But Yeltsin and his preferences were also centrally involved in building disunity into the executive. For one thing, he liked to take his chances with individuals whose egos were as strong as his. He several times told Chubais that “he really liked working with bright people and even with people brighter than he.”46 He would never select a collaborator who was after his throne or discourteous toward him. Within those doughy limits, personal qualities weighed almost as much as opinions. Policy intellectuals and semi-intellectuals, red directors from the planned economy, ex-apparatchiks, journalists, security officers, oligarchs and their tagalongs—Yeltsin found room for all of them under his institutional big tent. Were someone not to work out, he would be handed his walking papers, and that would be that.
Yeltsin, furthermore, custom-built some positions for individuals whose contribution or company he valued, and when he did so he gave scant thought to the whole chessboard. In 1990–91, still head of the RSFSR parliament, he designated a Supreme Economic Council as a consolation prize for Mikhail Bocharov, who had been a candidate for prime minister; Bocharov quit after failing for five months to get an appointment with him to discuss the council’s program.47 Yeltsin in 1990 gave Gennadii Burbulis the title of “authorized representative of the chairman of the Supreme Soviet”; in 1991–92 it was “state secretary of Russia.” Undefined in legislation, both offices amounted to carrying out those tasks Yeltsin commissioned him to do.48 For almost a year in 1992–93, the government had two press agencies, one headed by his former Moscow workfellow Mikhail Poltoranin and the other by the jurist and journalist Mikhail Fedotov. This situation was the upshot of Yeltsin’s desire to protect Poltoranin from the Supreme Soviet and of some prevarication on relations between the state and the mass media.49 From 1992 to 1994, Shamil Tarpishchev, the skipper of the Russian tennis team and Yeltsin’s coach and doubles partner, served as presidential “adviser for sports and physical culture” and had a Kremlin office.
Yeltsin’s creed of personal independence inclined him against micromanagement of bench members’ discharge of their duties. He would speak briefly with a new appointee, ask him to check in on issues of principle only, and leave him to go to it. Presidential assistants submitted weekly reports of one or two pages; most others turned to him only on time-urgent matters and only with short messages.50 This did not mean that the appointee could breathe easily, for the president’s eye was peeled: “Although Yeltsin rarely gave concrete assignments to workers in his apparatus, he watched carefully to see how self-reliant and energetic these workers were and rewarded such self-reliance.”51 Self-reliance was no salvation if political breakers were encountered, and it was secondary to presidential wishes, if and when these could be ascertained. The most benignant outcome would be like that accomplished by Viktor Chernomyrdin: “He [Yeltsin] did not interfere in my work… or in what the government was supposed to do. But I did not do anything without clearing the basic questions with him.”52 Any number of others did not thread the needle as adeptly.
A panoply of points of view nearby had additional utility for Yeltsin. In an overloaded and underpowered state, redundancy and rapid turnover provided some protection against local failure: If the first underboss and his outfit let you down, the second or third might be better. This is how Oleg Poptsov explains the anomaly of Russia having several armies and quasiarmies (the military, MVD, border guards, railway troops, and so on) when it could not really afford one of them. “It is all for the same reason: because of hesitation, because of uncertainty. If one does not come to your defense, you can always call on another.”53 In a fractionated society, it was apropos, the president felt, that the executive and not just the legislature contain representatives of the fractions. “I had to go this way,” Yeltsin explained to me in 2001. “It should have been so. The situation [at the top] mirrored the interplay of forces in the country.”54 The Yeltsinesque system of checks and balances was there less to shield society from state encroachment, as The Federalist Papers told Americans how to do in the 1780s, than to sub for a stunted civil society, shield the sovereign from state dysfunction, and facilitate divide-and-rule in the innards of the government.
In economic policy, even as he gave the liberals license to marketize and privatize, Yeltsin was determined to find a place in his government for more conservative voices from the Soviet industrial conglomerate, and was unapologetic about the conflicting signals it sent about his policy and the standing of the prime minister. Red director Yurii Skokov, whose specialty had been power systems for spacecraft, was first deputy premier in 1990–91, secretary of a presidential board on federalism in 1991–92, and secretary of the president’s Security Council in 1992–93. He was a backstairs negotiator with the putschists in August 1991 and was distinguished by a go-slow economic policy and political ambition. Wrote Yeltsin:
Skokov is an intelligent man, that is the first thing you have to say, and a very closed one. [Ivan] Silayev… and Gaidar… felt a latent threat coming from Skokov and argued with me about him.
What was the role of Skokov in Yeltsin’s ingroup? It was a reasonable question. Skokov was really my “shadow” prime minister…. I understood that his general political position, in economics above all, was quite different from mine and from the positions of Gaidar and Burbulis. His double-dealing always concerned my supporters. But I thought that if a person understood that it was necessary in today’s Russia to work for a strong government and not against it, then what was wrong with that? Let the shadow premier… urge on the real prime minister.55
Yeltsin lost faith in Skokov and fired him only when he dissented from Kremlin policy toward the parliament in the spring of 1993.
Chernomyrdin, who got the prime minister’s job in December 1992, would not have lasted for almost two-thirds of the Yeltsin presidency if he had not been forbearing toward his leader’s juggling of people and interests and had not displayed some of the same aptitude himself. The construction organizer Oleg Lobov, from Sverdlovsk, acquired some of Skokov’s and Deputy Premier Georgii Khizha’s military-industrial responsibilities and fought to decelerate the privatization program. Lobov wrote several memorandums to this effect to Yeltsin: “He never expressed dissatisfaction about what I wrote. He never said I was not right. No, he was surprised that my memos were not moving forward or being looked into.”56 Metallurgist Oleg Soskovets was named the ranking of the deputy premiers in the autumn of 1993, answering for heavy industry and the defense complex and chairing the cabinet’s committee on daily “operational questions.” He lobbied unabashedly for state credits, bailouts, and tariff barriers and, through Korzhakov, had a privileged relationship with Yeltsin. He was a thorn in Chernomyrdin’s side until his dismissal in June 1996.57