A panoply of points of view nearby had additional utility for Yeltsin. In an overloaded and underpowered state, redundancy and rapid turnover provided some protection against local failure: If the first underboss and his outfit let you down, the second or third might be better. This is how Oleg Poptsov explains the anomaly of Russia having several armies and quasiarmies (the military, MVD, border guards, railway troops, and so on) when it could not really afford one of them. “It is all for the same reason: because of hesitation, because of uncertainty. If one does not come to your defense, you can always call on another.”53 In a fractionated society, it was apropos, the president felt, that the executive and not just the legislature contain representatives of the fractions. “I had to go this way,” Yeltsin explained to me in 2001. “It should have been so. The situation [at the top] mirrored the interplay of forces in the country.”54 The Yeltsinesque system of checks and balances was there less to shield society from state encroachment, as The Federalist Papers told Americans how to do in the 1780s, than to sub for a stunted civil society, shield the sovereign from state dysfunction, and facilitate divide-and-rule in the innards of the government.
In economic policy, even as he gave the liberals license to marketize and privatize, Yeltsin was determined to find a place in his government for more conservative voices from the Soviet industrial conglomerate, and was unapologetic about the conflicting signals it sent about his policy and the standing of the prime minister. Red director Yurii Skokov, whose specialty had been power systems for spacecraft, was first deputy premier in 1990–91, secretary of a presidential board on federalism in 1991–92, and secretary of the president’s Security Council in 1992–93. He was a backstairs negotiator with the putschists in August 1991 and was distinguished by a go-slow economic policy and political ambition. Wrote Yeltsin:
Skokov is an intelligent man, that is the first thing you have to say, and a very closed one. [Ivan] Silayev . . . and Gaidar . . . felt a latent threat coming from Skokov and argued with me about him.
What was the role of Skokov in Yeltsin’s ingroup? It was a reasonable question. Skokov was really my “shadow” prime minister. . . . I understood that his general political position, in economics above all, was quite different from mine and from the positions of Gaidar and Burbulis. His double-dealing always concerned my supporters. But I thought that if a person understood that it was necessary in today’s Russia to work for a strong government and not against it, then what was wrong with that? Let the shadow premier . . . urge on the real prime minister.55
Yeltsin lost faith in Skokov and fired him only when he dissented from Kremlin policy toward the parliament in the spring of 1993.
Chernomyrdin, who got the prime minister’s job in December 1992, would not have lasted for almost two-thirds of the Yeltsin presidency if he had not been forbearing toward his leader’s juggling of people and interests and had not displayed some of the same aptitude himself. The construction organizer Oleg Lobov, from Sverdlovsk, acquired some of Skokov’s and Deputy Premier Georgii Khizha’s military-industrial responsibilities and fought to decelerate the privatization program. Lobov wrote several memorandums to this effect to Yeltsin: “He never expressed dissatisfaction about what I wrote. He never said I was not right. No, he was surprised that my memos were not moving forward or being looked into.”56 Metallurgist Oleg Soskovets was named the ranking of the deputy premiers in the autumn of 1993, answering for heavy industry and the defense complex and chairing the cabinet’s committee on daily “operational questions.” He lobbied unabashedly for state credits, bailouts, and tariff barriers and, through Korzhakov, had a privileged relationship with Yeltsin. He was a thorn in Chernomyrdin’s side until his dismissal in June 1996.57
President Yeltsin was not unobservant of the hazards of his polycentric modus operandi. Beginning in 1991, he deployed several safeguards to prevent balkanization from degenerating into chaos. One of those was to declare proprietary rights over the ultrasensitive precinct of national security and foreign policy and put it out of bounds to all but him and the agency heads. Yeltsin met one-on-one weekly with his foreign minister, spy chief, and police ministers and shut the prime minister and most of the Kremlin staff out of those colloquies.
