In political terms, the most shocking thing about shock therapy was that it laid bare the limits of the nationwide consensus. Russians were united on the necessity of doing something about the economy and about instability in all things political and constitutional; on what was to be done, they were disunited. Bearish economic news and the whittling down of Yeltsin’s mass base emboldened elite players who had principled objections to his reform program, or who found it expedient to take up arms. The first yelps of criticism came even before price liberalization took effect, and some were from members of the president’s winning coalition, not from unreconstructed communists. Aleksandr Rutskoi, the running mate to Yeltsin a half-year before and now his vice president, spoke against headlong marketization on a tour of Siberian towns in late November 1991. In an interview with the newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta on December 18, he declared that the government had been turned over to amateurs, “lads in pink trunks and yellow boots” who were hurling Russia toward disaster. Ruslan Khasbulatov, just chosen as parliamentary chairman, chimed in several weeks into the new year, and the Supreme Soviet adopted resolutions attacking the government.
In February and March of 1992, as a second planned miniwave of decontrol of prices drew nigh, this one aimed at oil and the energy sector, factory directors and bureaucrats from state industry campaigned to preempt it. Gaidar, elevated to first deputy premier by Yeltsin on March 2, cringed: “Powerful pressure mounted on the president. He was deluged daily by foot-messengers reporting to him what a fearful misadventure, if not perfidy, these monetarists were starting.”8 The Congress of People’s Deputies took up the mantra when it convened in April and considered a motion to dismiss four economic ministers. Gaidar took Yeltsin off guard by standing up on April 13 to inform the deputies the entire cabinet was stepping down if the motion passed. Khasbulatov and his legislators did a volte face the next day. Yeltsin wrote in Notes of a President that the Gaidar move was unwelcome news to him, but he gave high grades to his understudy’s theatrical sense: “Yegor Timurovich grasped the nature of the congress as a political spectacle, a big circus, where only the most unexpected and abrupt thrusts would carry the day.”9 Gaidar recalls that Yeltsin, who was still officially prime minister, “shook his head in pique and doubt yet accepted the decision.” Gaidar’s sponsor, Gennadii Burbulis, whom Yeltsin demoted in April from first deputy premier without explanation (he stayed on as state secretary), was dubious about the threat. Says Gaidar, “Gennadii Eduardovich, who had worked with Boris Nikolayevich much longer than me and knew him better, understood that our demand was addressed not only to the congress but to the president.”10
The reprieve lasted only a few weeks. In a preview of what he would do again and again, Yeltsin spoke to Gaidar about introducing armaments specialist Yurii Skokov or Sverdlovsk partocrat Oleg Lobov into the cabinet “for equipoise” (dlya ravnovesiya). The suggestion “was proudly rejected.”11 On May 30, at a Kremlin meeting on energy policy, Yeltsin announced that he was relieving the young minister for the branch, Vladimir Lopukhin, who was in favor of laissez-fire and was one of the four on the congress’s blacklist. Writes Yeltsin: “I think back to two faces: one was scarlet, almost vermilion—that was Gaidar; the other was pale as a sheet—that was Lopukhin. It was difficult to look at them.”12 Appointed in Lopukhin’s stead and awarded the rank of deputy premier was Viktor Chernomyrdin, an engineer and red director from the Urals; two other experienced managers, Vladimir Shumeiko and Georgii Khizha, were brought in as deputy premiers in mid-June.
Yeltsin did not consult Gaidar on the Lopukhin firing. He knew, Gaidar says, that Gaidar would have resigned if given early warning. Gaidar considered quitting but was talked out of it by friends. The promotion to acting prime minister on June 15 was little solace. Anyone could see he and Burbulis had been taken down a peg.13 There was further evidence one month later when Yeltsin nominated, and the Supreme Soviet confirmed, Viktor Gerashchenko as chairman of the Central Bank of Russia. Gerashchenko, the last head of the USSR’s state bank, was at odds with the Gaidar brain trust’s tight-money policy and flooded industry and agriculture with cheap credits. Inflation, having subsided in the spring, took off again that autumn.14
When the congress gathered for its winter session (it assembled two or three times a year), Yeltsin’s twelve months to make staffing and economic decisions by decree had expired. He asked the deputies to regularize Gaidar’s appointment as prime minister, which they refused to do by 486 votes to 467 on December 9, 1992 (the congress had 1,068 members, of whom 252 sat in the Supreme Soviet). Flustered, Yeltsin decided to take his brief to the people. On December 11 he was driven to the AZLK Works, the carmaker in southeast Moscow that manufactured the rattletrap Moskvich. He knew from government documents that Russian workplaces were having hard times:
But this was all on paper. Here in the immense assembly shop, darkish and slathered in machinery oil, all of the disillusionment and discontent heaped up over the year of reforms poured out. The workers met Yeltsin with a hush. All that rang out were some peals of applause, to which he was completely unaccustomed. There were no cries of acclaim, no supportive posters. The president plainly got skittish. Workers, mute and tense, listened. The concluding words of his speech—“I trust I will have your support”—struck no sparks. The prepackaged resolution was approved, but without any ardor.15
Workers bawled that Yeltsin should bury the hatchet with Khasbulatov and reanimate the socialist economy. Only ten or twenty, one observer divined, would have raised their hands for the motion if management and the trade union committee had not cracked the whips. Yeltsin was downcast as he climbed back into his limousine.16
AZLK and the dyspepsia of the parliamentarians took the wind out of Yeltsin’s sails. He sat down with Khasbulatov and reached a deal on a baroque formula for selecting a prime minister to serve until Russia had a new constitution. The congress on December 14 came up with eighteen candidates; Yeltsin shortened the list to five, and in the process disallowed the favorite of the deputies, Georgii Khizha, an arms manufacturer from St. Petersburg; the congress did a straw poll with three choices per deputy; the president was to make a choice from among the three leading nominees and submit that name for confirmation. Yurii Skokov was the top candidate with 637 votes, followed by Viktor Chernomyrdin with 621 and Gaidar with 400 votes. Chernomyrdin was Yeltsin’s pick of the three and was confirmed with 721 votes for.17 Gaidar, Burbulis, and several other reformists were excluded from the new Council of Ministers. The kamikazes had flamed out—and the commodore who had ordered them into the air stayed at his post.
Yeltsin was gratified in 1991 by Gaidar’s minimum of “Soviet baggage.” This could not have been said about Chernomyrdin, a jowly veteran of the petroleum industry and the founding head of Gazprom, the state company that took over the assets of the USSR Ministry of the Gas Industry in 1989. Two decades older than Gaidar and only seven years younger than Yeltsin, he was out of Orenburg oblast, the home region of Naina Yeltsina. He had hooked up with Yeltsin when the latter was Sverdlovsk party boss and together they supervised pipeline laying; he was kinder to Yeltsin than most after the rift with Gorbachev.18 “Viktor Stepanovich and I are united by common views on many things,” Yeltsin would say in Notes of a President, and were of the same generation. Chernomyrdin had principles but “is not up in the clouds.”19 The earthbound Chernomyrdin was to be an indispensable man, the prime minister for five-plus years, and to win fame equally for his competence, his wiliness, his partiality toward the Gazprom monopoly,20 and his mangled syntax and diction. Like Yeltsin, he evolved with the times.