Yeltsin also bore a resemblance to a CPSU first secretary in swinging the big stick of control over cadres.22 Anyone was expendable if he connived against the president, was flagrantly inefficient, or if Yeltsin had simply had his fill of him or wanted to reshuffle his team. Upon removal, an official would not normally be granted an audience to hear why. He could consider himself lucky if he got a telephone call giving him the news and wishing him well, and luckier still if Yeltsin found him a new position.23 On average, deputy premiers in Yeltsin’s first term lasted sixteen months; ordinary members of the Council of Ministers lasted twenty-three months. By the time he faced re-election in 1996, Yeltsin was on his seventh finance minister, his sixth minister of economics and trade, his fifth minister of regional development, and his fourth ministers of agriculture and energy. In the national-security realm, he had one defense minister and two foreign ministers in term one, but three chairmen of the Security Council, four heads of state security, and four interior ministers.24
Yeltsin, like many partocrats in their day, turned courtesies and picayune favors to his advantage. He did it not only to build personal fealty, as had been the practice in Soviet days, but to paper over cracks in the post-Soviet institutional edifice. During the strife with Ruslan Khasbulatov and the Supreme Soviet, he played this card adroitly, especially with holdovers from the communist establishment:
Having all that experience in the nomenklatura, Yeltsin appreciated that if former communists, even those numbered among his most ferocious opponents, could be “affectionately” brought nearer to the president’s chair, then their communist radicalism might blow off like smoke. Besides “political goodies,” Yeltsin made skillful and maybe cynical use of pittances—a prestigious position, an apartment, a dacha, medical care in the Central Clinical [Kremlin] Hospital, a car. In a quid pro quo for political loyalty, he could tolerate and forgive a great deal, foremost with the regional leaders. Many leaders of the [parliamentary] opposition and opposition deputies were seduced in the same way and at the requisite moment ended up as “clients” of the president.25
Parliament at first had an independent apparatus for granting supplies and perquisites to members, as did the prime minister’s office and the judiciary. In November 1993, a month after coming down on the parliamentary rebels, Yeltsin centralized the servicing of the federal government under one roof, a unified Presidential Business Department with more than 30,000 employees. The Fourth Chief Directorate of the old Soviet Ministry of Health, of which he had been so critical when in opposition, had been under presidential control since 1991. It was renamed the department’s Government Medical Center.26 Yeltsin selected Pavel Borodin, a Siberian city mayor championed by Aleksandr Korzhakov, to head the department and exhorted him to “feed the administration [executive office] and the government well.”27 The department’s budgetary demands “grew in geometrical progression” the moment Borodin was appointed, says Boris Fëdorov, the finance minister in 1993.28 The Kremlin quartermaster also showed great inventiveness in giving his unit a market aspect—primarily to finance operations and special projects such as the Kremlin reconstruction, although many suspected it was also to provide emoluments to officials. The business department not only operated facilities taken from its Soviet antecedents (such as office and apartment buildings, the TsKB and other clinics, hotels, farms, construction organizations, and ateliers) but diversified its funding by going into for-profit healthcare, banking, commercial real estate, and oil exports.29 Borodin spent the next six years on Yeltsin’s behalf meting out perks—offices, apartments and dachas, travel and vacation vouchers, hospital stays, and even books and cellphones—to lawmakers, bureaucrats, and judges.
Borodin—known to one and all as Pal Palych, a contraction of his first name and patronymic—was a bon vivant and reputed to be the best joketeller in the government, able to hold his ground with professional comedians. He emceed many presidential lunches and dinners and was the only official permitted to tell gags at them. The function of the Ministry of Privileges, as the press christened his agency, was no laughing matter. For the good of Yeltsin and democracy, it systematized service provision for the elite on a scale surpassing Soviet precedent. The soil was fertile: Housing and other goods and services were starting to be distributed commercially in Russia; state officials could not afford the best of them on their wages; and any revision of individual status still required a sheaf of permissions. “Goodies” that could be granted could also be withheld. When Yeltsin wanted to turn up the political heat on the Duma in the summer of 1995 and the spring of 1996, deputies were put on notice that, were the Duma to be dissolved, they would lose their offices and attendants, franking privileges, and VIP apartments in Moscow.
None of this establishes that Yeltsin governed as a CPSU secretary reborn, pure and simple. Regional party bosses until the 1980s, while all-powerful in their fiefdoms, reported to the general secretary, and that was a party role Yeltsin had never filled. Yeltsin as president took orders from no one and owed his post to the electorate. His refusal to be over-absorbed in detail was a character trait over and above what he learned in his party career. Some of the administrative levers associated with the Soviet partocracy, such as the personnel weapon and administration of perks, have been found in other times and places—for example, in the heyday of machine politics in big American cities. The Soviet formula was an alloy of machine techniques with the police state, the planned economy, and communist ideology, and those combinatory variables were absent after 1991. Yeltsin either would not or could not lock up dissidents, censor the press, or take 99.99 percent of the votes in a single-candidate election, and he had no hard-and-fast ideology and no propaganda mechanism at his fingertips. In the privileges area, he stayed aloof from the dross of Pavel Borodin’s decisions.30 The operation was constrained by a body of legislation on official benefits and by muckraking journalism, neither of them operative under the communist regime. Only when a good was in very short stock and the queue was long—state dachas are the best example—did Borodin and his office have much of an ability to play favorites.31 Once out of government service in the 1990s, most at the level of government minister, presidential adviser, or provincial governor were left to their own devices, without a helping or a hindering hand from Building No. 1.
The historicist, monarchial, and apparatchik paradigms all underplay the gnarly complexity of Yeltsin’s part in governing the state. Of the three, the first, with its sense of mission, is closest to his self-conception. But how effective was the Yeltsin recipe of governance in practice? As an oppositionist, he had presented himself as an improvement on Gorbachev, whose means of rule were rusting out. In power, he rammed through a constitution vesting him with the prerogatives he had lacked until then. The optimist would have forecast that state behavior in the new Russia would be more proactive and coherent than in the old, and it was some of the time but not consistently so. Presidential leadership was constrained by the disorganization of Yeltsin’s surroundings and by institutional counterweights. It was further influenced by his own conception of politics in an era of transition.
The results were there to see inside his organizational home, the executive branch in Moscow. Yeltsin was as well-spoken as anybody on the pathologies of government after communism. He titled his maiden state-of-the-country address to parliament in 1994 “On Strengthening the Russian State.” It began with “the gap between constitutional principles and the real practice” of rule. Russia had repudiated autocracy but not found a workable replacement, and this was undermining the whole course of reform: