From time to time, journalists and analysts would proclaim that some other body was succeeding where the State Council had not. Invariably, speculation about the latest candidate petered out. Modest requests by staffers for small-group meetings with the president were laughed off. At the reception for Yeltsin’s sixty-third birthday in 1994, assistant Georgii Satarov saluted him and said it would be good if all his aides sat down with him once a week. Yeltsin said no: “Why is this necessary? After all, each of you can come to see me and chat. What do you want to do, bring back the Politburo?”69
Yeltsin put higher stock in two other ways of mitigating the unruliness of the executive branch. The first was the extramural hobnobbing that he had practiced in the Sverdlovsk committee of the CPSU. An aspect of it was the new apartment house in Krylatskoye, which the Yeltsins made their legal Moscow domicile in 1994. Chernomyrdin, Korzhakov, Gaidar, Borodin, and Yurii Luzhkov were among the tenants who danced to a live orchestra at the housewarming. The building was a poor stimulant of friendly feelings, since the family rarely overnighted in their flat and those registered there, like them, lived mostly at country homes. Those who stayed behind avoided their neighbors due to political disagreements and to a psychological reaction against being cooped up in the same company.70
Yeltsin sank more effort into an association named the Presidential Club. It was established in June 1993 in a facility taken over from the CPSU Central Committee at 42 Kosygin Street, on the Sparrow (formerly Lenin) Hills. Yeltsin got the idea, through Korzhakov and Shamil Tarpishchev, from the Il’inka Sports Club attached to the Council of Ministers. The plant combined a sports complex (covered tennis courts, a swimming pool, a weight room) with lounges, a restaurant, and a movie theater. Yeltsin played doubles tennis at the club with Tarpishchev twice a week and others when possible. His most rollicking steambath parties and dinners were held there, and some political scuttlebutt was digested with the meals and drinks. Yeltsin was president of his club, which was to be for “people who are close in spirit and in views, who like one another, and who want to see one another regularly.”71
The generic resemblance to Urals precedent cloaked dissimilarities. Kosygin Street was far plusher than anything in the hinterland. Tennis, the main athletic pursuit, had snob appeal—it was not part of the Soviet sports machine until the 1980s—and, in singles and doubles, was less cooperative than the volleyball favored in Sverdlovsk. Yeltsin as regional boss had enrolled party workers in his volleyball league inclusively, but the Moscow lodge was exclusive. Entrants were issued cards and paid token dues; cursing was forbidden; enrollment was capped at 100 members; recruits were approved by Yeltsin in annual batches. It was not enough for the candidates to like one another: The president had to like them. A spot on the members’ directory was a mark of honor, which did not always fit with protocol position. Vice President Rutskoi, for example, was out, as were the head of the president’s staff (Sergei Filatov), all of Yeltsin’s liberal advisers, the mayor of Moscow (Yurii Luzhkov), and the chief of foreign intelligence (Yevgenii Primakov); for some reason, Yeltsin wanted at first to bar Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, then allowed him in.72 But Yeltsin’s senior aide (Viktor Ilyushin), who was equal to Filatov in status, was clubbable, and was joined by the head of the Presidential Business Department (Pavel Borodin), the ghostwriter of Yeltsin’s memoirs (Valentin Yumashev), the commander of the palace guard (Korzhakov) and top security officers, several elite intellectuals (Mark Zakharov and Yurii Ryzhov), and two comedians (Gennadii Khazanov and Mikhail Zadornov). An invitation into the club could recognize newly won standing. In 1994, for instance, businessman Boris Berezovskii, industrialist Vladimir Kadannikov (whose factory made the cars marketed by Berezovskii’s main business, Logovaz), and Ivan Rybkin, the new speaker of the State Duma, were asked to join. At his induction, in June, Berezovskii was in bandages for injuries suffered in an assassination attempt the week before.73 The organizers had planned to add a substantial number of figures from business and the arts but found limited interest in those they approached, and some of those who did accept came to the place only once. It was, in the end, “a club of chiefs,” in the words of Yumashev, and the membership was never over sixty.74
More than all these mechanisms, Yeltsin relied on top-down administrative resources to supply policy input, check on underlings, and impose his decisions. The instrument was the Presidential Executive Office created by Yurii Petrov and modeled in part on the Central Committee Secretariat. Petrov wanted it to have the planning and monitoring capacity of the high party apparatus in its prime, without it getting mired in operations, and to this end did not give it divisions for sectors of the economy, such as Yeltsin knew so well from an earlier life. Much of Petrov’s time went to the organizational tangles brought on by the change in regime, including the appropriation of the property of the CPSU, and he was struck by how little sway he had over the provinces—the obkoms and gorkoms were as extinct as the Central Committee—and over his boss.75 The intelligentsia-based Democratic Russia movement, with Gennadii Burbulis’s support, attacked Petrov in early 1992 as a symbol of nomenklatura revanche. He in April offered his resignation, which Yeltsin refused to accept. Petrov lost Yeltsin’s support in December 1992 when he dickered with communist legislators about his being selected as prime minister.76 In January 1993 the president supplanted Petrov with Sergei Filatov, a bookish Moscow academic and a vice speaker of the Congress of Deputies. Although Yeltsin was to slight Filatov in Presidential Marathon for having “turned the executive office into some sort of research institute on the problems of democracy in Russia,”77 staff strength grew under his aegis from about 400 to the level of about 2,000 office workers. That is higher than the circa 1,500 in the American White House staff (the U.S. population is more than twice Russia’s) and much more than the several hundred in the Élysée Palace in France, which, like Russia, has a dual executive.78
Petrov and then Filatov had some substantive impact on policy, but had to compete for Yeltsin’s ear with a squadron of policy experts reporting to him through separate ganglia. In 1993 Yeltsin began to appoint thematic presidential assistants (pomoshchniks), who were either former party or state placemen of a technocratic stripe or Moscow intellectuals, mostly of a democratic orientation. In the group of about twelve assistants, Anatolii Korabel’shchikov (who managed relations with the provinces) and Dmitrii Ryurikov (a professional diplomat who coordinated foreign policy) were the most prominent representatives of the first category; Yurii Baturin (assistant for national security), Georgii Satarov (domestic politics), and Aleksandr Livshits (economics) were the most prominent from the second category.79 These individuals, a generation younger than the president, were required to communicate with him not through Filatov but through Viktor Ilyushin, the tight-lipped apparatchik from Sverdlovsk who was responsible for blocking out Yeltsin’s workday. Filatov, Ilyushin, and their respective groupings were rivals from the start. This was no accident. “For a long time, the president’s apparatus had two leaders…. The president saw the contradictions but did nothing to efface them…. Often Yeltsin even encouraged antagonism between parts of his executive office and between individuals. It seemed to him that this would make it easier to control things and avert any one person increasing his influence unduly.”80