Borodin—known to one and all as Pal Palych, a contraction of his first name and patronymic—was a bon vivant and reputed to be the best joketeller in the government, able to hold his ground with professional comedians. He emceed many presidential lunches and dinners and was the only official permitted to tell gags at them. The function of the Ministry of Privileges, as the press christened his agency, was no laughing matter. For the good of Yeltsin and democracy, it systematized service provision for the elite on a scale surpassing Soviet precedent. The soil was fertile: Housing and other goods and services were starting to be distributed commercially in Russia; state officials could not afford the best of them on their wages; and any revision of individual status still required a sheaf of permissions. “Goodies” that could be granted could also be withheld. When Yeltsin wanted to turn up the political heat on the Duma in the summer of 1995 and the spring of 1996, deputies were put on notice that, were the Duma to be dissolved, they would lose their offices and attendants, franking privileges, and VIP apartments in Moscow.
None of this establishes that Yeltsin governed as a CPSU secretary reborn, pure and simple. Regional party bosses until the 1980s, while all-powerful in their fiefdoms, reported to the general secretary, and that was a party role Yeltsin had never filled. Yeltsin as president took orders from no one and owed his post to the electorate. His refusal to be over-absorbed in detail was a character trait over and above what he learned in his party career. Some of the administrative levers associated with the Soviet partocracy, such as the personnel weapon and administration of perks, have been found in other times and places—for example, in the heyday of machine politics in big American cities. The Soviet formula was an alloy of machine techniques with the police state, the planned economy, and communist ideology, and those combinatory variables were absent after 1991. Yeltsin either would not or could not lock up dissidents, censor the press, or take 99.99 percent of the votes in a single-candidate election, and he had no hard-and-fast ideology and no propaganda mechanism at his fingertips. In the privileges area, he stayed aloof from the dross of Pavel Borodin’s decisions.30 The operation was constrained by a body of legislation on official benefits and by muckraking journalism, neither of them operative under the communist regime. Only when a good was in very short stock and the queue was long—state dachas are the best example—did Borodin and his office have much of an ability to play favorites.31 Once out of government service in the 1990s, most at the level of government minister, presidential adviser, or provincial governor were left to their own devices, without a helping or a hindering hand from Building No. 1.
The historicist, monarchial, and apparatchik paradigms all underplay the gnarly complexity of Yeltsin’s part in governing the state. Of the three, the first, with its sense of mission, is closest to his self-conception. But how effective was the Yeltsin recipe of governance in practice? As an oppositionist, he had presented himself as an improvement on Gorbachev, whose means of rule were rusting out. In power, he rammed through a constitution vesting him with the prerogatives he had lacked until then. The optimist would have forecast that state behavior in the new Russia would be more proactive and coherent than in the old, and it was some of the time but not consistently so. Presidential leadership was constrained by the disorganization of Yeltsin’s surroundings and by institutional counterweights. It was further influenced by his own conception of politics in an era of transition.
The results were there to see inside his organizational home, the executive branch in Moscow. Yeltsin was as well-spoken as anybody on the pathologies of government after communism. He titled his maiden state-of-the-country address to parliament in 1994 “On Strengthening the Russian State.” It began with “the gap between constitutional principles and the real practice” of rule. Russia had repudiated autocracy but not found a workable replacement, and this was undermining the whole course of reform:
Having relinquished the command principle of governing, the state has not fully assimilated the law-based principle. This has brought forth such menacing phenomena as… an efflorescence of bureaucratism, which stifles the growth of new economic relations, … the inclusion of part of the bureaucracy on various levels in the political struggle, which leads to the sabotage of state decisions… the imbuing of the state and municipal apparatus with corruption… a low level of discipline in implementation… lack of coordination in the work of the ministries and departments…. Here we must confess openly that democratic principles and the organizations of government are more and more being discredited. A negative image of democracy is being formed, as a lethargic and amorphous system of power that gives little to the majority of people and defends above all its own corporate interests. Russian society has attained freedom, but does not yet feel democracy as a system of state power that is both strong and accountable before the nation.32
The Yeltsin constitution of 1993 cleared up the struggle between the executive and the legislative wings. Other than excising the vice presidency, which Aleksandr Rutskoi had made a base for attacking the president, it did little to bring order to the executive. One option would have been to snuff out its structural duality. Gennadii Burbulis had wanted to scrap the office of prime minister and make the president a U.S.-type chief executive, with agency heads reporting to him and forming a presidential cabinet. He saw Yeltsin’s combination of the posts of president and premier in the autumn of 1991 as a first step toward realizing his goal. Initially open to the suggestion, Yeltsin was unalterably against it by mid-1992, wanting someone else do the legwork on reform and be a lightning rod. As Burbulis put it in an interview, “The president’s path [Yeltsin thought] would be the main source of will on questions of direction. The difficulties, pain, and burdensome decisions at any given moment would be undertaken by others, who could be removed [if they failed].”33 The new constitution reaffirmed the separation between a popularly elected president and a prime minister confirmed by parliament and in day-to-day charge of the civilian bureaucracy and the budget. The arrangement resembled the Gaullist Fifth Republic in France. In a way, it also honored the Soviet legacy: For most of the communist period, different individuals served as general secretary of the Communist Party and chairman of the USSR government, with the former, like the post-Soviet Russian president, very much in the driver’s seat.
The dispersive undercurrents within the state apparatus were never enough to prod Yeltsin into radical action. The bureaucracy, no longer the handmaiden of the CPSU apparatus, and with its economic monopoly burst by market reform, seemed to him a headless monster and not an immediate threat. Making it less corrupt and more responsive were desirable objectives but low on his to-do list. A ranking official who was caught red-handed peddling influence stood to be fired. In August 1993, for example, Yeltsin released Viktor Barannikov, the minister of security, for taking bribes. Barannikov then switched sides in the constitutional dogfight and was arrested after the October violence. In November 1994 Yeltsin removed Deputy Defense Minister Matvei Burlakov, who had been accused in the press of profiteering from the evacuation of troops from Germany, but the general was never prosecuted. On systemic graft, kickbacks, and falsification, Yeltsin promulgated ameliorative decrees to little effect. To the demand of Grigorii Yavlinskii, the leader of the liberal Yabloko Party, that he make a full-scale attack on corruption as a condition of Yavlinskii supporting him in the 1996 presidential election, Yeltsin came back with a shrug of the shoulders: “So what can I do about it? This is Russia, after all.”34