There was another generator of dissonance: Aleksandr Korzhakov and the Presidential Security Service. The service was founded in 1990 as a small bodyguard for Yeltsin as parliamentary chairman. Upgraded in 1992, it was on paper part of the Main Protection Directorate (previously the Ninth Directorate of the KGB), but that agency was headed by Mikhail Barsukov, a brother officer Korzhakov had known since 1979, whose son was married to Korzhakov’s daughter, and who was willing to give him autonomy. Korzhakov freely admits in his memoirs that he was given to role expansion even in the first leg of his service to Yeltsin, in the Moscow party committee from 1985 to 1987.81 In national government, his star soared after the principal security forces flubbed the operation against parliament in October 1993. Yeltsin took to calling the service his “mini-KGB” and acceded to Korzhakov’s demand for status parity with Filatov and Ilyushin, enlargement of the service—it went from 250 men in September 1991 to 829 by June 1996—and improvement of their pay, housing conditions, and weaponry. Korzhakov convinced Yeltsin that, beyond keeping him safe, the service would fight corruption in the Kremlin and in the bowels of the bureaucracy.82
Armed with an unpublished presidential decree dated November 11, 1993, Korzhakov tapped telephones and fed Yeltsin dossiers of surreptitiously gathered compromising material (kompromat) on officials. Filatov, a target, sounded off in the press about Korzhakov turning the executive office into “a team of stoolpigeons.”83 Yeltsin, he said in an interview, “began to toss [Korzhakov’s] letters back to him,” but they kept coming, and some were directed to Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and other cabinet ministers.84 Unfazed, Korzhakov formed an in-house “analytical center” that made proposals on a wide range of public issues and badmouthed market reforms. Beginning in 1994, he wrote sharp letters on economic and other policy problems unrelated to his job description, not only to Yeltsin but to high-ranking leaders, including Chernomyrdin, and leaked information about his views to the media.85 By this time, Korzhakov was also a force in personnel decisions. Pavel Borodin and First Deputy Premier Soskovets were friends and allies of his, and in his last year in the Kremlin he had the principal say over the designation of a chief of the FSB (Barsukov), procurator general (Yurii Skuratov), and press secretary to Yeltsin (Sergei Medvedev).86 In January 1996 he engineered the replacement of Filatov by Nikolai Yegorov, the former governor of Krasnodar province, a hard-liner on Chechnya (who had been demoted from a ministerial position after Budënnovsk), and a man of “haughty manners and a slighting attitude toward those occupying more modest posts than he in the hierarchy of state service.”87 Korzhakov pressed Yeltsin to make Soskovets prime minister in Chernomyrdin’s place.88 And in the early months of 1996, he and Soskovets controlled the organization of Yeltsin’s campaign for re-election (see Chapter 14).
Yeltsin was later driven to lament the wideness of Korzhakov’s reach:
Korzhakov came to influence the appointment of people in the government, in the executive office, and in the power [security] ministries. . . . With every passing month and year, the political role of the . . . guard service . . . and concretely of Korzhakov grew. Korzhakov fought tooth and nail with everyone who did not submit to him and anyone he considered “alien.” He interfered in the work of my secretariat and violated established procedures to bring his own documents to me. He fought with Filatov and Ilyushin and tried through Oleg Soskovets to have a say in the country’s economic policy. . . . I take full responsibility for his unbelievable rise and his deserved fall. It was my mistake, and I had to pay for it.89
Yeltsin came to this wisdom in the rearview mirror. During his first term, though, it was his indulgence of Korzhakov that taught the Moscow high and mighty that the ex-watchman was a man to be feared and propitiated. Korzhakov family celebrations, such as his daughter’s nuptials and his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, became must-show events. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin gave the newlyweds a handsome china set. When Yeltsin dropped in on the silver anniversary party, Chernomyrdin, if Korzhakov can be believed, pouted because he had not been invited.90 Korzhakov’s public reputation shot to rarefied heights. To go by the experts’ poll published monthly in newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta, beginning in late 1994, he was ranked among the ten most powerful political figures in the country. In November 1995 he placed fourth, behind no one but the president, the prime minister, and Mayor Luzhkov; in January 1996 he was fourth again, trailing only Yeltsin, Gennadii Zyuganov (the communist leader, who was about to run for president against Yeltsin), and Chernomyrdin.
