. Putin, though, was older than many earlier favorites and, at forty-seven, was the very same age as Stepashin. Putin’s St. Petersburg roots could hardly have been decisive; Yeltsin had no network in Russia’s second city, and Chubais and Stepashin, among others, were also from there. In personal style, Putin was in some regards the un-Yeltsin—medium in height, trim, imperturbable, abstemious—but there were plenty of individuals out there who were different from Yeltsin. It has been suggested that Yeltsin chose Putin because Boris Berezovskii or some other master manipulator put him up to it, or because Putin had a unique ability to protect Yeltsin and his family from prosecution after his retirement. Neither of these interpretations holds water, either. There is no evidence that Berezovskii or anyone like him advocated Putin. My guess is that Berezovskii’s support, had it been extended and had Yeltsin known of it, would for Yeltsin have been the kiss of death to any candidate.⁸⁷ Any senior politician Yeltsin would have considered, not only Putin, would have been happy to extend him the limited immunity Putin was to give him (not him and his family) by decree on December 31, and any presidential edict of this sort could subsequently have been superseded by legislation. Yeltsin never negotiated over immunity or any aspect of the Putin decree, which was finalized only in the hours after his resignation.⁸⁸

Presidential Marathon drops a key clue to Putin’s appeal to Yeltsin when it harks back to the decision, which he soon repudiated, to make Nikolai Bordyuzha Kremlin chief of staff in 1998. “I was already coming to feel that society needed some new quality in the state, a steel backbone that would strengthen the political structure of authority. We needed a person who was thinking, democratic, and innovative yet steadfast in the military manner. The next year such a person did appear…. Putin.”⁸⁹ Putin acquired the military manner while serving sixteen years in the foreign intelligence wing of the Soviet KGB. His democratic and pro-market qualifications, such as they were, were earned in the first half of the 1990s, when he was lieutenant to Anatolii Sobchak, the liberal mayor of St. Petersburg, and was in charge of attracting foreign investment to the city. After Sobchak was voted out of office in 1996, Putin came to Moscow and worked in successively more responsible positions under Borodin, Chubais, and Yumashev. On July 25, 1998, Yeltsin appointed him director of the FSB, over the heads of hundreds of more senior operatives. Putin soon showed his reliability behind the scenes by suppressing talk among disgruntled army officers of a coup against the civilian government.⁹⁰ In March 1999 he made a public display of loyalty to the president by standing up for the authenticity of the scandalous charges against Procurator General Skuratov. Right after that, he was given the additional post of secretary of the Security Council.

On August 9, 1999, Yeltsin revealed that he had once again fired his prime minister and nominated a replacement. Whereas he had given Chernomyrdin a backhanded endorsement for president in August 1998, and had never linked any of his other changes in the premier’s chair to the succession, this time he explicitly put forward Putin as his designated heir. Putin, Yeltsin said, was capable of “consolidating society” and seeing to “the continuation of reforms in Russia” after him.

The whole plan would have been scuttled if the votes to confirm could not be found in the Duma. Two hundred and thirty-three were found in the first round, on August 16, and Putin was duly installed. It is worth noting that this was only seven votes more than the 226 required and was substantially less than the support given to Primakov, Stepashin, and even Sergei Kiriyenko on his third try. The KPRF caucus could have blocked Yeltsin and Putin if it had been united on the issue. It was disunited, and, like so many other actors, did not foresee the mallet blow that Putin was to strike against its interests.⁹¹

After August 16, there was but one potential impediment to the transfer of Monomakh’s Cap to Putin—the attitude of his patron in the Kremlin. Although Yeltsin in his retrospective memoir account treated the choice of Putin as hard and fast, in real time it was more tentative than that. In an interview with journalists shortly after the fact, Putin reported that in their conversation about the premiership Yeltsin was vague about the future: “He did not use the word ‘successor.’ Yeltsin spoke about ‘a prime minister with prospects’ [s perspektivoi] and said that if all went well he considered this [the presidency] to be possible.”⁹² In his public statement on August 9, Yeltsin reminded Russians that there was to be a presidential election in less than a year. Over that time, he was persuaded that Putin as prime minister would do “very useful things for the country,” which would allow citizens to evaluate his “professional and human qualities” for themselves. “I have confidence in him. But I want everyone who in July 2000 will go to the voting stations and make their choice to also be sure. I think this will be enough time for him to show himself.”⁹³

What would happen if Putin faltered, the new man failed to catch fire with the public, and, by Yeltsin’s definition, his qualities proved inadequate for leading Russia into the twenty-first century? One must assume that, if time allowed, the president would not have hesitated to act again. Having done in four prime ministers in seventeen months, what was to stop him from doing it to a fifth? Putin was the latest in a long line of army- and police-related functionaries to have captured his imagination. The line stretches back through Stepashin, Bordyuzha, and Nikolayev to Lebed, Korzhakov, and Rutskoi. In every other case, Yeltsin sooner or later lost faith in the man with the military manner. In the appropriate circumstances, he might well have done so for this understudy, too.

Russia’s new prime minister did not falter, he did catch fire with the public, and the president did not reassess his vote of confidence. The politics of the four months following the August breakpoint belong more to the rising Putin era than to the fading Yeltsin one. Boris Yeltsin chose for himself the lame-duck status that pundits a year earlier saw as being inflicted on him by other people and by conditions. Putin as premier made almost no personnel changes, concentrating on mobilizing resources to deal with a pair of ripening crises.

