As the Soviet Union was in extremis and Yeltsin composed himself, Russia’s government found itself in turmoil. In July he had asked Gennadii Burbulis, the scholar from Sverdlovsk who had just managed his election campaign, and whom he passed over for Aleksandr Rutskoi as vice president, to be his chief of staff and set up a Presidential Executive Office (Administratsiya Prezidenta) for him. Burbulis balked: He pined to be a grand strategist and not “to work twenty-four hours a day with a card file.”48 Yeltsin contrived the position of state secretary for him, with undefined duties. Rutskoi, elected without a job description, then exhorted Yeltsin to unite the office of vice president with headship of the executive office and to let him be the president’s channel to the state apparatus. Yeltsin, saying he had no need of “a commissar,” declined.49 On August 5 he selected as chief of staff his old friend from the Sverdlovsk obkom, Yurii Petrov, who had been Soviet ambassador to Cuba since 1988; Yeltsin had to ask Gorbachev to release him from the post. Petrov reported for duty around noon on August 19, just as the tanks chugged up to the Russian White House. He had no time to introduce himself to Rutskoi, Burbulis, and staff before rushing downstairs to catch Yeltsin making his immortal speech on Tank No. 110.50
The ministerial bureaucracy was the main mechanism for carrying out decisions. At its head as prime minister was Ivan Silayev, a “red director”—a widely used term in Russia for the Soviet-era industrial manager, serving at the pleasure of the Communist Party. Silayev, who was Yeltsin’s age and had left the besieged White House for his family in August, was in the president’s estimation an unsuitable sparkplug for a serious salvage and reform effort. He quit on September 27 to chair an interrepublic economic committee, leaving Oleg Lobov of Sverdlovsk as caretaker Russian premier. The cabinet was rife with jockeying for position; agreements were being signed and disowned and resignations tendered in disgust. The seclusion of the president, one reporter observed, “has produced a crisis of power” and “a conflict of all against all.”51
For the prime minister’s post, Yeltsin looked at first for a “miracle worker” unattached to any program. He offered it in September to Svyatoslav Fëdorov, the proprietor of the USSR’s first commercial eye-surgery clinic, who turned it down flat. He had no better luck with Yurii Ryzhov, the rector of the Moscow Aviation Institute, or Mikhail Poltoranin, the editor to whom he had been so close in the Moscow party committee. He then auditioned Yurii Skokov, a conservative industrialist from the military sector, and Grigorii Yavlinskii.52 In dialogue on beach chairs in Sochi, Burbulis got Yeltsin to look at less familiar names and to link his personnel decision to the reform conundrum. After three days, “Yeltsin understood very well the backlog of problems, the frightening inheritance that had come his way. And so our conversation came down to the hopelessness of surmounting all of this by conventional methods.” “It is going to be very sticky,” Yeltsin said to him. Burbulis felt “emaciated” by the conversation.53
As crafter of the unconventional methods, Burbulis prevailed on the president to turn to Yegor Gaidar, an urbane, moon-faced economist and publicist from the Soviet baby boom—at thirty-five, he was but one year older than Yeltsin’s first daughter, Yelena. Born into an establishment family (his father was a navy admiral and both of his grandfathers were famed writers), Gaidar had two graduate degrees in economics, had written for Pravda and Kommunist (the CPSU’s theoretical journal), and directed a research institute. He also had a connection to the city of Sverdlovsk, which had just been renamed Yekaterinburg.54 Working out of an Arkhangel’skoye-2 dacha, Gaidar and colleagues had drawn up a liberalization proposal more radical than Five Hundred Days and executable in Russia rather than in an undivided Soviet Union.55 He was asked in the last week of October to return from a lecture booking at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, to meet with Yeltsin. Their interview took all of twenty minutes. The chief “grasped the breathtaking risk connected with the beginning of reforms,” yet also “that passivity and dallying would be suicidal.” “He seemed geared up to take upon himself political accountability for reforms that would inevitably be punishing, knowing this would add nothing to his popularity.”56 Gaidar agreed to serve in some capacity, although he and his confederates at the dacha rubbed their eyes and “felt as if it were not for real.”57
Yeltsin tipped his hand publicly on October 28 in a wide-ranging address to the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies and the population. “The period of movement by small steps is over,” he declared. “We now need a reformist breakthrough. . . . We shall begin, in deeds and not just in words, to pull ourselves out of the morass that is sucking us in deeper and deeper.”58 On November 1 the congress gave him carte blanche to make reforms by decree for twelve months. He was authorized to issue edicts contravening existing laws, reorganize the cabinet without checking with parliament, and appoint heads of provincial administrations. Ruslan Khasbulatov, the new chairman of the Supreme Soviet, shepherded the motion through the assembly. The composition of a reform government was revealed on November 6, the day Yeltsin consigned the CPSU to oblivion. On Burbulis’s advice, Yeltsin did the constitutional somersault of naming himself prime minister, averting the need to have anyone else confirmed by parliament. Burbulis was made first deputy premier and Gaidar finance minister and deputy premier for economic policy.59 To their surprise, Yeltsin left Gaidar and Burbulis alone to nominate the holders of key portfolios. Most were thirtysomethings, up to twenty-five years younger than Yeltsin and Gavriil Popov and the reformists he had known in the Interregional Deputies Group. “Fresh faces were needed to cope with the job. I selected people with a minimum of Soviet baggage, people without mental and ideological blinkers, without a bureaucratic mentality.”60 They passed with flying colors the test he had set in the Moscow party committee in the mid-1980s: readiness to put in insanely long hours at work. Gaidar’s days that fall and winter ended at three or four A.M.; eager beavers in his office snatched some slumber on cots or on pillows and blankets spread on the floor.
Political blowups heightened the pressure. One of them led Yeltsin on November 7 to impose martial law in Chechnya, a minority republic in the North Caucasus area of Russia. An air force general, Djokhar Dudayev, had been elected president in the Chechen capital of Grozny and peremptorily declared independence. Yeltsin’s show of force, promoted by Vice President Rutskoi, only fanned the flames, and Gorbachev, who still controlled Soviet troops, was opposed. On November 11 the Russian Supreme Soviet voted not to recognize Yeltsin’s decree, making it unenforceable. Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, an ethnic Chechen, sided with the anti-Yeltsin forces.