The subdivision of executive authority between president and prime minister was sanctioned by Russia’s constitution and laws. It created, as Yeltsin observed in 1994 in Notes of a President, “a second center of power” within the state—existing on the sufferance of the first center yet still formidable—and this did not disturb him.91 To curb centrifugal tendencies in the formal structures of the state and to make decisions as he saw fit, Yeltsin had recourse to informal and personalistic means, some of them concocted anew, some of them out of the Soviet or pre-Soviet Russian armory. In Midnight Diaries, published in 2000, Yeltsin looked back at the Kremlin of the early and middle 1990s and remarked that it harbored a multiplicity of “informal leaders” and “centers of power” pushing in contradictory directions.92 The institutional remedy for polycentric government, Yeltsin’s shop within the executive branch, was itself wantonly polycentric—more tower of Babel than beacon of strength.
This outcome was reached with Yeltsin’s cooperation. It was a fine example of a paradox of post-communism, as dissected by the sociologist Alena Ledeneva—“that informal practices are important because of their ability to compensate for defects in the formal order while simultaneously undermining it.” This contradiction, Ledeneva adds, “serves to explain why things in Russia are never quite as bad or as good as they seem.”93 Governing the state from 1991 to 1996 the way he did allowed Yeltsin to maintain his power within it and avail himself of diverse talent and knowledge. He orchestrated a leader-centered ruling coalition by cowing and cajoling political and bureaucratic actors into compliance, playing potential rivals off against one another, and accepting—even glorying in—compromise and ambiguity in policy. That same mix of tactics, however, came at a price. It left the program for transforming Russia less integrated in its content, and jerkier in its phasing, than it ought to have been.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Reconnecting
The replenishment of his electoral mandate in June–July 1996 was a peerless ordering moment in the Yeltsin presidency. Holding an election for chief executive on track and in more or less competitive fashion affirmed the post-communist regime and its reliance on popular consent. Yeltsin’s 1996 victory must rate with the 1991 putsch as his magic hour as practitioner of mass politics. It gave him a fresh lease on political life and another crack at governing, at heavy cost to his health. It prevented neo-communists from retaking power and undoing some or all of the changes of the preceding decade. And it pulled new participants, and new techniques for exercising influence, onto Russia’s civil stage.
It was not predetermined that Yeltsin would be a candidate for re-election upon expiration of his five-year term. He told Aleksandr Korzhakov in the spring of 1992 that he would “not be able to bear up under a second term” and needed to find a successor, and in May he said in a press interview that there was “a limit to a person’s physical and other abilities” and his first term would be his last.1 Richard Nixon, dropping in on him in June 1992, called his disclaimer a fiendishly clever strategy—“a masterstroke” that transmitted his fearlessness as a reformer “and would be to Yeltsin’s advantage even should he eventually decide to run again.” Yeltsin gave a knowing smile and said that “of course” he would benefit politically; how he would was impossible to make out.2 He commented to Bill Clinton, still a U.S. presidential candidate, in Washington that same month that taking himself out of the running had already had “an important psychological impact” and that people apprec
iated “that I’m not fighting to stay in office but to ensure that the reforms become irreversible.”3
Yeltsin soon second-guessed the decision. He declared, the week after dissolving the Supreme Soviet in September 1993, that he would be willing to proceed with a presidential election, and to be a candidate, in the summer of 1994—a statement he revoked just as suddenly that November. In March 1994, when an article in Izvestiya maintained that he would participate in the next election “only in his capacity as a voter,” Yeltsin had his press secretary persuade the paper to print a new article saying he was agnostic about standing. Later in 1994 there was a different iron in the fire: the idea of postponing, in the interests of political stability, the Duma election slated for 1995 and/or the presidential election slated for 1996. Gennadii Burbulis, no longer a member of the government but still influential in the liberal beau monde, wanted Yeltsin to extend his term by decree for two years and not to seek re-election. Although these and related proposals bristled with constitutional complications, Yeltsin was content to leave them in play. Aides were kept in the dark about his true intent but formed the impression by the summer of 1994 that the president meant to run, be it in 1996 or 1998, and they should begin to clear the decks. This was also the burden of remarks he made to staffers in 1995.4
