Around February 1, Yeltsin asked his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, age thirty-six, to sit in on meetings of the Soskovets group. Other than transcribing speeches and canvassing in his early campaigns, this was her first involvement in her father’s politics. She was smart and resolute like her father but soft-spoken and unassuming like her mother. She had felt unfulfilled in the defense-related institute where she had worked for a decade and where she turned down a suggestion in the mid-1980s that she join the Communist Party (she said she did not know enough about politics and did not consider herself “worthy”), and in the bank where she was on staff in 1994–95: “My character is such that I for some reason tend to have inflated expectations of myself. And then it seems that each time I do not quite live up to them.”34 This time she was willing to heed her father’s request.
Dyachenko was soon saying to Yeltsin that something was out of whack with the Soskovets effort.35 But at first nothing much came of her efforts. It was then that Yeltsin’s need to reconnect with the mass electorate intersected with the process of connecting differently with players at the elite level. Come what may, he had to empower a functional campaign staff and to appease other public politicians. A new presence in post-communist politics—the leaders of the nonstate business class that was beginning to amass fabulous wealth in the market economy—showed both tasks in a new light.
The Russian moguls were mostly in their thirties and forties, had been nobodies under Soviet power, and until the year before Yeltsin’s re-election were mostly financiers who made money out of currency speculation, arbitrage, handling governmental deposits, and buying high-interest state debt. On August 31, 1995, Yeltsin had his first meeting with a group of them, about reserve requirements and other banking issues, and referred to the banks as having a political role. “Russian bankers,” he told ten representatives, “take part in the country’s political life. . . . The banks, like all of Russia, are learning democracy.”36 The loans-for-shares auctions in November–December 1995 allowed the more conspicuous of “the oligarchs,” as they were now known, to reposition as captains of industry. Initially dreamt up by Vladimir Potanin of Oneximbank, this privatization scheme was backed by Chubais but also by Kremlin conservatives like Soskovets, who was the one to get Yeltsin’s signature on it.37 At bargain-basement prices, Potanin picked up Norilsk Nickel, the world’s number one smelter of palladium and nickel, and he, Mikhail Khodorkovskii of Menatep, and Boris Berezovskii acquired the oil giants Sidanco, Yukos, and Sibneft. Two oligarchs also had extensive media interests and were bound to figure in the 1996 campaign: Vladimir Gusinskii of Most Bank was de jure the proprietor of NTV television; his rival Berezovskii had been de facto the moneyman behind the ORT network (formerly Ostankino) since 1994. Relations between Gusinskii and Berezovskii had always been testy, but they were willing in 1996 to set differences aside in order to protect their gains.
The one business figure on the Soskovets board was the hyperactive Berezovskii. He more than any of his colleagues was out to build status and influence in the political realm, to which end he had added to his portfolio the quality newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta, the TV-6 entertainment network, and a one-third share in the Ogonëk publishing house. He had frequently offered advice, solicited and unsolicited, to Soskovets and Korzhakov, and lobbied for advantage. His path had crossed Yeltsin’s in November or December 1993, when he and Vladimir Kadannikov volunteered to underwrite publication under the Ogonëk imprint of the Russian edition of volume two of Yeltsin’s memoirs, in which Yeltsin was advanced 10 percent against the domestic royalties. Berezovskii first shook the president’s hand when he went to his office to sign the contract. (The foreign rights, which brought in four or five times the revenue, were handled by the British literary agent Andrew Nurnberg.) In 1994 he was the first businessman to join the Presidential Club.38 Berezovskii also knew Tatyana Dyachenko, though not yet much less cursorily than he knew her father. Korzhakov was to write in his 1997 memoir that at some time in 1994 or 1995 Berezovskii made her a present of two cars: a Russian-made Niva wagon and a Chevrolet Blazer. The claim was claptrap and is controverted by both Dyachenko and Berezovskii.39 But the two were acquainted and had as a friend in common Valentin Yumashev, who had prepared both volumes of Yeltsin’s memoirs for publication. In his professional life, Yumashev was deputy editor of Ogonëk magazine from 1991 to 1995 and director general of the Ogonëk company in 1995–96.40
It took only several meetings of the Soskovets group for Berezovskii to conclude that not all was well. From February 2 to 5, he and seventy other Russian capitalists and officials attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where they were upset by the polite reception given to Gennadii Zyuganov, who had a bulge over Yeltsin in the polls. At Berezovskii’s suggestion, Viktor Ilyushin arranged for Yeltsin to host an unpublicized Kremlin luncheon for six businessmen—Berezovskii, Gusinskii, Khodorkovskii, Potanin, Aleksandr Smolenskii of SBS-Agro Bank, and Vladimir Vinogradov of Inkombank—and Chubais, who had been Yeltsin’s deputy for privatization until Yeltsin threw him to the wolves in January as a result of the Duma election. The meal was held about a fortnight after the Davos forum, in Shrovetide on the Russian calendar, and the chef served traditional fare for the season: pancakes with garnishes and drinks.41 Yeltsin had thought the diners wanted to speak with him about campaign finance, since “they had nowhere to go and would have to support me,” but the conversation was about the hopelessness of the Soviet-style effort under Soskovets. “I had not expected such tough talk,” he was to write in Presidential Marathon.42 Gusinskii and Chubais held nothing back. “Boris Nikolayevich,” Chubais stated, “your popularity rating is zero.” As usual when he was confronted by unlovely news, the meeting was marked by a long silence from the chair. One of the visitors, Khodorkovskii, thought “the tsar was thinking about whether to send of us all to the execution block”; another, Smolenskii, said in 2003 that “the pause was so loud that I hear it to this day.”43 The frank comments gave every appearance of shaking Yeltsin out of his apathy. Hesitating to catch his breath, he asked what they recommended. He promised after forty minutes of discussion to think about ways to energize the campaign and to involve Chubais and associates of big business in it. Berezovskii stayed to chat with Yeltsin briefly after the group dispersed.44
It is important to realize, though, that the dialogue with the magnates had no immediate effect.45 Almost a month after the Kremlin meeting, on March 14, Yeltsin’s political assistant, Georgii Satarov, and a group of consultants sent him a blistering memorandum noting that the campaign was still a shambles:
[Soskovets] is not a specialist on public politics or electoral technologies, as immediately revealed itself. But this has not been offset by the possible merits on which you apparently were counting.
Soskovets has displayed no organizational ability: The headquarters has not yet begun to work normally. He is unable to make contact with people who have a different point of view but are necessary to the campaign. His influence on the regional leadership has been exercised through vulgar and vain officiousness, which not only compromises you as president but turns off possible allies. The same methods are being employed, with the same result, with government agencies and with representatives of the mass media and of commercial and banking circles. The weirdest thing is that Soskovets has not resolved the problem of mobilizing in a short span of time the financial resources needed to wage the campaign. . . . More than a month has been lost.