Having relinquished the command principle of governing, the state has not fully assimilated the law-based principle. This has brought forth such menacing phenomena as . . . an efflorescence of bureaucratism, which stifles the growth of new economic relations, ... the inclusion of part of the bureaucracy on various levels in the political struggle, which leads to the sabotage of state decisions . . . the imbuing of the state and municipal apparatus with corruption . . . a low level of discipline in implementation . . . lack of coordination in the work of the ministries and departments. . . . Here we must confess openly that democratic principles and the organizations of government are more and more being discredited. A negative image of democracy is being formed, as a lethargic and amorphous system of power that gives little to the majority of people and defends above all its own corporate interests. Russian society has attained freedom, but does not yet feel democracy as a system of state power that is both strong and accountable before the nation.32
The Yeltsin constitution of 1993 cleared up the struggle between the executive and the legislative wings. Other than excising the vice presidency, which Aleksandr Rutskoi had made a base for attacking the president, it did little to bring order to the executive. One option would have been to snuff out its structural duality. Gennadii Burbulis had wanted to scrap the office of prime minister and make the president a U.S.-type chief executive, with agency heads reporting to him and forming a presidential cabinet. He saw Yeltsin’s combination of the posts of president and premier in the autumn of 1991 as a first step toward realizing his goal. Initially open to the suggestion, Yeltsin was unalterably against it by mid-1992, wanting someone else do the legwork on reform and be a lightning rod. As Burbulis put it in an interview, “The president’s path [Yeltsin thought] would be the main source of will on questions of direction. The difficulties, pain, and burdensome decisions at any given moment would be undertaken by others, who could be removed [if they failed].”33 The new constitution reaffirmed the separation between a popularly elected president and a prime minister confirmed by parliament and in day-to-day charge of the civilian bureaucracy and the budget. The arrangement resembled the Gaullist Fifth Republic in France. In a way, it also honored the Soviet legacy: For most of the communist period, different individuals served as general secretary of the Communist Party and chairman of the USSR government, with the former, like the post-Soviet Russian president, very much in the driver’s seat.
The dispersive undercurrents within the state apparatus were never enough to prod Yeltsin into radical action. The bureaucracy, no longer the handmaiden of the CPSU apparatus, and with its economic monopoly burst by market reform, seemed to him a headless monster and not an immediate threat. Making it less corrupt and more responsive were desirable objectives but low on his to-do list. A ranking official who was caught red-handed peddling influence stood to be fired. In August 1993, for example, Yeltsin released Viktor Barannikov, the minister of security, for taking bribes. Barannikov then switched sides in the constitutional dogfight and was arrested after the October violence. In November 1994 Yeltsin removed Deputy Defense Minister Matvei Burlakov, who had been accused in the press of profiteering from the evacuation of troops from Germany, but the general was never prosecuted. On systemic graft, kickbacks, and falsification, Yeltsin promulgated ameliorative decrees to little effect. To the demand of Grigorii Yavlinskii, the leader of the liberal Yabloko Party, that he make a full-scale attack on corruption as a condition of Yavlinskii supporting him in the 1996 presidential election, Yeltsin came back with a shrug of the shoulders: “So what can I do about it? This is Russia, after all.”34
Boris Yeltsin as decision maker should be measured by an appropriate yardstick. Innovative statesmen in democracies or half-democracies do not address the dilemmas of the day singlehandedly. They identify problems, stir the pot, and begin to act. When followers join in, it may mainly serve the leader’s requirements and ramify his influence; empower followers to mold the relationship, so that leaders wind up following the followers; or mutually empower, as it was with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition in the United States in the 1930s. The most successful leaders respond to the material and psychic needs of followers and motivate them to invest in the shared cause and to help fix its terms.35
The early Yeltsin fostered mutual empowerment with acolytes on the street and in the halls of power. Once in the Kremlin, he still did, only with the difference that his empowerment of others tended to be ambiguous and, one could say, schizoid—the authorization of persons with multiple outlooks to speak and act in his name, either serially or simultaneously. The president’s team was deficient in teamwork.
Captaincy of the team was not up for debate. An underperforming player might be slighted for months before Yeltsin let him go. In July 1994, aboard a steamship on the Yenisei River in Siberia with the governor of Krasnoyarsk province, Valerii Zubov, Yeltsin was out of sorts at japes made by press secretary Vyacheslav Kostikov and ordered him thrown into the drink, fully clothed. Pavel Borodin rescued Kostikov with only his self-regard harmed.36 Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev was on the receiving end in 1995. Yeltsin complained of him at press conferences in July and September. When they traveled to the United States in October, the Americans were astonished to see Kozyrev disembark the presidential airplane in New York through a rear door. He was assigned to the hindmost car in the motorcade and forbidden to accompany Yeltsin to the United Nations, after which he “went forlornly off to his hotel.”37 In January 1996 Yeltsin replaced Kozyrev with Yevgenii Primakov.
In meetings scheduled for briefing purposes, Yeltsin never tipped off the questions he would ask of the reporting official. No exception was made for his Tuesday A.M. update from the prime minister, the number two in the Russian state. “Prompting would not have corresponded to the style of Boris Yeltsin. He wanted the weekly performance to have some suspense about it, something unexpected for the prime minister. The latter, of course, was not overjoyed.”38 The prime minister had the same right to ask questions as the president, and Yeltsin had no interest in seeing them before the meeting. In one-on-one meetings the president initiated, he would call for a summary of the recommended course, then ask to hear in a nutshell which pieces of it were spornyi, debatable—likely to cause implementation and political problems. If the discussion had been initiated by a subordinate, it was not unusual for Yeltsin to stare poker-faced for most of the encounter. I heard in interviews that the guest often felt as if trapped in a magnetic field, or like a rabbit in the gaze of a boa constrictor that could strike without warning. Kostikov convincingly attributes Yeltsin’s silence at many meetings to his work in the CPSU apparatus, “when you could pay with your career for a careless word or an overly frank glance,” as well as to an instinct to protect yourself from people “who are prepared to change their opinion depending on the eyebrow movements of a powerful person.”39 But there was personal style at work, too. Yeltsin reflected on it in the last volume of his memoirs: “In conversation, I love sharp turns, gaps, and unexpected transitions. I hold to my own rhythm and cannot stand stupid monotony.”40
At meetings with many policymakers present, Yeltsin kept them on their toes by arbitrarily assigning seats at the table and sometimes changing the order at the last second, moving them toward or away from his chair. If he had already made a decision on an issue, he might hear out advice on how to do it better but hated to be contradicted. Were he to revise a position, it was by stealing the critic’s thunder without explicitly endorsing the critique: He “came out in public support of the stand he had previously spurned, without naming names.”41 During a discussion he thought unproductive, Yeltsin could vacate the room to stunning effect, leaving the others to cool their heels for twenty or thirty minutes. The signing of a memorandum or position paper—though not of a decree or law, which would have undergone laborious review—could evoke “the Yeltsin pause.” The president would take up to sixty seconds to reread the text word for word, pan over the spectators, and then roll up his shirt sleeve and scratch out his signature with a fountain pen. There were days when Yeltsin, pen uncapped, spied a problem in the document and discarded it. The sponsors would go scurrying for cover, and Yeltsin would take the unsigned document away with him.