More than all these mechanisms, Yeltsin relied on top-down administrative resources to supply policy input, check on underlings, and impose his decisions. The instrument was the Presidential Executive Office created by Yurii Petrov and modeled in part on the Central Committee Secretariat. Petrov wanted it to have the planning and monitoring capacity of the high party apparatus in its prime, without it getting mired in operations, and to this end did not give it divisions for sectors of the economy, such as Yeltsin knew so well from an earlier life. Much of Petrov’s time went to the organizational tangles brought on by the change in regime, including the appropriation of the property of the CPSU, and he was struck by how little sway he had over the provinces—the obkoms and gorkoms were as extinct as the Central Committee—and over his boss.75 The intelligentsia-based Democratic Russia movement, with Gennadii Burbulis’s support, attacked Petrov in early 1992 as a symbol of nomenklatura revanche. He in April offered his resignation, which Yeltsin refused to accept. Petrov lost Yeltsin’s support in December 1992 when he dickered with communist legislators about his being selected as prime minister.76 In January 1993 the president supplanted Petrov with Sergei Filatov, a bookish Moscow academic and a vice speaker of the Congress of Deputies. Although Yeltsin was to slight Filatov in Presidential Marathon for having “turned the executive office into some sort of research institute on the problems of democracy in Russia,”77 staff strength grew under his aegis from about 400 to the level of about 2,000 office workers. That is higher than the circa 1,500 in the American White House staff (the U.S. population is more than twice Russia’s) and much more than the several hundred in the Élysée Palace in France, which, like Russia, has a dual executive.78
Petrov and then Filatov had some substantive impact on policy, but had to compete for Yeltsin’s ear with a squadron of policy experts reporting to him through separate ganglia. In 1993 Yeltsin began to appoint thematic presidential assistants (pomoshchniks), who were either former party or state placemen of a technocratic stripe or Moscow intellectuals, mostly of a democratic orientation. In the group of about twelve assistants, Anatolii Korabel’shchikov (who managed relations with the provinces) and Dmitrii Ryurikov (a professional diplomat who coordinated foreign policy) were the most prominent representatives of the first category; Yurii Baturin (assistant for national security), Georgii Satarov (domestic politics), and Aleksandr Livshits (economics) were the most prominent from the second category.79 These individuals, a generation younger than the president, were required to communicate with him not through Filatov but through Viktor Ilyushin, the tight-lipped apparatchik from Sverdlovsk who was responsible for blocking out Yeltsin’s workday. Filatov, Ilyushin, and their respective groupings were rivals from the start. This was no accident. “For a long time, the president’s apparatus had two leaders. . . . The president saw the contradictions but did nothing to efface them. . . . Often Yeltsin even encouraged antagonism between parts of his executive office and between individuals. It seemed to him that this would make it easier to control things and avert any one person increasing his influence unduly.”80
There was another generator of dissonance: Aleksandr Korzhakov and the Presidential Security Service. The service was founded in 1990 as a small bodyguard for Yeltsin as parliamentary chairman. Upgraded in 1992, it was on paper part of the Main Protection Directorate (previously the Ninth Directorate of the KGB), but that agency was headed by Mikhail Barsukov, a brother officer Korzhakov had known since 1979, whose son was married to Korzhakov’s daughter, and who was willing to give him autonomy. Korzhakov freely admits in his memoirs that he was given to role expansion even in the first leg of his service to Yeltsin, in the Moscow party committee from 1985 to 1987.81 In national government, his star soared after the principal security forces flubbed the operation against parliament in October 1993. Yeltsin took to calling the service his “mini-KGB” and acceded to Korzhakov’s demand for status parity with Filatov and Ilyushin, enlargement of the service—it went from 250 men in September 1991 to 829 by June 1996—and improvement of their pay, housing conditions, and weaponry. Korzhakov convinced Yeltsin that, beyond keeping him safe, the service would fight corruption in the Kremlin and in the bowels of the bureaucracy.82
Armed with an unpublished presidential decree dated November 11, 1993, Korzhakov tapped telephones and fed Yeltsin dossiers of surreptitiously gathered compromising material (kompromat) on officials. Filatov, a target, sounded off in the press about Korzhakov turning the executive office into “a team of stoolpigeons.”83 Yeltsin, he said in an interview, “began to toss [Korzhakov’s] letters back to him,” but they kept coming, and some were directed to Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and other cabinet ministers.84 Unfazed, Korzhakov formed an in-house “analytical center” that made proposals on a wide range of public issues and badmouthed market reforms. Beginning in 1994, he wrote sharp letters on economic and other policy problems unrelated to his job description, not only to Yeltsin but to high-ranking leaders, including Chernomyrdin, and leaked information about his views to the media.85 By this time, Korzhakov was also a force in personnel decisions. Pavel Borodin and First Deputy Premier Soskovets were friends and allies of his, and in his last year in the Kremlin he had the principal say over the designation of a chief of the FSB (Barsukov), procurator general (Yurii Skuratov), and press secretary to Yeltsin (Sergei Medvedev).86 In January 1996 he engineered the replacement of Filatov by Nikolai Yegorov, the former governor of Krasnodar province, a hard-liner on Chechnya (who had been demoted from a ministerial position after Budënnovsk), and a man of “haughty manners and a slighting attitude toward those occupying more modest posts than he in the hierarchy of state service.”87 Korzhakov pressed Yeltsin to make Soskovets prime minister in Chernomyrdin’s place.88 And in the early months of 1996, he and Soskovets controlled the organization of Yeltsin’s campaign for re-election (see Chapter 14).
Yeltsin was later driven to lament the wideness of Korzhakov’s reach:
Korzhakov came to influence the appointment of people in the government, in the executive office, and in the power [security] ministries. . . . With every passing month and year, the political role of the . . . guard service . . . and concretely of Korzhakov grew. Korzhakov fought tooth and nail with everyone who did not submit to him and anyone he considered “alien.” He interfered in the work of my secretariat and violated established procedures to bring his own documents to me. He fought with Filatov and Ilyushin and tried through Oleg Soskovets to have a say in the country’s economic policy. . . . I take full responsibility for his unbelievable rise and his deserved fall. It was my mistake, and I had to pay for it.89
Yeltsin came to this wisdom in the rearview mirror. During his first term, though, it was his indulgence of Korzhakov that taught the Moscow high and mighty that the ex-watchman was a man to be feared and propitiated. Korzhakov family celebrations, such as his daughter’s nuptials and his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, became must-show events. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin gave the newlyweds a handsome china set. When Yeltsin dropped in on the silver anniversary party, Chernomyrdin, if Korzhakov can be believed, pouted because he had not been invited.90 Korzhakov’s public reputation shot to rarefied heights. To go by the experts’ poll published monthly in newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta, beginning in late 1994, he was ranked among the ten most powerful political figures in the country. In November 1995 he placed fourth, behind no one but the president, the prime minister, and Mayor Luzhkov; in January 1996 he was fourth again, trailing only Yeltsin, Gennadii Zyuganov (the communist leader, who was about to run for president against Yeltsin), and Chernomyrdin.