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 ab
le 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.
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