Boris Yeltsin as decision maker should be measured by an appropriate yardstick. Innovative statesmen in democracies or half-democracies do not address the dilemmas of the day singlehandedly. They identify problems, stir the pot, and begin to act. When followers join in, it may mainly serve the leader’s requirements and ramify his influence; empower followers to mold the relationship, so that leaders wind up following the followers; or mutually empower, as it was with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition in the United States in the 1930s. The most successful leaders respond to the material and psychic needs of followers and motivate them to invest in the shared cause and to help fix its terms.35
The early Yeltsin fostered mutual empowerment with acolytes on the street and in the halls of power. Once in the Kremlin, he still did, only with the difference that his empowerment of others tended to be ambiguous and, one could say, schizoid—the authorization of persons with multiple outlooks to speak and act in his name, either serially or simultaneously. The president’s team was deficient in teamwork.
Captaincy of the team was not up for debate. An underperforming player might be slighted for months before Yeltsin let him go. In July 1994, aboard a steamship on the Yenisei River in Siberia with the governor of Krasnoyarsk province, Valerii Zubov, Yeltsin was out of sorts at japes made by press secretary Vyacheslav Kostikov and ordered him thrown into the drink, fully clothed. Pavel Borodin rescued Kostikov with only his self-regard harmed.36 Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev was on the receiving end in 1995. Yeltsin complained of him at press conferences in July and September. When they traveled to the United States in October, the Americans were astonished to see Kozyrev disembark the presidential airplane in New York through a rear door. He was assigned to the hindmost car in the motorcade and forbidden to accompany Yeltsin to the United Nations, after which he “went forlornly off to his hotel.”37 In January 1996 Yeltsin replaced Kozyrev with Yevgenii Primakov.
In meetings scheduled for briefing purposes, Yeltsin never tipped off the questions he would ask of the reporting official. No exception was made for his Tuesday A.M. update from the prime minister, the number two in the Russian state. “Prompting would not have corresponded to the style of Boris Yeltsin. He wanted the weekly performance to have some suspense about it, something unexpected for the prime minister. The latter, of course, was not overjoyed.”38 The prime minister had the same right to ask questions as the president, and Yeltsin had no interest in seeing them before the meeting. In one-on-one meetings the president initiated, he would call for a summary of the recommended course, then ask to hear in a nutshell which pieces of it were spornyi, debatable—likely to cause implementation and political problems. If the discussion had been initiated by a subordinate, it was not unusual for Yeltsin to stare poker-faced for most of the encounter. I heard in interviews that the guest often felt as if trapped in a magnetic field, or like a rabbit in the gaze of a boa constrictor that could strike without warning. Kostikov convincingly attributes Yeltsin’s silence at many meetings to his work in the CPSU apparatus, “when you could pay with your career for a careless word or an overly frank glance,” as well as to an instinct to protect yourself from people “who are prepared to change their opinion depending on the eyebrow movements of a powerful person.”39 But there was personal style at work, too. Yeltsin reflected on it in the last volume of his memoirs: “In conversation, I love sharp turns, gaps, and unexpected transitions. I hold to my own rhythm and cannot stand stupid monotony.”40
At meetings with many policymakers present, Yeltsin kept them on their toes by arbitrarily assigning seats at the table and sometimes changing the order at the last second, moving them toward or away from his chair. If he had already made a decision on an issue, he might hear out advice on how to do it better but hated to be contradicted. Were he to revise a position, it was by stealing the critic’s thunder without explicitly endorsing the critique: He “came out in public support of the stand he had previously spurned, without naming names.”41 During a discussion he thought unproductive, Yeltsin could vacate the room to stunning effect, leaving the others to cool their heels for twenty or thirty minutes. The signing of a memorandum or position paper—though not of a decree or law, which would have undergone laborious review—could evoke “the Yeltsin pause.” The president would take up to sixty seconds to reread the text word for word, pan over the spectators, and then roll up his shirt sleeve and scratch out his signature with a fountain pen. There were days when Yeltsin, pen uncapped, spied a problem in the document and discarded it. The sponsors would go scurrying for cover, and Yeltsin would take the unsigned document away with him.
Another expression of this same approach was Yeltsin’s acting as a court of appeal for suppliants. It was a partial continuation both of his populism, which implied listening to voices from below, and of his CPSU bossism, which gave the chief the right to settle disputes over resources. Yeltsin acted in this mode with the greatest frequency in his first several years in the Kremlin. “Witnesses say,” wrote one political journalist, “that from morning to evening Yeltsin’s reception area is under attack by foot-messengers and applicants with draft decrees in their pockets.” Since there were many more requests than Yeltsin could give thoughtful consideration to, the process let well-placed bureaucrats decide whom to give “access to the body” (Yeltsin’s) and which edicts to give priority to, with no one looking out for coherency and comprehensibility. “They commission expert reviews of the drafts and assess their results. They ‘report’ drafts for [the president’s] signature, correcting the texts by their lights. As a result, today’s decrees often contradict yesterday’s decrees and the-day-before-yesterday’s.”42
Mindful of the danger, managers on the Kremlin staff tried throughout the first term to rationalize the process by restricting access to Yeltsin by suitors for loans, subventions, and pork-barrel projects. Decree No. 226 in February 1995, written by Aleksandr Livshits and Anatolii Chubais, lifted the bar by requiring that any presidential decision touching on the budget kitty first be authorized by the Council of Ministers. Yeltsin found ways around this rigmarole, mostly by issuing offhand rulings. The Presidential Business Department and the Center for Presidential Priorities, headed by Nikolai Malyshev, provided convenient off-the-books funds, and provincial governors could always be enmeshed in the same spirit. Yevgenii Yasin, Yeltsin’s economics minister in 1995, shortly after adoption of Decree No. 226, protested a promise to extend financial credits for retooling to the Krasnodar Automotive Works. Yeltsin remonstrated, “And who is president of Russia? They have told me you are a saboteur, and now that is obvious. I gave you an instruction. How to carry it out is your problem.” A loophole was eventually found and the loan funded.43
The phenomenon was larger than Yeltsin. It was rooted also in the governing cohort he assembled, which sector by sector and across them all was fractious and fluctuating. Why so? Some of it was out of Yeltsin’s hands, in that he had to split the difference over personnel and policy with other forces in the political system. Inside the executive, the CPSU horse collar was not succeeded by the norms of rule of law and collective responsibility that prevail in the cabinets and bureaucracies of established democracies. Faced with uncertainty, government bureaus strove for autarky, and jurisdictional boundaries among them, not crisp to begin with, were imprecise in the extreme—“everyone was interested in everything.”44 The legislature was another serious constraint on Yeltsin. The Congress of People’s Deputies was the main factor behind the removal of economic liberals like Yegor Gaidar and the promotion of more conservative figures like Viktor Chernomyrdin. Although the State Duma had fewer powers than the congress, Yeltsin continued to make concessions, “willing to sacrifice… executive officials at critical junctures in order to placate a parliament that was hostile to zealous reformers.”45 This happened after both the 1993 and the 1995 Duma elections. Gaidar left the government for the second time after the first; Chubais and Foreign Minister Kozyrev were among those demoted after the second.