Another low-cost response was to infiltrate protégés from earlier in his career into strategic positions, as Soviet party bosses had always done. Because Yeltsin’s term as head of the Moscow party organization had been so brief and doleful, few products of it worked in his presidential office. The main exceptions were Viktor Ilyushin (who started with him in Sverdlovsk), Valerii Semenchenko, and Mikhail Poltoranin. The best pool Yeltsin had at his disposal was the “Sverdlovsk diaspora,” the old-boy network whence he drew his chief of staff from 1991 to 1993 (Yurii Petrov), his senior presidential assistant from 1991 to 1996 (Ilyushin), the head of the Kremlin business department before Pavel Borodin (Fëdor Morshchakov), and a representative in the Council of Ministers and Security Council (the peripatetic Oleg Lobov).58 Gennadii Burbulis, head speech writer Lyudmila Pikhoya, and her colleague Aleksandr Il’in were Sverdlovskers but low-ranking members of the professoriate—advantageously for them, at Yeltsin’s alma mater, UPI.59 “You feel more confident, you feel certain warmth, among people from your area [zemlyaki],” says Pikhoya.60 Yeltsin’s reliance on people from his province of birth, though, was quite limited, since he wanted to avoid charges of cronyism and to be free to recruit outside the group. Burbulis left office by the end of 1992, Petrov by early 1993, and the others followed. No new Sverdlovskers were brought into the administration after then.
A related habit for Yeltsin was to find new favorites. These might be all-round comrades and purveyors of good cheer with whom he had ryumochnyye otnosheniya (shot-glass relations); examples would be Soskovets or Vladimir Shumeiko, a first deputy premier in 1992–93 and chairman of the Federation Council in 1994–95. Or they might be Young Turks who pushed reforms—like Anatolii Chubais, Boris Fëdorov, and Sergei Shakhrai. As a show of favor, Yeltsin several times followed up on a Fëdorov complaint by telephoning Chernomyrdin, with Fëdorov seated in the office. Fëdorov saw it a sign of confidence when Yeltsin did not tell Chernomyrdin that Fëdorov was there and made gargoyle faces at him during the conversation.61
A corrective to personalization and governmental disconnectedness would have been a collegial entity for sharing information, arbitrating conflicts, and inculcating common purpose. Yeltsin was stubbornly against such a linchpin—as should come as no shock, given his individualism and his intuitive approach to political action. Acquaintance with the communist era’s plenteous underbrush of committees, bureaus, and secretariats seems to have helped sour him on communal decision making. This aversion shows the selectiveness of his attitude toward the Soviet legacy.
During the seven months in 1991–92 when Yeltsin did double duty as prime minister, it was up to him to chair sessions of the Council of Ministers. He had nothing but distaste for the unwieldy council and the eye-glazing detail that marked its meetings. Several months of watching him sleepwalk through the proceedings won Burbulis and Gaidar over to two events per week—a working session on Tuesdays over sandwiches and tea, which Yeltsin did not attend, and one with him on Thursdays, to approve the decisions made on Tuesday. Yeltsin was relieved to make Burbulis and, after the spring of 1992, Gaidar his proxy for cabinet paperwork.62 The Yeltsin constitution gave the president the right, which he wrote into the draft, to chair any sitting of the Council of Ministers. He did it once in a blue moon after 1993 (and only twice in the second term), and then it was mostly to make announcements for the television cameras. Size and practice disqualified the Council of Ministers as a serious decision maker, as was the case with its Soviet predecessor. The fifty or sixty officials in attendance sat in rows facing forward, like pupils in a classroom. All remarks were made from a microphone and lectern at the front of the hall. Votes were almost never taken.
