Although Yeltsin greeted and forced changes in many Russian institutions, his concern about a loss of control decelerated or halted change in several domains. It influenced him to oppose the eradication of communist-era law codes and regulations, which were considered to be in force unless expressly repealed. To tear up the body of Soviet legislation, and of Russia’s prerogatives as juridical heir to the USSR, would in his assessment have brought “so many problems and worries that we were just not prepared to handle at so difficult a time.”75
In the same spirit, Yeltsin did not wipe out the KGB, the coercive sidearm of the Communist Party, which it was in his power to do in 1991–92. This is not the outcome one might have expected, for, although he had cooperative personal relations with some KGB officers before 1987, in his days in opposition he came to distrust the organization. In 1989 he was one of the few deputies to abstain on the confirmation vote for Vladimir Kryuchkov in the USSR Supreme Soviet, and, says one then volunteer assistant of his, he developed “spy mania” and saw “in every new person a stoolpigeon for the KGB.” Asked about a possible recruit, he would tap two fingers on a shoulder, a sign in the USSR for eavesdropping.76 Yeltsin knew of the KGB’s and Kryuchkov’s centrality in the 1991 putsch from experience and from the five assorted committees to investigate it, one of which, under Sergei Stepashin, he himself had appointed.
When the committees reported, Yeltsin seemed to lose his zeal for shaking up the organization. Its last Soviet chairman, Vadim Bakatin, says wryly in his memoirs that Yeltsin’s men wanted nothing more than “to change the nameplate from ‘KGB of the USSR’ to ‘KGB of the RSFSR.’”77 This is rather unfair, in that Yeltsin agreed demonstratively with the decision to shut down the Fifth Chief Directorate, which had been in charge of secret informants and hunting dissidents, and to restrict the main body of the agency to counterintelligence and home security. After an experiment with subordinating it to the regular police hierarchy in the Ministry of the Interior (MVD), it was restyled the Ministry of Security in 1992, the Federal Counterintelligence Service or FSK in 1993, and in 1995 the Federal Security Service or FSB. And Yeltsin spun off independent functional units for foreign intelligence, border guards, protection of leaders, and governmental electronic communications. All these components were put on a short political leash, monitored by Yeltsin and reporting to him through discrete channels.
But this was no root-and-branch reform such as had taken down the StB agency in Czechoslovakia and the Stasi in East Germany. There were Russians who were interested in going this route. Gavriil Popov asked Yeltsin in the fall of 1991 to make him chairman of the agency. He wanted, Gennadii Burbulis says, to dig out the roots of (vykorchevyvat’) the organization—to pare it down, air its secrets, bring its remnants under strict, many-sided civilian control. Yeltsin was unwilling. To Burbulis, he said that the CPSU had been the country’s brain and the KGB its spinal cord: “And he clearly did not want to rupture the spinal cord now that the head had been lopped off.”78 Yeltsin kept the spinal cord whole out of fear of multiple threats—to political stability, to democracy, to national unity, and to safekeeping of Russia’s weapons of mass destruction.79
A last chance at a more intrusive solution was to be missed in 1993–94. Yeltsin felt let down by the Ministry of Security during his 1993 confrontation with parliament (see Chapter 11). The minister, Viktor Barannikov, a favorite of the president’s dismissed in August 1993 for corruption, defected to the anti-Yeltsin ultras and headed the shadow security department in Aleksandr Rutskoi’s “Provisional Government.” On October 4, 1993, the security forces under a new chief, Nikolai Golushko, permitted dozens of deputies and their armed auxiliaries to flee through underground tunnels.80 In December Yeltsin replaced Golushko with Sergei Stepashin, a former parliamentarian, and issued a statement referring to all changes in the former KGB as having had “a superficial and cosmetic character” with no “strategic concept” behind them.81 He appointed Oleg Lobov to chair a commission to review the force, making Sergei Kovalëv, a Brezhnev-era political prisoner, a member. Kovalëv asked for but did not receive a list of officers who had gone after dissidents in the past. Lobov “said that Boris Nikolayevich did not have in view any radical changes . . . that we cannot afford to lose professionals.”82 Staff cuts imposed on the FSK were largely reversed by mid-1994. Yeltsin then lapsed back into the confidence that it was enough to subdivide the service—replacing a leviathan with a hydra—place restrictions on surveillance networks, define democratic control as that exercised by him as chief executive, and let sleeping dogs lie. The brotherhood of active and reserve KGB officers, be they engrossed in domestic snooping, foreign spying, or commercial opportunities, persevered. Not until he was a pensioner did Yeltsin confide in Aleksandr Yakovlev that he had “not thought through everything” about the agency and put too much faith in changing the line of command and leaving the essence of the organization intact.83
The last of Yeltsin’s inbuilt resistances was to selling Russian society on the general reform course. Truth be told, he was not well equipped congenitally for outreach. By 1991 he had laid aside the harangues of the CPSU boss for question-and-answer volleys, saucy interviews, campaign oratory, and parliamentary interpellation. He treasured parsimony in speech and literature and loved to pull the printout of a talk from his jacket pocket and chuck it sportily in the wastebasket. Nine times out of ten, it was a masquerade: Either he had memorized the talk and would recite it rote, or he had a variation on the original which he then read out. But Yeltsin as president had to address the nation as a whole, and not merely live audiences, and to mate salesmanship with the dignity of a head of state. This meant working through the mass communications media with which Russia had been imbued under the Soviets. Yeltsin fulfilled the role with a sigh. He did not mind doing in front of television cameras; posing for the blue screen was not his cup of tea.84 Grouchily, he submitted to pancake makeup, a brittle coiffure (the handicraft of a hairdresser inherited from Gorbachev), and a teleprompter. He would fine-tune speeches with the writers, insisting on brevity, some peppy phrases, and pauses for effect. They would coach him on pronunciation and the purging of Urals localisms—such as his rolling of the letter “r,” his flattening of the Russian pronoun chto (what) to shta, and, in press conferences, his elision of the soft vowel “ye” from the expression for “If you know what I mean” (Ponimayesh’ became Ponimash’).85