Reconnecting with the electorate was going to take some doing. Entranced by the Kremlin and high politics, Yeltsin had long since let his reputation as “people’s president” lose its luster. To be sure, he continued to escape Moscow and accept bread and salt, the customary token of Russian hospitality, in the provinces. A hobby project of his in 1992–93 was to circuit through every subunit of the federation. He dug in against staffers who urged him to prioritize the populous regions and align his peregrinations with the Moscow political calendar.5 When out in the field, he could still gladhand with the best of them. Unlike Gorbachev, who invariably initiated group conversations, Yeltsin’s way was to wait for someone else to lead off and to make a retort, and one that frequently contained a nonverbal element. In May 1992, for example, he held court at the Omsk Oil Refinery in west Siberia. Hearing out one disgruntled worker, Yeltsin gave him a light slap on the forehead and cried “Mosquito!” after which the two men swapped jokes. To the refinery employees, it was a playful and egalitarian gesture.6 In June 1994 Yeltsin descended on Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva, the mountain republic of shamanistic and Buddhist heritage on the border with Mongolia. Decked out in the national costume at a concert by Kongar-ool Ondar, Tuva’s renowned throat singer, he mounted the stage, hummed along, and quaffed arakar, a potent beverage from fermented goat’s milk.7
Russians after 1991 rarely accorded Yeltsin an abusive reception. Correspondents in the advance party would see the eyes of local residents light up when the president’s blue Mi-8 chopper landed on the tarmac, especially if he shushed his bodyguards and waded into the throng: “We would stand around [beforehand] and ask people what they made of Yeltsin. They would do nothing but denounce him something fierce: ‘As soon as he gets here we are going to tear him to shreds,’ that type of thing. Then Yeltsin showed up, perhaps not in the best of form, and did a walkabout. And suddenly these very same people would be saying, ‘Oh, Boris Nikolayevich, may you be healthy, you are one of us.’”8 These swooning scenes speak volumes about the Russian tradition of deference to leaders. Members of the crowd often came up and asked Yeltsin to intercede on a family or community problem; adjutants took down the requests and referred them to central or local functionaries.
Nonetheless, as the first term wore on, Yeltsin communed person-to-person with his fellow citizens less and less. Security tightened during the 1993 constitutional conflict and when the Chechen war made him an assassination target. Some governors discouraged him from making appearances when in their regions. A tour in the spring of 1995 was aborted after one stop because of lack of interest in the events.9 Yeltsin’s extemporaneous contacts with the masses, the press corps noticed, were getting to be more perfunctory. “He preferred to go up to the crowd, slap it on the back . . . and get away,” is how Tatyana Malkina, a beat reporter for the newspaper Segodnya, recalls it. Yeltsin, she said, was losing sight of “people” (lyudi) and starting to see only “the people” (narod).10
As the 1995–96 election season approached, it was equally apparent that Yeltsin lacked a key resource that leaders and aspiring leaders have in the retail politics of mature democracies: an effective party. Post-Soviet Russia was a petri dish for political parties and protoparties (there were 273 of them registered in 1995), and they were found in every ideological hue, from fascist to feminist. Quality, admittedly, did not match quantity, and many of these organizations were jerry-built, personality-driven, and transient.11 Nonetheless, a party or mass movement of his own would have given Yeltsin a chance to advance positions, build organizational capacity in the parliamentary election arena, and utilize them in a presidential campaign.
