A more propitious attempt to rejoin the threads was the Russian State Council of 1991–92. The council was born in July 1991 as the brainchild of Burbulis and a subset of the Westernizing intellectuals who had congregated around Yeltsin during his drive for power. They wanted a summit-level panel that would deliberate direction and priorities and not bog down in detail. Members were to have entrée to the president as individuals; as a group, they were to sit down with him in the chair to consider the big picture. Burbulis intended to make the State Council the modernizing center of policy making and to have its role as clearing house for ideas given constitutional sanction. The council was “to work out for the head of state questions about the country’s development overall and gather under its roof people of the same turn of mind who were scattered around other structures.”63
The core members of the State Council were Burbulis and five “state counselors” whom Yeltsin made responsible for reform sectors: Yekaterina Lakhova (women’s and social issues), Sergei Shakhrai (legal affairs), Yurii Skokov (defense), Sergei Stankevich (politics), and Galina Starovoitova (nationalities). Burbulis, Shakhrai, Stankevich, and Starovoitova were progressive academics; Lakhova, a pediatrician from Sverdlovsk, was a political centrist; Skokov was a secretive conservative. Added to them were five cabinet ministers of liberal outlook.64 Yegor Gaidar and Vice President Rutskoi, fearful of exclusion, asked for the right to participate as well. Burbulis, who had begged off the job of organizing Yeltsin’s presidential office, was not the optimal salesman for the council. Yurii Petrov, Viktor Ilyushin, and the veterans of the CPSU apparatus to whom Yeltsin had turned for assistance gave it a chilly reception, as did ministers and parliamentarians who stood to give up powers.65
The backbiting would have been extraneous unless Yeltsin had the reservations he did. They went back to the rationale for the State Council, which, as Stankevich was later to say frankly, was “to make up for [Yeltsin’s] shortcomings” and for his “inadequate vision of the future.”66 Getting his back up at the tutorship, Yeltsin waffled. He would not commit to a firm schedule or appoint more counselors, and missed most of the early sessions. This left Burbulis to lead them, which it was hard to do when political heavyweights sat around the table. Yeltsin took offense at press reports that the council would elevate the tone of government and that Burbulis was his “gray cardinal,” pulling wires from backstage: “This, of course, was balderdash. For there to be a ‘cardinal,’ the person in the president’s chair would have had to be spineless, soft, and apathetic,” adjectives inapplicable to the first president of Russia.67 The State Council convened about twice a month until Yeltsin abolished it in May 1992. Of the counselors, now “presidential advisers,” Shakhrai made a good career as a government minister, Lakhova entered electoral politics, and Skokov stayed on in the Security Council Yeltsin established by decree in April 1992. Burbulis and Starovoitova walked the plank in November 1992 and Stankevich, after losing his Kremlin office and hotline connection to the president, in December 1993.68 A Presidential Council, chaired by Yeltsin, continued to function throughout his first term as an unpaid sounding board for thirty or so opinion makers and an audition chamber for future aides.
From time to time, journalists and analysts would proclaim that some other body was succeeding where the State Council had not. Invariably, speculation about the latest candidate petered out. Modest requests by staffers for small-group meetings with the president were laughed off. At the reception for Yeltsin’s sixty-third birthday in 1994, assistant Georgii Satarov saluted him and said it would be good if all his aides sat down with him once a week. Yeltsin said no: “Why is this necessary? After all, each of you can come to see me and chat. What do you want to do, bring back the Politburo?”69
Yeltsin put higher stock in two other ways of mitigating the unruliness of the executive branch. The first was the extramural hobnobbing that he had practiced in the Sverdlovsk committee of the CPSU. An aspect of it was the new apartment house in Krylatskoye, which the Yeltsins made their legal Moscow domicile in 1994. Chernomyrdin, Korzhakov, Gaidar, Borodin, and Yurii Luzhkov were among the tenants who danced to a live orchestra at the housewarming. The building was a poor stimulant of friendly feelings, since the family rarely overnighted in their flat and those registered there, like them, lived mostly at country homes. Those who stayed behind avoided their neighbors due to political disagreements and to a psychological reaction against being cooped up in the same company.70
Yeltsin sank more effort into an association named the Presidential Club. It was established in June 1993 in a facility taken over from the CPSU Central Committee at 42 Kosygin Street, on the Sparrow (formerly Lenin) Hills. Yeltsin got the idea, through Korzhakov and Shamil Tarpishchev, from the Il’inka Sports Club attached to the Council of Ministers. The plant combined a sports complex (covered tennis courts, a swimming pool, a weight room) with lounges, a restaurant, and a movie theater. Yeltsin played doubles tennis at the club with Tarpishchev twice a week and others when possible. His most rollicking steambath parties and dinners were held there, and some political scuttlebutt was digested with the meals and drinks. Yeltsin was president of his club, which was to be for “people who are close in spirit and in views, who like one another, and who want to see one another regularly.”71
The generic resemblance to Urals precedent cloaked dissimilarities. Kosygin Street was far plusher than anything in the hinterland. Tennis, the main athletic pursuit, had snob appeal—it was not part of the Soviet sports machine until the 1980s—and, in singles and doubles, was less cooperative than the volleyball favored in Sverdlovsk. Yeltsin as regional boss had enrolled party workers in his volleyball league inclusively, but the Moscow lodge was exclusive. Entrants were issued cards and paid token dues; cursing was forbidden; enrollment was capped at 100 members; recruits were approved by Yeltsin in annual batches. It was not enough for the candidates to like one another: The president had to like them. A spot on the members’ directory was a mark of honor, which did not always fit with protocol position. Vice President Rutskoi, for example, was out, as were the head of the president’s staff (Sergei Filatov), all of Yeltsin’s liberal advisers, the mayor of Moscow (Yurii Luzhkov), and the chief of foreign intelligence (Yevgenii Primakov); for some reason, Yeltsin wanted at first to bar Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, then allowed him in.72 But Yeltsin’s senior aide (Viktor Ilyushin), who was equal to Filatov in status, was clubbable, and was joined by the head of the Presidential Business Department (Pavel Borodin), the ghostwriter of Yeltsin’s memoirs (Valentin Yumashev), the commander of the palace guard (Korzhakov) and top security officers, several elite intellectuals (Mark Zakharov and Yurii Ryzhov), and two comedians (Gennadii Khazanov and Mikhail Zadornov). An invitation into the club could recognize newly won standing. In 1994, for instance, businessman Boris Berezovskii, industrialist Vladimir Kadannikov (whose factory made the cars marketed by Berezovskii’s main business, Logovaz), and Ivan Rybkin, the new speaker of the State Duma, were asked to join. At his induction, in June, Berezovskii was in bandages for injuries suffered in an assassination attempt the week before.73 The organizers had planned to add a substantial number of figures from business and the arts but found limited interest in those they approached, and some of those who did accept came to the place only once. It was, in the end, “a club of chiefs,” in the words of Yumashev, and the membership was never over sixty.74