Yeltsin’s take on president-as-tsar was mixed. He did speak openly about his admiration for Peter the Great and made several public references to himself as Boris I.12 The word was sometimes used nonchalantly in family circles.13 In closeted settings, he a few times donned the mantle, as when, on a state visit to Sweden, he ribbed King Carl Gustav about the lengthiness of the seven-course palace banquet. “The king answered, ‘You have to understand, Mr. President, that we have a certain ritual here, and it has been observed since the thirteenth century.’ And Yeltsin replied jovially, ‘Listen, you are a king and I am a tsar, and you tell me the two of us cannot solve such a problem?’” Carl Gustav had the wait staff speed up the feast.14 On occasions, Yeltsin would toss out the trope of the tsar to reprimand employees. He once chastised a cheeky press secretary with the words, “Go and do what the tsar has ordered.”15 And the figure of speech in which he and members of his staff belittled matters not worth his personal attention was that they were “not the tsar’s business” (ne tsarskoye delo).
Yeltsin in the end recognized that the partial democratization of Russia made it impolitic to apply monarchism literally. As he knew, the plasticity that was the great boon of the monarchial legend was its great bane as well. Elected monarchy is an oxymoron. Kings are chosen on the hereditary principle from a royal caste, train for the throne from birth, and sit on it until death. Yeltsin was elected to a fixed term and knew that he would have to leave his post. In an exchange with me about the subject, he saw no way to conciliate tsardom with democracy: “How can a tsar lead in a democratic society? There are certain democratic institutions through which you have to act.”16 When subalterns pressed him too hard to address a ticklish issue, he was known to turn them aside with the question, “What do you think I am, a tsar?”
A third template for directorship of the post-communist state came from Russia’s recent national past, the Soviet period, and from Yeltsin’s personal past. The reflex here was to the CPSU boss he was in Sverdlovsk and Moscow.
Like the provincial party prefect of yore, Yeltsin as president felt qualified, when the spirit moved him, to intervene on any issue. His onetime economic adviser Aleksandr Livshits testifies he had “the mentality of the obkom first secretary” in assuming “the right and the duty to make decisions about urgent questions then and there.”17 The interventions that counted most, as in the Soviet system, were those given verbally. The richly experienced Viktor Chernomyrdin knew the norm: “The verbal assignments the premier received [from Yeltsin]… were carried out strictly, which cannot be said about decrees or even the written assignments of the president. That is to say, as things had been signified in the [party] apparatus, words spoken orally outranked pieces of paper.”18 As in the Sverdlovsk obkom and the Moscow gorkom, Yeltsin did not sweat the small stuff of public policy, the technicalities of administration, and the legal niceties, all of which were best farmed out to specialists. He “understood the limits of what he understood,” Yegor Gaidar has said.19 He would “‘grab’ a question on the wing… get a feel for problems without subjecting them to long and detailed study,” to cite Boris Fëdorov, who held several economic portfolios in the first term.20 Like the party secretary, Yeltsin in the Kremlin wanted to leave his door open to petitioners and not filter the upbound flow of information and advice. To quote Livshits again, “For him to say to people who made overtures to him that he had to check with Livshits or [Georgii] Satarov [another Kremlin aide] was as good as saying he did not have vlast’ [power], and that was something he could never admit.”21
Yeltsin also bore a resemblance to a CPSU first secretary in swinging the big stick of control over cadres.22 Anyone was expendable if he connived against the president, was flagrantly inefficient, or if Yeltsin had simply had his fill of him or wanted to reshuffle his team. Upon removal, an official would not normally be granted an audience to hear why. He could consider himself lucky if he got a telephone call giving him the news and wishing him well, and luckier still if Yeltsin found him a new position.23 On average, deputy premiers in Yeltsin’s first term lasted sixteen months; ordinary members of the Council of Ministers lasted twenty-three months. By the time he faced re-election in 1996, Yeltsin was on his seventh finance minister, his sixth minister of economics and trade, his fifth minister of regional development, and his fourth ministers of agriculture and energy. In the national-security realm, he had one defense minister and two foreign ministers in term one, but three chairmen of the Security Council, four heads of state security, and four interior ministers.24
Yeltsin, like many partocrats in their day, turned courtesies and picayune favors to his advantage. He did it not only to build personal fealty, as had been the practice in Soviet days, but to paper over cracks in the post-Soviet institutional edifice. During the strife with Ruslan Khasbulatov and the Supreme Soviet, he played this card adroitly, especially with holdovers from the communist establishment:
Having all that experience in the nomenklatura, Yeltsin appreciated that if former communists, even those numbered among his most ferocious opponents, could be “affectionately” brought nearer to the president’s chair, then their communist radicalism might blow off like smoke. Besides “political goodies,” Yeltsin made skillful and maybe cynical use of pittances—a prestigious position, an apartment, a dacha, medical care in the Central Clinical [Kremlin] Hospital, a car. In a quid pro quo for political loyalty, he could tolerate and forgive a great deal, foremost with the regional leaders. Many leaders of the [parliamentary] opposition and opposition deputies were seduced in the same way and at the requisite moment ended up as “clients” of the president.25
Parliament at first had an independent apparatus for granting supplies and perquisites to members, as did the prime minister’s office and the judiciary. In November 1993, a month after coming down on the parliamentary rebels, Yeltsin centralized the servicing of the federal government under one roof, a unified Presidential Business Department with more than 30,000 employees. The Fourth Chief Directorate of the old Soviet Ministry of Health, of which he had been so critical when in opposition, had been under presidential control since 1991. It was renamed the department’s Government Medical Center.26 Yeltsin selected Pavel Borodin, a Siberian city mayor championed by Aleksandr Korzhakov, to head the department and exhorted him to “feed the administration [executive office] and the government well.”27 The department’s budgetary demands “grew in geometrical progression” the moment Borodin was appointed, says Boris Fëdorov, the finance minister in 1993.28 The Kremlin quartermaster also showed great inventiveness in giving his unit a market aspect—primarily to finance operations and special projects such as the Kremlin reconstruction, although many suspected it was also to provide emoluments to officials. The business department not only operated facilities taken from its Soviet antecedents (such as office and apartment buildings, the TsKB and other clinics, hotels, farms, construction organizations, and ateliers) but diversified its funding by going into for-profit healthcare, banking, commercial real estate, and oil exports.29 Borodin spent the next six years on Yeltsin’s behalf meting out perks—offices, apartments and dachas, travel and vacation vouchers, hospital stays, and even books and cellphones—to lawmakers, bureaucrats, and judges.