A panoply of points of view nearby had additional utility for Yeltsin. In an overloaded and underpowered state, redundancy and rapid turnover provided some protection against local failure: If the first underboss and his outfit let you down, the second or third might be better. This is how Oleg Poptsov explains the anomaly of Russia having several armies and quasiarmies (the military, MVD, border guards, railway troops, and so on) when it could not really afford one of them. “It is all for the same reason: because of hesitation, because of uncertainty. If one does not come to your defense, you can always call on another.”53 In a fractionated society, it was apropos, the president felt, that the executive and not just the legislature contain representatives of the fractions. “I had to go this way,” Yeltsin explained to me in 2001. “It should have been so. The situation [at the top] mirrored the interplay of forces in the country.”54 The Yeltsinesque system of checks and balances was there less to shield society from state encroachment, as The Federalist Papers told Americans how to do in the 1780s, than to sub for a stunted civil society, shield the sovereign from state dysfunction, and facilitate divide-and-rule in the innards of the government.
In economic policy, even as he gave the liberals license to marketize and privatize, Yeltsin was determined to find a place in his government for more conservative voices from the Soviet industrial conglomerate, and was unapologetic about the conflicting signals it sent about his policy and the standing of the prime minister. Red director Yurii Skokov, whose specialty had been power systems for spacecraft, was first deputy premier in 1990–91, secretary of a presidential board on federalism in 1991–92, and secretary of the president’s Security Council in 1992–93. He was a backstairs negotiator with the putschists in August 1991 and was distinguished by a go-slow economic policy and political ambition. Wrote Yeltsin:
Skokov is an intelligent man, that is the first thing you have to say, and a very closed one. [Ivan] Silayev . . . and Gaidar . . . felt a latent threat coming from Skokov and argued with me about him.
What was the role of Skokov in Yeltsin’s ingroup? It was a reasonable question. Skokov was really my “shadow” prime minister. . . . I understood that his general political position, in economics above all, was quite different from mine and from the positions of Gaidar and Burbulis. His double-dealing always concerned my supporters. But I thought that if a person understood that it was necessary in today’s Russia to work for a strong government and not against it, then what was wrong with that? Let the shadow premier . . . urge on the real prime minister.55
Yeltsin lost faith in Skokov and fired him only when he dissented from Kremlin policy toward the parliament in the spring of 1993.
Chernomyrdin, who got the prime minister’s job in December 1992, would not have lasted for almost two-thirds of the Yeltsin presidency if he had not been forbearing toward his leader’s juggling of people and interests and had not displayed some of the same aptitude himself. The construction organizer Oleg Lobov, from Sverdlovsk, acquired some of Skokov’s and Deputy Premier Georgii Khizha’s military-industrial responsibilities and fought to decelerate the privatization program. Lobov wrote several memorandums to this effect to Yeltsin: “He never expressed dissatisfaction about what I wrote. He never said I was not right. No, he was surprised that my memos were not moving forward or being looked into.”56 Metallurgist Oleg Soskovets was named the ranking of the deputy premiers in the autumn of 1993, answering for heavy industry and the defense complex and chairing the cabinet’s committee on daily “operational questions.” He lobbied unabashedly for state credits, bailouts, and tariff barriers and, through Korzhakov, had a privileged relationship with Yeltsin. He was a thorn in Chernomyrdin’s side until his dismissal in June 1996.57
President Yeltsin was not unobservant of the hazards of his polycentric modus operandi. Beginning in 1991, he deployed several safeguards to prevent balkanization from degenerating into chaos. One of those was to declare proprietary rights over the ultrasensitive precinct of national security and foreign policy and put it out of bounds to all but him and the agency heads. Yeltsin met one-on-one weekly with his foreign minister, spy chief, and police ministers and shut the prime minister and most of the Kremlin staff out of those colloquies.
Another low-cost response was to infiltrate protégés from earlier in his career into strategic positions, as Soviet party bosses had always done. Because Yeltsin’s term as head of the Moscow party organization had been so brief and doleful, few products of it worked in his presidential office. The main exceptions were Viktor Ilyushin (who started with him in Sverdlovsk), Valerii Semenchenko, and Mikhail Poltoranin. The best pool Yeltsin had at his disposal was the “Sverdlovsk diaspora,” the old-boy network whence he drew his chief of staff from 1991 to 1993 (Yurii Petrov), his senior presidential assistant from 1991 to 1996 (Ilyushin), the head of the Kremlin business department before Pavel Borodin (Fëdor Morshchakov), and a representative in the Council of Ministers and Security Council (the peripatetic Oleg Lobov).58 Gennadii Burbulis, head speech writer Lyudmila Pikhoya, and her colleague Aleksandr Il’in were Sverdlovskers but low-ranking members of the professoriate—advantageously for them, at Yeltsin’s alma mater, UPI.59 “You feel more confident, you feel certain warmth, among people from your area [zemlyaki],” says Pikhoya.60 Yeltsin’s reliance on people from his province of birth, though, was quite limited, since he wanted to avoid charges of cronyism and to be free to recruit outside the group. Burbulis left office by the end of 1992, Petrov by early 1993, and the others followed. No new Sverdlovskers were brought into the administration after then.
A related habit for Yeltsin was to find new favorites. These might be all-round comrades and purveyors of good cheer with whom he had ryumochnyye otnosheniya (shot-glass relations); examples would be Soskovets or Vladimir Shumeiko, a first deputy premier in 1992–93 and chairman of the Federation Council in 1994–95. Or they might be Young Turks who pushed reforms—like Anatolii Chubais, Boris Fëdorov, and Sergei Shakhrai. As a show of favor, Yeltsin several times followed up on a Fëdorov complaint by telephoning Chernomyrdin, with Fëdorov seated in the office. Fëdorov saw it a sign of confidence when Yeltsin did not tell Chernomyrdin that Fëdorov was there and made gargoyle faces at him during the conversation.61
A corrective to personalization and governmental disconnectedness would have been a collegial entity for sharing information, arbitrating conflicts, and inculcating common purpose. Yeltsin was stubbornly against such a linchpin—as should come as no shock, given his individualism and his intuitive approach to political action. Acquaintance with the communist era’s plenteous underbrush of committees, bureaus, and secretariats seems to have helped sour him on communal decision making. This aversion shows the selectiveness of his attitude toward the Soviet legacy.
During the seven months in 1991–92 when Yeltsin did double duty as prime minister, it was up to him to chair sessions of the Council of Ministers. He had nothing but distaste for the unwieldy council and the eye-glazing detail that marked its meetings. Several months of watching him sleepwalk through the proceedings won Burbulis and Gaidar over to two events per week—a working session on Tuesdays over sandwiches and tea, which Yeltsin did not attend, and one with him on Thursdays, to approve the decisions made on Tuesday. Yeltsin was relieved to make Burbulis and, after the spring of 1992, Gaidar his proxy for cabinet paperwork.62 The Yeltsin constitution gave the president the right, which he wrote into the draft, to chair any sitting of the Council of Ministers. He did it once in a blue moon after 1993 (and only twice in the second term), and then it was mostly to make announcements for the television cameras. Size and practice disqualified the Council of Ministers as a serious decision maker, as was the case with its Soviet predecessor. The fifty or sixty officials in attendance sat in rows facing forward, like pupils in a classroom. All remarks were made from a microphone and lectern at the front of the hall. Votes were almost never taken.