The headlines of 1992 illuminated the environmental encumbrances to Yeltsin’s reform program in all their abundance. Until he forcibly shut down the Congress of People’s Deputies in late 1993 and imposed a presidentialist constitution, an obstructionist legislature lurked over his shoulder and had the legal and often the political force to foil him. But some of his biggest problems were within the amorphous executive branch. It contained a runaway vice president, a chief banker more attuned to parliament than to Yeltsin, and ministers and counselors raring to score points and to draw him into their corner. Large producers in Russia, still the property of the state, entreated for financial assistance. Private business, which was in its infancy, was strong enough in one area, banking, to create a sordid interest-group politics. The banks plumped for, and profited bounteously from, measures to assign them contracts for transferring credits from the central bank to specific firms and sectors, to allow them to pay negative real interest rates to depositors, and to protect them from contributory deposit insurance and foreign competition.21 Although the populace only looked on from a distance, all principals knew well the peril of social unrest, and grassroots opinion was still viewed by government and opposition as mobilizable.
What was not so apparent in Yeltsin’s first year, except to those with inside dope, was the importance of his endogenous thought processes and inhibitions—some of them evincing the Soviet baggage he sought to escape in his advisers, some responding to his reading of popular sentiment. In the springtime flap over bank credits and economic stabilization, to take one example, Gaidar found the president a hard sell on the subject of tight money: “Time after time at meetings between us or sessions of the government, he returned to the question of why we were not increasing the money supply” and thus keeping cash-strapped firms going. “The arguments we advanced did not seem persuasive enough to him anymore.”22 Yeltsin also vetoed Gaidar’s call for an instantaneous, Russian-imposed end to the ruble zone in the former USSR. The currency reform occurred only in July 1993.
Yeltsin, rehashing the 1992 Lopukhin story in his memoirs, emphasized that he had his own reasons, and it was not just about pesky parliamentarians or lobbyists:
The thing is that I myself worked for decades in Soviet economic management. It has no secrets for me. I know just what disorder there is there, what life is really like in factories big and small, what are the best and worst qualities of our directors, workers, and engineers. Despite the fact that I am a builder by profession, which has left its mark on me, I know all about heavy and light industry. In Sverdlovsk I had to be involved in this up to my elbows.
So let’s say some elderly industrialist comes to me and says in an agitated voice, “Boris Nikolayevich, I have been working for forty years in the gas industry. Now look at what this Lopukhin is up to, things are going on, here are the statistics to prove it, it is a nightmare, everything is going to hell.” What am I going to do? I cannot be indifferent . . . and I feel I have to respond.
Gaidar, Yeltsin elaborated, “was putting the squeeze on me” via Lopukhin to approve liberalized energy prices, and “I considered that we could not adopt so hard a policy.”23
The jockeying over forming and re-forming the cabinet brought out another phenomenon: Yeltsin’s determination as president to have political independence from allies and associates. It applied to the intelligentsia-based movements with which he had made common cause in his tramp to power. Gavriil Popov, who had been elected mayor of Moscow, left city hall in June 1992 to found a private university—Yeltsin named Yurii Luzhkov, a red director and municipal bureaucrat, in his place—and no member of the former Interregional Deputies Group was given a high-level position. Leaders of the related Democratic Russia movement felt that Yeltsin owed them for their help in 1990 and 1991. Lev Ponomarëv and Gleb Yakunin, two of its three co-chairmen, stated publicly that Yeltsin should listen to their recommendations on cabinet positions and appoint members of the organization as his emissaries to the provinces. Ponomarëv and Yakunin invited themselves to Sochi in October 1991, during Yeltsin’s sojourn there, and prevailed on him to receive them. The president took notes during the meeting, commended joint action, and did nothing to follow up.24 Yurii Afanas’ev, the third co-chairman, well known to Yeltsin from the Interregionals, led a faction that was against any collaboration with him. In early 1992 he and ex-dissident Yurii Burtin, ruing “authoritarian degradation” under Yeltsin, walked out of Democratic Russia, which promptly split up into pettifogging sects. Why, Burtin asked, was reform “put in the hands of a bunch of youngsters . . . about whom no one had heard a word a half-year ago?”25 Yeltsin’s attitude is condensed in his memoir putdown of Afanas’ev as a scholastic “eternal oppositionist”: “Such people are very necessary, but not in government—somewhere to the side, or on a hilltop where the view is better.”26
Burbulis, Gaidar, and the mavens of shock therapy, their ties to the older radicals flimsy, learned a little later about Yeltsin chasing his own star. Burbulis unburdened himself in an interview in 2001:
Soon we felt that the trust that had let us spread our wings, that untied our hands to make decisions and put them into life, had somehow changed into a well-thought-out distancing, into what I would say was the putting of us into orbit [orbitnost’]. Gradually, the president made over his image from courageous leader of a transformative program into not even a partner but some kind of arbitrator—and he convinced himself that this was the reality. This was the wellspring of his vagueness, of the combinative voting [he encouraged in the Congress of Deputies], of his dangerous ambiguity in relation to the intractable [anti-reform] group in the congress, of his reprisals against people on our side. And then we got inconsistency in his ideas, which was tangled up with big blows to Yeltsin’s instinct for power. This came out in the incoherence of the reforms. Before you knew it, everything was clear—Polevanov, Soskovets [two relatively conservative officials], and the so-called checks and balances, which bore not only on personnel decisions but on the loss of ideals, the loss of goals and orienting points.27
Yeltsin could not get over Burbulis’s refusal to serve as presidential chief of staff in 1991 and was ever more of the belief that Burbulis had an allergy to the gritty work of government, whereas the blemish he observed in Gaidar was inexperience and impracticality, not sloth. But the pulling back from the reform maximalists expressed a deeper tendency—in turn an outgrowth of character and habits of Urals self-sufficiency—that would apply to helpmates of sundry orientations. Everyone in the game was to be in orbit, and flight plans could be revised on short notice. The conservatives cited by Burbulis as beneficiaries of Yeltsin’s decisions help make the point. Vladimir Polevanov, a Siberian provincial leader who was named deputy premier and head of the State Property Committee in November 1994, and who used the appointment to try to undo the privatization of the aluminum industry, lasted only three months and was fired at the demand of Anatolii Chubais. Oleg Soskovets, an ethnic Russian technocrat from Kazakhstan and the last minister of metallurgy of the USSR, was made first deputy premier, the number two to Chernomyrdin, in April 1993. His turn to run afoul of the president came in June 1996, for factional activities in league with Aleksandr Korzhakov.