The first of these was a deadly threat to the shaky peace in the North Caucasus, Russia’s most unruly area. On August 7, following several months of infiltrating villages, a force of 2,000 Chechnya-based guerrillas crossed into Dagestan, the multiethnic republic within Russia separating the Chechen lands from the western shore of the Caspian Sea. They proclaimed an independent Islamic Republic of Dagestan, with the desperado Shamil Basayev as its leader, on August 10. In early September, as the Russians were counterattacking in Dagestan, Moscow and two southern towns were rocked by nighttime terror bombings of apartment houses. Three hundred civilians were killed and the FSB blamed the violence on pro-Chechen fanatics. Putin was convinced that failure to respond would be the death knell for the country: “My evaluation of the situation in August, when the bandits attacked Dagestan, was that if we did not stop it immediately Russia as a state in its current sense was finished…. We were threatened by the Yugoslaviazation of Russia.”⁹⁴ Russian tanks and troops entered Chechnya in early October and fought their way across the Terek River toward Grozny; they seized the city on February 2, 2000, and pushed on into the southern high country.

Putin asked Yeltsin to entrust day-to-day coordination of the military effort to him. Yeltsin “did not hesitate to support him,” the first time he had delegated so many of his national-security powers.⁹⁵ Putin’s forceful prosecution of the war, and his verbal jabs at the rebels, had speedy impact on public opinion. He won further respect for announcing increases in pension payments from the federal budget, something the incipient economic recovery enabled. His approval ratings skyrocketed, and so did the number prepared to vote for him in a presidential election. If in August 1999 some 2 percent of prospective voters said they would cast their ballots for Putin, by September that was 4 percent and in October it jumped to 21 percent, overtaking Yevgenii Primakov and Gennadii Zyuganov. In November Putin’s forecast vote share had doubled to 45 percent; by the time of the election to the State Duma, on December 19, it stood at 51 percent.⁹⁶

With Yeltsin’s encouragement, Putin also intervened in the Duma campaign, the second critical event that autumn. The favorite in the election had been the alliance patched together over the preceding year by Yurii Luzhkov. It took final shape in August as the Fatherland–All Russia Bloc, with the widely esteemed Primakov heading its electoral slate. The bloc was center-left and nationalistic in policy orientation and included many of Russia’s most powerful regional chiefs. With the involvement of Vladimir Gusinskii and the NTV television network, its materials depicted the central government and “the Family” around Yeltsin as corrupt and devoid of ideas. The burden of fending off Fatherland–All Russia was assumed by a pro-Kremlin coalition called Unity, which took shape only in September. Led by Sergei Shoigu, the minister for emergency management in all cabinets going back to 1990, Unity put forward a hazy program that mixed liberal ideas with populism, patriotism, and national unity. Berezovskii-controlled ORT television promoted Unity, sparred with Gusinskii and NTV, and attacked Fatherland–All Russia.

Unity’s logo was a stylized drawing of a forest bear, the universal symbol of Russia. It is also the animal to which Boris Yeltsin had often been compared, but that was as close as Unity got to linking itself to the president. Yeltsin cool-headedly accepted the need for a firewall between them. After the initial discussions, “I very quickly ceased to have anything to do with this work. It was clear to me… that the party of social optimism should not be associated in the consciousness of the voters with my name…. It did not bother me that Unity distanced itself from me.”⁹⁷ The movement was eager to associate itself with the Russian leader whose political coattails were now the longest—Putin. On November 24 Putin stated that “as a citizen” he was going to vote for the Unity bloc. “Our goal is to create a pro-Putin majority in the State Duma,” Unity blared the next week. “Unity supports Putin, and Putin relies on Unity.” Although Unity did not win a majority outright, it routed Fatherland–All Russia, with the Putin sound bite counting for as much as half of its vote share, and came a close second to the KPRF in the national vote. It was soon able to build a working parliamentary majority, something Yeltsin never had as president.

Yeltsin had one more trick up his sleeve. In black and white, Article 92 of the 1993 constitution gave a mechanism that permitted him to control the timing and atmospherics of his exit and to smooth the handover of power. It stipulated that, in the event of a presidential resignation, the prime minister automatically became “acting president” and there was to be a national election of a permanent head of state within ninety days. Anticipating a favorable outcome in the scheduled Duma election, Yeltsin came to the decision to invoke Article 92 the week before it. He brought Putin up to date on his plans at Gorki-9 on December 14, and Putin gave his assent, although Putin thought Yeltsin had in mind retirement in the spring of 2000, not before the end of the year. Putin expressed reluctance about his readiness for the job, to which Yeltsin answered that he, too, came to Moscow with “other plans,” and learned about national leadership only by doing it. On December 28 Yeltsin instructed Aleksandr Voloshin, the head of his executive office, to work out a resignation decree and other administrative arrangements and asked former head Yumashev to draft a retirement speech, so as to keep it secret from the regular speech writers. Yeltsin broke the news to his daughter Tatyana the evening of December 28 and to his wife the morning of his resignation.⁹⁸

December 31, the final date of the millennium, was chosen as the leave-taking date for its symbolic value, as the end of one unit of history and the start of another. Yeltsin’s grim-faced address, a classic of ceremonial rhetoric, had as its centerpiece a poignant apology. He had told Yumashev to include in the speech a passage about the sufferings of the population in the 1990s and his regrets for them. The speech as delivered requested the Russian people’s forgiveness “for not making many of your and my dreams come true,” faulting the speaker’s performance and the naïveté of the dreams in whose name he attempted his anti-revolutionary revolution. “I did all I could,” Yeltsin said.

Decree No. 1761, his last, took effect at twelve noon sharp. Around one P.M., citizen Yeltsin returned to the president’s office from the farewell lunch and toasts. An adjutant slipped on his overcoat. As they waited for the private elevator of Building No. 1, he presented Putin with the fat fountain pen with which he had signed decrees and laws. He put on his sable hat at the front door. “Take care of Russia,” he said to Putin as the flashbulbs popped. He walked to the car in a light snowfall and was gone out the Kremlin gates.