Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  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 w
ork 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.