As Yeltsin saw it, the general in mufti was after bigger game than Kulikov or Chubais. It was no coincidence that Lebed had picked this moment to strut his stuff: “All that went on in the Kremlin during those months was closely connected with one specific circumstance—my illness.” Yeltsin disliked Lebed’s pugilism about everything under the sun and, worse, his transparent attempt to come across as the alternative to an infirm civilian leader: “With his demeanor, he was trying to show that the president is doing badly and I, the general-politician, am ready to take his place… [and] I alone know how to communicate with the people at this trying moment.” The last straw was when Lebed had the impertinence to call on September 28 for the president to step down from office until he was fully recovered from surgery. Yeltsin stayed his hand for several weeks because, interestingly, Lebed “someways reminded me of myself, only in caricatured form.”44 On October 17 Yeltsin came out of preoperative quarantine to fire Lebed and found the strength to shoot a clip about the decision for the evening news, in which he compared Lebed, not to himself, but to another politicized general, Aleksandr Korzhakov.45 Lebed had made it through nearly four months on the job. As was his way, Yeltsin did not further punish the defrocked comrade. Lebed spent the coming year networking and raising funds; in May 1998 he won election as governor of the Siberian province of Krasnoyarsk.
A further spinoff from the just-concluded presidential campaign was the accord reached with Aleksandr Lukashenko in April 1996 to form an interstate community between Russia and Belarus. Details were left to be negotiated. As Yeltsin convalesced that first winter, Dmitrii Ryurikov, his presidential assistant for foreign policy, worked out a treaty of “union,” a deeper association than Yeltsin had in mind. Like Lebed, Ryurikov, confident he was free to act, got too far ahead of himself. He had the document approved by the Belarusians and by Gennadii Seleznëv, the communist speaker of the Russian State Duma, and, before sharing it with his boss, informed the press that Yeltsin had agreed. The draft treaty would have fathered a bicameral union parliament (with equal representation for Belarus, a nation of 10 million, and Russia, with more than 140 million), a rotating presidency, and a ratification referendum within three months. Its neo-Soviet and pan-Slavic harmonics pleased Lukashenko, as did the possibility of a political presence within Russia, where he had built a provincial following since taking over in Minsk in 1994. Yeltsin was not a bit pleased. The draft was impossible to reconcile with his constitution (it would bring into being a second legislature and budget and open up bothersome questions about the federal structure), and sharing executive powers with anyone else was the farthest thing from his mind. It would have midwifed “a new country,” he told his chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev, and he had done that once before in the 1990s.46 On April 4, 1997, Yeltsin unceremoniously dismissed Ryurikov, who was soon appointed ambassador to Uzbekistan. A vague and saccharine agreement was agreed to and signed by the two presidents in the Kremlin on May 23.
The final case of overreach by a refractory subordinate came again from the field of national security. In July 1996 Yeltsin, having let Pavel Grachëv go with the Korzhakov-Soskovets group, appointed Igor Rodionov his second minister of defense at the strenuous recommendation of Aleksandr Lebed. Rodionov was a four-star Soviet general whose career had been wrecked when soldiers under his command killed twenty civilian protestors in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1989. Since then he had been commandant of the General Staff Academy and branched into military doctrine and organization, which is what won Lebed’s respect. Yeltsin asked Rodionov to come up with a design for “military reform”; the desiderata were a gradual switch from conscript to professional troops (as Yeltsin had agreed to do during the election campaign), holding the line on defense spending, and development of airborne and mobile forces. Instead, Rodionov sat tight on conscription, clamored for a budget increase, and tried to transfer airborne regiments to the infantry. Yeltsin was most affronted by Rodionov’s speeches and media leaks, feeling they were intended to put pressure on him through popular opinion, and by what he saw as the minister’s going back on his word to do army reform on a shoestring.
In September 1996, in an effort to limit Lebed’s influence as secretary of the Security Council, Yeltsin created a separate consultative board, the Defense Council, which he put under Yurii Baturin’s management as executive secretary. It was the Defense Council that Yeltsin chose as the place to clear the air on May 22, 1997. The scene in the General Staff’s white marble quarters on Arbat Square has been set down by Baturin and his coauthors of The Yeltsin Epoch:
Yeltsin… was cold, stern, and forbidding. He said hello and gave the floor to the minister.
“You have fifteen minutes for your report.”
“Fifteen minutes is insufficient,” replied the minister.
“Fifteen minutes,” the president snapped.
“If we want to talk seriously about reform, I need fifty minutes,” Rodionov stated.
“We are losing time, let us begin.” Yeltsin’s voice was getting sterner.
“In that case, I refuse to make my report,” the minister declared.
Yeltsin called on [General Viktor] Samsonov: “Chief of the General Staff, please go ahead.”
“I also refuse.”
“Igor Sergeyevich Sergeyev,” the president said, misstating the patronymic of the commander-in-chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces (which is Dmitriyevich).
Sergeyev stood up and, thinking he was supposed to report, moved toward the desk where the president was sitting.
“Hold on,” said Yeltsin, stopping him. “Will you take on the duties of minister of defense?”
“Very good, sir!” Sergeyev retorted curtly.
“Viktor Stepanovich Chechevatov,” the president went on in the same self-assured voice. For some time, he had known and respected this general, who had gone up the service ladder to commander of [the Far Eastern] Military District; in the summer of 1996, Yeltsin had received him in the Kremlin as a candidate for defense minister. “Do you agree to take the position of chief of the General Staff?”
“If you don’t mind, Boris Nikolayevich, I would like a private word with you when the session of the Defense Council is over, and I will give you an answer then.”
“Fine, sit down.”
The president turned to the secretary of the Defense Council [Yurii Baturin], seated at his left hand, and uttered a single word: “Decrees.”
Baturin left to phone the State Legal Directorate, which was responsible for composing presidential decrees. While Yeltsin was delivering an irate and not exactly fair speech berating the generals, several alternative draft decrees were brought over from the directorate—alternatives, since there was no clarity about the chief of the General Staff. Having had his say, the president headed off to the defense minister’s office for the talk with Chechevatov. All of a sudden, on his way there, he handed his aide a form on which he had written, “Call in [Anatolii] Kvashnin [the commander of the North Caucasus Military District] for a chat.” Yeltsin had made up his mind that Chechevatov was not to be chief of the General Staff. If he had not agreed to the offer right away, so be it. The president does not offer twice. He almost never made exceptions to this rule of his.