There had been no want of schemes for hatching a Yeltsin party. Early on in his administration, advisers Gennadii Burbulis, Sergei Stankevich, and Galina Starovoitova pushed a broad-based national party—an August Bloc, they suggested calling it, in honor of the turning back of the coup. In March 1992 Yeltsin received the representatives of several dozen liberal organizations and said he was for creation of a pro-reform Assembly of Russian Citizens. All that came from it was a charter meeting in April, chaired by Burbulis. The plan revived in June 1992 as an Association in Support of Democracy and Reforms, bracketing forty-three reformist groups. In consultations, Yeltsin gave it his imprimatur, said that in principle he might lead it, and even expressed a preference for a name with the words “people’s” or “democratic” in it. This endeavor, too, trailed off into nothingness. Then, after the April 1993 referendum, Burbulis and Stankevich thought they had won Yeltsin over to an overarching League of the Twenty-Fifth of April or an April Alliance in the same mold. All over again, they were unable to get him to act.12
Russia’s Choice in the 1993 Duma election was a Yeltsin-friendly electoral formation that did get into the air. Without his assistance, it gathered together government ministers and reformist intellectuals, all in the hopes of a symbiosis with their hero: “Our bloc makes no bones about who is its leader—it is President Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.”13 Yeltsin indicated to Yegor Gaidar, who headed up the list of candidates, that he would throw his weight behind them. On his journey to Japan in October, he promised Gaidar to address the bloc’s convention and back its list. But he never did. Pouring all of his energies into making and ratifying the constitution, Yeltsin determined at the eleventh hour not to attend the meeting, withheld sanction, and did not take issue when cabinet minister Sergei Shakhrai formed a separate electoral list, the Party of Russian Unity and Accord. A planned post-Tokyo meeting with Russia’s Choice panjandrums became a presidential soliloquy on Asian affairs.14 Gaidar estimates that a Yeltsin statement would have swung 10 percent of the vote to Russia’s Choice and made it the undisputed winner of the election.15
Sergei Filatov, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, was behind the next party-building maneuver in 1994 and into 1995. He and Aleksandr Yakovlev founded a Russian Party of Social Democracy, dedicated to democratic values and a mixed economy, and registered it in February 1995. Filatov and Yakovlev felt they had a commitment from Yeltsin to help it with financing, back it in the next Duma election, and chair it after that.16 Despite assurances, Yeltsin went off on a tangent. Prodded by Shakhrai, the spoiler from 1993, he gave license for not one but two pro-presidential electoral groupings. Our Home Is Russia, headed by Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had sat out the 1993 election, was right-of-center programmatically (right in the sense of favoring the market over government control); the bloc struck by Ivan Rybkin, the Duma speaker, was left-of-center (left in the sense of partiality for government direction over the market). On April 25, 1995, Yeltsin jumped the gun to unveil plans for the two blocs to journalists and to blubber that they would stride coordinately in “two columns,” im
plying that they were apologists for the status quo. After that, he did not bestir himself to help either organization, although he did go on television on December 15 to speak out against the command economy and plans to restore the Soviet Union. Rybkin assumed he was at liberty to rebuke the prime minister and the government, only to find that, whenever he did, Chernomyrdin complained to him and Yeltsin; he also was strapped for campaign funds.17 On election day, December 17, Rybkin scraped together 1 percent of the popular vote. Our Home Is Russia far exceeded him in resources and had thirty-six governors on its national list, yet Yeltsin made slighting comments about its drawing power and it was not able to claim that it spoke for the president. Chernomyrdin noted both these points to Korzhakov. “I said to him right away [after Yeltsin made his comments in September], ‘Boris Nikolayevich, this is not my personal initiative only, it is necessary to all of us.’” Yeltsin was unmoved. “And then the governors would ask me, ‘Are you together or not together?’ I would say, ‘What are you talking about, why don’t you want to understand?’ [And they would reply], ‘We’re not able to figure it out, and that is it.’”18 On December 17 Our Home Is Russia finished with a puny 10 percent. The winner in the popular vote (with 23 percent) and in seats was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the KPRF, which was ferally opposed to Yeltsin.
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