There was another generator of dissonance: Aleksandr Korzhakov and the Presidential Security Service. The service was founded in 1990 as a small bodyguard for Yeltsin as parliamentary chairman. Upgraded in 1992, it was on paper part of the Main Protection Directorate (previously the Ninth Directorate of the KGB), but that agency was headed by Mikhail Barsukov, a brother officer Korzhakov had known since 1979, whose son was married to Korzhakov’s daughter, and who was willing to give him autonomy. Korzhakov freely admits in his memoirs that he was given to role expansion even in the first leg of his service to Yeltsin, in the Moscow party committee from 1985 to 1987.81 In national government, his star soared after the principal security forces flubbed the operation against parliament in October 1993. Yeltsin took to calling the service his “mini-KGB” and acceded to Korzhakov’s demand for status parity with Filatov and Ilyushin, enlargement of the service—it went from 250 men in September 1991 to 829 by June 1996—and improvement of their pay, housing conditions, and weaponry. Korzhakov convinced Yeltsin that, beyond keeping him safe, the service would fight corruption in the Kremlin and in the bowels of the bureaucracy.82
Armed with an unpublished presidential decree dated November 11, 1993, Korzhakov tapped telephones and fed Yeltsin dossiers of surreptitiously gathered compromising material (kompromat) on officials. Filatov, a target, sounded off in the press about Korzhakov turning the executive office into “a team of stoolpigeons.”83 Yeltsin, he said in an interview, “began to toss [Korzhakov’s] letters back to him,” but they kept coming, and some were directed to Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and other cabinet ministers.84 Unfazed, Korzhakov formed an in-house “analytical center” that made proposals on a wide range of public issues and badmouthed market reforms. Beginning in 1994, he wrote sharp letters on economic and other policy problems unrelated to his job description, not only to Yeltsin but to high-ranking leaders, including Chernomyrdin, and leaked information about his views to the media.85 By this time, Korzhakov was also a force in personnel decisions. Pavel Borodin and First Deputy Premier Soskovets were friends and allies of his, and in his last year in the Kremlin he had the principal say over the designation of a chief of the FSB (Barsukov), procurator general (Yurii Skuratov), and press secretary to Yeltsin (Sergei Medvedev).86 In January 1996 he engineered the replacement of Filatov by Nikolai Yegorov, the former governor of Krasnodar province, a hard-liner on Chechnya (who had been demoted from a ministerial position after Budënnovsk), and a man of “haughty manners and a slighting attitude toward those occupying more modest posts than he in the hierarchy of state service.”87 Korzhakov pressed Yeltsin to make Soskovets prime minister in Chernomyrdin’s place.88 And in the early months of 1996, he and Soskovets controlled the organization of Yeltsin’s campaign for re-election (see Chapter 14).
Yeltsin was later driven to lament the wideness of Korzhakov’s reach:
Korzhakov came to influence the appointment of people in the government, in the executive office, and in the power [security] ministries…. With every passing month and year, the political role of the… guard service… and concretely of Korzhakov grew. Korzhakov fought tooth and nail with everyone who did not submit to him and anyone he considered “alien.” He interfered in the work of my secretariat and violated established procedures to bring his own documents to me. He fought with Filatov and Ilyushin and tried through Oleg Soskovets to have a say in the country’s economic policy…. I take full responsibility for his unbelievable rise and his deserved fall. It was my mistake, and I had to pay for it.89
Yeltsin came to this wisdom in the rearview mirror. During his first term, though, it was his indulgence of Korzhakov that taught the Moscow high and mighty that the ex-watchman was a man to be feared and propitiated. Korzhakov family celebrations, such as his daughter’s nuptials and his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, became must-show events. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin gave the newlyweds a handsome china set. When Yeltsin dropped in on the silver anniversary party, Chernomyrdin, if Korzhakov can be believed, pouted because he had not been invited.90 Korzhakov’s public reputation shot to rarefied heights. To go by the experts’ poll published monthly in newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta, beginning in late 1994, he was ranked among the ten most powerful political figures in the country. In November 1995 he placed fourth, behind no one but the president, the prime minister, and Mayor Luzhkov; in January 1996 he was fourth again, trailing only Yeltsin, Gennadii Zyuganov (the communist leader, who was about to run for president against Yeltsin), and Chernomyrdin.
The subdivision of executive authority between president and prime minister was sanctioned by Russia’s constitution and laws. It created, as Yeltsin observed in 1994 in Notes of a President, “a second center of power” within the state—existing on the sufferance of the first center yet still formidable—and this did not disturb him.91 To curb centrifugal tendencies in the formal structures of the state and to make decisions as he saw fit, Yeltsin had recourse to informal and personalistic means, some of them concocted anew, some of them out of the Soviet or pre-Soviet Russian armory. In Midnight Diaries, published in 2000, Yeltsin looked back at the Kremlin of the early and middle 1990s and remarked that it harbored a multiplicity of “informal leaders” and “centers of power” pushing in contradictory directions.92 The institutional remedy for polycentric government, Yeltsin’s shop within the executive branch, was itself wantonly polycentric—more tower of Babel than beacon of strength.
This outcome was reached with Yeltsin’s cooperation. It was a fine example of a paradox of post-communism, as dissected by the sociologist Alena Ledeneva—“that informal practices are important because of their ability to compensate for defects in the formal order while simultaneously undermining it.” This contradiction, Ledeneva adds, “serves to explain why things in Russia are never quite as bad or as good as they seem.”93 Governing the state from 1991 to 1996 the way he did allowed Yeltsin to maintain his power within it and avail himself of diverse talent and knowledge. He orchestrated a leader-centered ruling coalition by cowing and cajoling political and bureaucratic actors into compliance, playing potential rivals off against one another, and accepting—even glorying in—compromise and ambiguity in policy. That same mix of tactics, however, came at a price. It left the program for transforming Russia less integrated in its content, and jerkier in its phasing, than it ought to have been.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Reconnecting
The replenishment of his electoral mandate in June–July 1996 was a peerless ordering moment in the Yeltsin presidency. Holding an election for chief executive on track and in more or less competitive fashion affirmed the post-communist regime and its reliance on popular consent. Yeltsin’s 1996 victory must rate with the 1991 putsch as his magic hour as practitioner of mass politics. It gave him a fresh lease on political life and another crack at governing, at heavy cost to his health. It prevented neo-communists from retaking power and undoing some or all of the changes of the preceding decade. And it pulled new participants, and new techniques for exercising influence, onto Russia’s civil stage.