A more propitious attempt to rejoin the threads was the Russian Stat
e Council of 1991–92. The council was born in July 1991 as the brainchild of Burbulis and a subset of the Westernizing intellectuals who had congregated around Yeltsin during his drive for power. They wanted a summit-level panel that would deliberate direction and priorities and not bog down in detail. Members were to have entrée to the president as individuals; as a group, they were to sit down with him in the chair to consider the big picture. Burbulis intended to make the State Council the modernizing center of policy making and to have its role as clearing house for ideas given constitutional sanction. The council was “to work out for the head of state questions about the country’s development overall and gather under its roof people of the same turn of mind who were scattered around other structures.”63
The core members of the State Council were Burbulis and five “state counselors” whom Yeltsin made responsible for reform sectors: Yekaterina Lakhova (women’s and social issues), Sergei Shakhrai (legal affairs), Yurii Skokov (defense), Sergei Stankevich (politics), and Galina Starovoitova (nationalities). Burbulis, Shakhrai, Stankevich, and Starovoitova were progressive academics; Lakhova, a pediatrician from Sverdlovsk, was a political centrist; Skokov was a secretive conservative. Added to them were five cabinet ministers of liberal outlook.64 Yegor Gaidar and Vice President Rutskoi, fearful of exclusion, asked for the right to participate as well. Burbulis, who had begged off the job of organizing Yeltsin’s presidential office, was not the optimal salesman for the council. Yurii Petrov, Viktor Ilyushin, and the veterans of the CPSU apparatus to whom Yeltsin had turned for assistance gave it a chilly reception, as did ministers and parliamentarians who stood to give up powers.65
The backbiting would have been extraneous unless Yeltsin had the reservations he did. They went back to the rationale for the State Council, which, as Stankevich was later to say frankly, was “to make up for [Yeltsin’s] shortcomings” and for his “inadequate vision of the future.”66 Getting his back up at the tutorship, Yeltsin waffled. He would not commit to a firm schedule or appoint more counselors, and missed most of the early sessions. This left Burbulis to lead them, which it was hard to do when political heavyweights sat around the table. Yeltsin took offense at press reports that the council would elevate the tone of government and that Burbulis was his “gray cardinal,” pulling wires from backstage: “This, of course, was balderdash. For there to be a ‘cardinal,’ the person in the president’s chair would have had to be spineless, soft, and apathetic,” adjectives inapplicable to the first president of Russia.67 The State Council convened about twice a month until Yeltsin abolished it in May 1992. Of the counselors, now “presidential advisers,” Shakhrai made a good career as a government minister, Lakhova entered electoral politics, and Skokov stayed on in the Security Council Yeltsin established by decree in April 1992. Burbulis and Starovoitova walked the plank in November 1992 and Stankevich, after losing his Kremlin office and hotline connection to the president, in December 1993.68 A Presidential Council, chaired by Yeltsin, continued to function throughout his first term as an unpaid sounding board for thirty or so opinion makers and an audition chamber for future aides.
From time to time, journalists and analysts would proclaim that some other body was succeeding where the State Council had not. Invariably, speculation about the latest candidate petered out. Modest requests by staffers for small-group meetings with the president were laughed off. At the reception for Yeltsin’s sixty-third birthday in 1994, assistant Georgii Satarov saluted him and said it would be good if all his aides sat down with him once a week. Yeltsin said no: “Why is this necessary? After all, each of you can come to see me and chat. What do you want to do, bring back the Politburo?”69
Yeltsin put higher stock in two other ways of mitigating the unruliness of the executive branch. The first was the extramural hobnobbing that he had practiced in the Sverdlovsk committee of the CPSU. An aspect of it was the new apartment house in Krylatskoye, which the Yeltsins made their legal Moscow domicile in 1994. Chernomyrdin, Korzhakov, Gaidar, Borodin, and Yurii Luzhkov were among the tenants who danced to a live orchestra at the housewarming. The building was a poor stimulant of friendly feelings, since the family rarely overnighted in their flat and those registered there, like them, lived mostly at country homes. Those who stayed behind avoided their neighbors due to political disagreements and to a psychological reaction against being cooped up in the same company.70
Yeltsin sank more effort into an association named the Presidential Club. It was established in June 1993 in a facility taken over from the CPSU Central Committee at 42 Kosygin Street, on the Sparrow (formerly Lenin) Hills. Yeltsin got the idea, through Korzhakov and Shamil Tarpishchev, from the Il’inka Sports Club attached to the Council of Ministers. The plant combined a sports complex (covered tennis courts, a swimming pool, a weight room) with lounges, a restaurant, and a movie theater. Yeltsin played doubles tennis at the club with Tarpishchev twice a week and others when possible. His most rollicking steambath parties and dinners were held there, and some political scuttlebutt was digested with the meals and drinks. Yeltsin was president of his club, which was to be for “people who are close in spirit and in views, who like one another, and who want to see one another regularly.”71
