Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Boris Nikolayevich, who . . . had such a feeling for power, did not very much like to take the hierarchy into account. . . . He vented a sort of internal democratism. If he had decrees or decisions to sign, he was likely to do it on a tractor or on a tank or, I don’t know, on the tire of a bus or at a mill or factory. This was not just public relations, it was a reflection of his heart and soul, of protest again the hated bureaucratic machine of Soviet times. His directives were never written so as to encourage the implementers to maneuver or palm things off. But everybody wanted to palm [costs] off anyway. . . . This is what got us into the nonsense of [granting favors] that were not in the interests of the state. [Yeltsin would tell us that] there was a promise; it had to be discharged right away or on a three-day deadline, and so on. After the fact, it was very hard to persuade him that the supplicant—for example, the governor who sent him a letter in which he lied barefacedly about being owed subsidies from the budget—should have his ears boxed. This was very tough. . . . It was like getting him to part with a dear toy. . . . My feeling was less that he had trouble letting go of financial questions per se than that he was irked that, “Heck, everything is already decided,” and he was unable to take care of problems expeditiously. He seemed to think, “Here we go again with all this bureaucracy, studying and checking everything. I don’t give a fig; you people aren’t able to decide anything.”84