President Yeltsin was not unobservant of the hazards of his polycentric modus operandi. Beginning in 1991, he deployed several safeguards to prevent balkanization from degenerating into chaos. One of those was to declare proprietary rights over the ultrasensitive precinct of national security and foreign policy and put it out of bounds to all but him and the agency heads. Yeltsin met one-on-one weekly with his foreign minister, spy chief, and police ministers and shut the prime minister and most of the Kremlin staff out of those colloquies.
Another low-cost response was to infiltrate protégés from earlier in his career into strategic positions, as Soviet party bosses had always done. Because Yeltsin’s term as head of the Moscow party organization had been so brief and doleful, few products of it worked in his presidential office. The main exceptions were Viktor Ilyushin (who started with him in Sverdlovsk), Valerii Semenchenko, and Mikhail Poltoranin. The best pool Yeltsin had at his disposal was the “Sverdlovsk diaspora,” the old-boy network whence he drew his chief of staff from 1991 to 1993 (Yurii Petrov), his senior presidential assistant from 1991 to 1996 (Ilyushin), the head of the Kremlin business department before Pavel Borodin (Fëdor Morshchakov), and a representative in the Council of Ministers and Security Council (the peripatetic Oleg Lobov).58 Gennadii Burbulis, head speech writer Lyudmila Pikhoya, and her colleague Aleksandr Il’in were Sverdlovskers but low-ranking members of the professoriate—advantageously for them, at Yeltsin’s alma mater, UPI.59 “You feel more confident, you feel certain warmth, among people from your area [zemlyaki],” says Pikhoya.60 Yeltsin’s reliance on people from his province of birth, though, was quite limited, since he wanted to avoid charges of cronyism and to be free to recruit outside the group. Burbulis left office by the end of 1992, Petrov by early 1993, and the others followed. No new Sverdlovskers were brought into the administration after then.
A related habit for Yeltsin was to find new favorites. These might be all-round comrades and purveyors of good cheer with whom he had ryumochnyye otnosheniya (shot-glass relations); examples would be Soskovets or Vladimir Shumeiko, a first deputy premier in 1992–93 and chairman of the Federation Council in 1994–95. Or they might be Young Turks who pushed reforms—like Anatolii Chubais, Boris Fëdorov, and Sergei Shakhrai. As a show of favor, Yeltsin several times followed up on a Fëdorov complaint by telephoning Chernomyrdin, with Fëdorov seated in the office. Fëdorov saw it a sign of confidence when Yeltsin did not tell Chernomyrdin that Fëdorov was there and made gargoyle faces at him during the conversation.61
A corrective to personalization and governmental disconnectedness would have been a collegial entity for sharing information, arbitrating conflicts, and inculcating common purpose. Yeltsin was stubbornly against such a linchpin—as should come as no shock, given his individualism and his intuitive approach to political action. Acquaintance with the communist era’s plenteous underbrush of committees, bureaus, and secretariats seems to have helped sour him on communal decision making. This aversion shows the selectiveness of his attitude toward the Soviet legacy.
During the seven months in 1991–92 when Yeltsin did double duty as prime minister, it was up to him to chair sessions of the Council of Ministers. He had nothing but distaste for the unwieldy council and the eye-glazing detail that marked its meetings. Several months of watching him sleepwalk through the proceedings won Burbulis and Gaidar over to two events per week—a working session on Tuesdays over sandwiches and tea, which Yeltsin did not attend, and one with him on Thursdays, to approve the decisions made on Tuesday. Yeltsin was relieved to make Burbulis and, after the spring of 1992, Gaidar his proxy for cabinet paperwork.62 The Yeltsin constitution gave the president the right, which he wrote into the draft, to chair any sitting of the Council of Ministers. He did it once in a blue moon after 1993 (and only twice in the second term), and then it was mostly to make announcements for the television cameras. Size and practice disqualified the Council of Ministers as a serious decision maker, as was the case with its Soviet predecessor. The fifty or sixty officials in attendance sat in rows facing forward, like pupils in a classroom. All remarks were made from a microphone and lectern at the front of the hall. Votes were almost never taken.
A more propitious attempt to rejoin the threads was the Russian State Council of 1991–92. The council was born in July 1991 as the brainchild of Burbulis and a subset of the Westernizing intellectuals who had congregated around Yeltsin during his drive for power. They wanted a summit-level panel that would deliberate direction and priorities and not bog down in detail. Members were to have entrée to the president as individuals; as a group, they were to sit down with him in the chair to consider the big picture. Burbulis intended to make the State Council the modernizing center of policy making and to have its role as clearing house for ideas given constitutional sanction. The council was “to work out for the head of state questions about the country’s development overall and gather under its roof people of the same turn of mind who were scattered around other structures.”63
The core members of the State Council were Burbulis and five “state counselors” whom Yeltsin made responsible for reform sectors: Yekaterina Lakhova (women’s and social issues), Sergei Shakhrai (legal affairs), Yurii Skokov (defense), Sergei Stankevich (politics), and Galina Starovoitova (nationalities). Burbulis, Shakhrai, Stankevich, and Starovoitova were progressive academics; Lakhova, a pediatrician from Sverdlovsk, was a political centrist; Skokov was a secretive conservative. Added to them were five cabinet ministers of liberal outlook.64 Yegor Gaidar and Vice President Rutskoi, fearful of exclusion, asked for the right to participate as well. Burbulis, who had begged off the job of organizing Yeltsin’s presidential office, was not the optimal salesman for the council. Yurii Petrov, Viktor Ilyushin, and the veterans of the CPSU apparatus to whom Yeltsin had turned for assistance gave it a chilly reception, as did ministers and parliamentarians who stood to give up powers.65
The backbiting would have been extraneous unless Yeltsin had the reservations he did. They went back to the rationale for the State Council, which, as Stankevich was later to say frankly, was “to make up for [Yeltsin’s] shortcomings” and for his “inadequate vision of the future.”66 Getting his back up at the tutorship, Yeltsin waffled. He would not commit to a firm schedule or appoint more counselors, and missed most of the early sessions. This left Burbulis to lead them, which it was hard to do when political heavyweights sat around the table. Yeltsin took offense at press reports that the council would elevate the tone of government and that Burbulis was his “gray cardinal,” pulling wires from backstage: “This, of course, was balderdash. For there to be a ‘cardinal,’ the person in the president’s chair would have had to be spineless, soft, and apathetic,” adjectives inapplicable to the first president of Russia.67 The State Council convened about twice a month until Yeltsin abolished it in May 1992. Of the counselors, now “presidential advisers,” Shakhrai made a good career as a government minister, Lakhova entered electoral politics, and Skokov stayed on in the Security Council Yeltsin established by decree in April 1992. Burbulis and Starovoitova walked the plank in November 1992 and Stankevich, after losing his Kremlin office and hotline connection to the president, in December 1993.68 A Presidential Council, chaired by Yeltsin, continued to function throughout his first term as an unpaid sounding board for thirty or so opinion makers and an audition chamber for future aides.