The generic resemblance to Urals precedent cloaked dissimilarities. Kosygin Street was far plusher than anything in the hinterland. Tennis, the main athletic pursuit, had snob appeal—it was not part of the Soviet sports machine until the 1980s—and, in singles and doubles, was less cooperative than the volleyball favored in Sverdlovsk. Yeltsin as regional boss had enrolled party workers in his volleyball league inclusively, but the Moscow lodge was exclusive. Entrants were issued cards and paid token dues; cursing was forbidden; enrollment was capped at 100 members; recruits were approved by Yeltsin in annual batches. It was not enough for the candidates to like one another: The president had to like them. A spot on the members’ directory was a mark of honor, which did not always fit with protocol position. Vice President Rutskoi, for example, was out, as were the head of the president’s staff (Sergei Filatov), all of Yeltsin’s liberal advisers, the mayor of Moscow (Yurii Luzhkov), and the chief of foreign intelligence (Yevgenii Primakov); for some reason, Yeltsin wanted at first to bar Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, then allowed him in.72 But Yeltsin’s senior aide (Viktor Ilyushin), who was equal to Filatov in status, was clubbable, and was joined by the head of the Presidential Business Department (Pavel Borodin), the ghostwriter of Yeltsin’s memoirs (Valentin Yumashev), the commander of the palace guard (Korzhakov) and top security officers, several elite intellectuals (Mark Zakharov and Yurii Ryzhov), and two comedians (Gennadii Khazanov and Mikhail Zadornov). An invitation into the club could recognize newly won standing. In 1994, for instance, businessman Boris Berezovskii, industrialist Vladimir Kadannikov (whose factory made the cars marketed by Berezovskii’s main business, Logovaz), and Ivan Rybkin, the new speaker of the State Duma, were asked to join. At his induction, in June, Berezovskii was in bandages for injuries suffered in an assassination attempt the week before.73 The organizers had planned to add a substantial number of figures from business and the arts but found limited interest in those they approached, and some of those who did accept came to the place only once. It was, in the end, “a club of chiefs,” in the words of Yumashev, and the membership was never over sixty.74
More than all these mechanisms, Yeltsin relied on top-down administrative resources to supply policy input, check on underlings, and impose his decisions. The instrument was the Presidential Executive Office created by Yurii Petrov and modeled in part on the Central Committee Secretariat. Petrov wanted it to have the planning and monitoring capacity of the high party apparatus in its prime, without it getting mired in operations, and to this end did not give it divisions for sectors of the economy, such as Yeltsin knew so well from an earlier life. Much of Petrov’s time went to the organizational tangles brought on by the change in regime, including the appropriation of the property of the CPSU, and he was struck by how little swa
y he had over the provinces—the obkoms and gorkoms were as extinct as the Central Committee—and over his boss.75 The intelligentsia-based Democratic Russia movement, with Gennadii Burbulis’s support, attacked Petrov in early 1992 as a symbol of nomenklatura revanche. He in April offered his resignation, which Yeltsin refused to accept. Petrov lost Yeltsin’s support in December 1992 when he dickered with communist legislators about his being selected as prime minister.76 In January 1993 the president supplanted Petrov with Sergei Filatov, a bookish Moscow academic and a vice speaker of the Congress of Deputies. Although Yeltsin was to slight Filatov in Presidential Marathon for having “turned the executive office into some sort of research institute on the problems of democracy in Russia,”77 staff strength grew under his aegis from about 400 to the level of about 2,000 office workers. That is higher than the circa 1,500 in the American White House staff (the U.S. population is more than twice Russia’s) and much more than the several hundred in the Élysée Palace in France, which, like Russia, has a dual executive.78
Petrov and then Filatov had some substantive impact on policy, but had to compete for Yeltsin’s ear with a squadron of policy experts reporting to him through separate ganglia. In 1993 Yeltsin began to appoint thematic presidential assistants (pomoshchniks), who were either former party or state placemen of a technocratic stripe or Moscow intellectuals, mostly of a democratic orientation. In the group of about twelve assistants, Anatolii Korabel’shchikov (who managed relations with the provinces) and Dmitrii Ryurikov (a professional diplomat who coordinated foreign policy) were the most prominent representatives of the first category; Yurii Baturin (assistant for national security), Georgii Satarov (domestic politics), and Aleksandr Livshits (economics) were the most prominent from the second category.79 These individuals, a generation younger than the president, were required to communicate with him not through Filatov but through Viktor Ilyushin, the tight-lipped apparatchik from Sverdlovsk who was responsible for blocking out Yeltsin’s workday. Filatov, Ilyushin, and their respective groupings were rivals from the start. This was no accident. “For a long time, the president’s apparatus had two leaders. . . . The president saw the contradictions but did nothing to efface them. . . . Often Yeltsin even encouraged antagonism between parts of his executive office and between individuals. It seemed to him that this would make it easier to control things and avert any one person increasing his influence unduly.”80
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