Yeltsin notified Kiriyenko on August 22 that his premiership was done, after four months. The choice to replace him was the amazing one foreseen by Tret’yakov in July—Chernomyrdin, the same veteran of the red directors’ club whom Yeltsin had deposed in March. As he made the offer to Chernomyrdin in his Kremlin office on August 23, Yeltsin made a fulsome apology for the past spring and offered to repeat it on the airwaves. Chernomyrdin said the confidential amends were sufficient. It was made clear in this meeting and others that Yeltsin expected Chernomyrdin to sit until 2000 and to run for president then with his support. Yeltsin was more acceptant of Chernomyrdin’s return than excited by it.34 He divulged his decision in a televised speech the next day. “Today we need the people who are usually called ‘heavyweights.’ In my view, the experience and weight of Chernomyrdin are needed.” Yeltsin drew a link to the succession question, saying the reinstatement would help assure “continuity in power in 2000” and that human qualities such as Chernomyrdin’s “will be the decisive argument in the presidential elections.”
The Duma would have none of it. In the first round of the voting, on August 31, only ninety-four deputies voted for the former and acting prime minister, worse than Kiriyenko had fared in April. Meeting on September 2 with Bill Clinton, in Moscow to show the flag, Yeltsin was truculent. He was not afraid to provoke a system-wide crisis if the Duma would not confirm his nominee: “Yeltsin seemed ready for that, even to welcome it. He could use his presidential powers, he said, to ‘wreck the Communist Party once and for all.’ The communists ‘have committed plenty of sins in the past. I could make a list of those sins and take it to the Ministry of Justice and prosecute them.’ Clasping his hands and gritting his teeth, he added, ‘I could really put the squeeze on them.’”35 But Yeltsin also shared with the Americans that he was debating alternatives, and Chernomyrdin knew it full well.36 Doubts only grew when, upon resubmission, Chernomyrdin could garner no more than 138 votes. While this was more than Kiriyenko received in the second round in April, the climate of opinion was different: Gennadii Seleznëv would not arrange a secret ballot; the communist caucus stuck to its guns; the Federation Council was not on board; Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin were damaged goods. There was also a constitutional complication. The communists were preparing to introduce a bill to impeach Yeltsin. Under Article 109, the president was not empowered to dissolve the Duma and force a new parliamentary election if an article of impeachment had passed the lower house. Had Yeltsin persisted, militant KPRF deputies had a chance to tie his hands by railroading through an impeachment bill before the nomination of Chernomyrdin came to a vote.
Yeltsin now executed another U-turn: As in December 1992 with Chernomyrdin, he agreed to a compromise candidate. Yevgenii Primakov, two years older than Yeltsin (and thirty-three years older than Kiriyenko), had been Russia’s spymaster and latterly its minister of foreign affairs. Before that he was a journalist, academic, and nonvoting member of the Gorbachev Politburo, always working hand in glove with the security services. Primakov was portly, avuncular in comportment, and center-left in his politics. He wanted a broad-based government, heightened state regulation of the market, and a more muscular foreign policy, all of which fit better with what parliament and the populace wanted than Chernomyrdin or Kiriyenko had. Primakov needed to be talked into taking the position of prime minister. After three meetings with Yeltsin and many more with staffers, he acquiesced on September 10. The nomination sailed through the Duma on September 11, with 317 votes in favor to sixty-three against.
Yeltsin’s back-to-back reversals, in a setting of economic distress, led some to the surmise that his star had set irretrievably. “The Yeltsin factor, with his . . . utter unpredictability in the struggle for personal power, has departed for all time from Russian politics,” Tret’yakov submitted in Nezavisimaya gazeta the morning after the Primakov confirmation. “In the larger scheme of things, politician Yeltsin no longer exists”; all that was left now was “citizen Yeltsin,” yesterday’s man. He had failed to “appoint” an heir, Tret’yakov continued, and would be unable to appoint one in future.37
But Yeltsin was not yet ready to fade from the scene, and he was not bereft of political resources, as would be evident in 1999. What Tret’yakov’s diagnosis also overlooked was that the Primakov solution was in some ways a blessing in disguise for Yeltsin. Defeat in a third Duma ballot, if that was the alternative, held more dangers for him than it did for the communist-led opposition, which most likely would have come back from an election strengthened. Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow was a much-bruited option for prime minister in September. Put off by his ambition and forwardness, Yeltsin was passionately against the candidacy and sacked several close aides for pushing it.38 Had a Chernomyrdin restoration come about, it would have been a standing reproach to Yeltsin for his poor judgment in ousting him earlier. Unlike Primakov, Chernomyrdin had open presidential aspirations that Yeltsin would need to manage. Chernomyrdin had reason to feel aggrieved at Yeltsin’s treatment of him and to reckon that he could feed off it politically.39 And parliamentary approval for Chernomyrdin would have come at the price of a huge power-sharing concession, to be in effect until 2000. During the negotiations Yeltsin had offered to waive his right to dissolve the legislature (it would waive its right to vote no-confidence) and to give it a veto over the appointment of deputy premiers, the minister of finance, and the heads of the force agencies. Gennadii Zyuganov renounced the pact on August 30, thinking there were more concessions to wring out of Yeltsin.40 Yeltsin took it off the table when he submitted Primakov’s name, leaving him able in future to put his new prime minister through the same meat grinder he subjected Chernomyrdin and Kiriyenko to in 1998.
Primakov, most importantly, was in a position to pursue the needed course correction with far more credibility than Chernomyrdin. Talk of a constitutional revision to dilute Yeltsin’s presidential powers withered on the vine in October. Yeltsin was prepared to give Primakov as much autonomy to select collaborators as the young liberals Gaidar and Kiriyenko had in their time. Primakov filled many positions in his White House apparat with reserve intelligence officers. In staffing the cabinet, he would say in a memoir, “The president and his entourage . . . desisted from imposing . . . particular people on me.”41 As his first deputy premier for economic affairs, he lined up the communist and dirigiste Yurii Maslyukov.42 At Primakov’s urging, Viktor Gerashchenko, evicted from the position by Yeltsin in 1994, came back on September 12 to chair the central bank.
Primakov on the whole was a moderate and pragmatic prime minister. He ran for Yeltsin what was essentially a coalition government. Fourteen of thirty-one cabinet members, among them reformists like Finance Minister Zadornov, were carried over from Kiriyenko, and he blended in leftists, centrists, and clients of Luzhkov and other politicos. Primakov and his ministers employed administrative levers to put failed banks into receivership, slow capital flight, and force the payment of some back wages to civil servants and the disgruntled miners.43 The budget they submitted had a deficit of only 3 percent of GDP. Primakov and Gerashchenko financed the deficit that remained through the printing press, thereby ramping up inflation to 84 percent in 1998 (from 11 percent in 1997) while short-circuiting the ruinous lending cycle. The feeble economic growth of 1997 yielded to still another slump in output, by 4.9 percent in 1998, but the bottom did not drop out of the system, as had been feared. Primakov, in Yeltsin’s assessment, “chose the perfect intonation” to reassure the nation. “With his confident unhurriedness, Yevgenii Maksimovich managed . . . to convince almost everybody that things would calm down.”44