The end to the Kremlin tenure of Aleksandr Korzhakov in June 1996 convinced Yeltsin to tame the sulfurous discord within the Presidential Executive Office. Korzhakov’s mini-KGB lost its surveillance rights and was folded into the larger body (headed by Mikhail Barsukov until he went down with Korzhakov) henceforth known as the Federal Protection Service. It steered clear of high politics for the rest of the 1990s. The crash-and-burn of Aleksandr Lebed in October quickly removed another threat to amity in the executive.70
Yeltsin brought Anatolii Chubais into the Kremlin establishment in July 1996 so as to give it a long-needed overhaul. The first Yeltsin lieutenant to carry a laptop computer, Chubais wasted no time weeding out parallel subunits and positions, centralizing decision making, and imposing a managerial style with a stricter division of labor and command hierarchy. The supernumerary post of senior assistant, held until the election by Viktor Ilyushin, was done away with. All aides now reported to the president through the one chief of staff and his deputies. The pre-1996 presidential assistants, most of them intellectuals by background, were allowed to stay with pruned responsibilities. The new crowd had less experience in academe and more in public administration, communications, and, in some cases, private business.71
This change came at the expense not only of the infighting of earlier days but of their restless energy. The old crowd did not take kindly to it. As a group of them were to write in 2001, “The time had passed when Yeltsin needed ‘eggheads’ to help him figure out pieces of ‘the transition to democracy.’… Now the inconveniences presented by independent people outweighed their merits.”72 The eggheads left one at a time, the last departures being in mid-1998. At least one of the separations took a strange turn. Yurii Baturin, who had been the presidential assistant for legal and security policy, made inquiries about satisfying his life’s dream of training as a cosmonaut. Yeltsin heard of it, said all was well, and then fired him on August 28, 1997. Rushing back to Moscow from vacation, Baturin received a handshake, a two-minute audience, and an autographed photo portrait. Unhindered by Yeltsin, he was accepted into the space program in September and flew on two space missions.73 The duplicative Defense Council he had run for a year was abolished soon after.
Besides policy implementation, Yeltsin’s reshaped team immersed itself in public relations, the art that had allowed him to keep his job in the 1996 election. The Chubais “analytical group” was continued after inauguration as a session on “political planning” that met every Friday at ten A.M. and was chaired at first by Maksim Boiko, a Chubais deputy.74 Yeltsin agreed to give a weekly address to maintain contact with the electors. The chosen medium was national radio, which was judged friendlier than television and better at masking his infirmities. Ten-minute chats, taped on Fridays, went on the air every Saturday morning until the summer of 1998.
A regular in the Friday group was Valentin Yumashev, the Urals-born journalist and editor, amanuensis for the Yeltsin memoirs, and friend of the family. At age thirty-nine, he was made head of the executive office on March 11, 1997, in place of Chubais, who went to the government chambers in the White House. Yumashev stuck in the main to the Chubais mold, although, with no governmental experience, he had nothing like Chubais’s political heft.
Another member of the coterie was Tatyana Dyachenko, who had no formal role in government after the 1996 campaign. When Yeltsin returned to work in 1997, he realized that he wanted her involvement, yet was illpositioned to ask for it since he had always segregated home from work and had censured Gorbachev for nepotism in making his wife a public figure. He recalled hearing that Claude Chirac, the daughter of President Chirac of France, had been a special adviser to her father since 1994. He asked the Chiracs to receive Tatyana and explain how the arrangement worked. She went to Paris and was satisfied, and on June 30, 1997, Yeltsin had Yumashev name her to the Kremlin staff and assign her an office on the presidential floor of Building No. 1. It was explained that she would be his image adviser (sovetnik po imidzhu).75 Her alliance with Yumashev was close and at this point political and platonic only. They would marry in 2001, after Yeltsin and the two of them were out of politics.
Dyachenko’s meteoric rise, her familial relationship with the chief, and his frequent nonattendance stoked the impression that she filled a void and was a major power in Russian politics. In the savants’ ratings of influence carried monthly by Nezavisimaya gazeta, she showed up in the top twenty-five in September 1996 and in the top ten in July 1997, where she remained until the end of 1999. She was to be ranked as high as third in the nation in June, October, and November of 1999.
That Dyachenko was a significant presence is beyond doubt. She busied herself with much more than Yeltsin’s image, as she traveled with him, made the odd foray to the provinces as his surrogate, sat in on staff meetings, edited speeches, and was the back-channel communications conduit to him. Her main role, she said in an interview, “was that I could tell Papa certain unpleasant things, which for other people, you see, it was not so comfortable to do…. I was better able to find the right moment and the necessary words.” But the understanding between father and daughter was that in general she was to express opinions only on matters that he broached to her or that flowed from assignments she had been tending to at his request. She had no right to raise questions about personnel unless invited and never weighed in on security-related issues. She did not make public statements or deal with journalists. Neither did she possess anything like the standard bureaucratic toolkit. She had only one aide and no authority whatsoever to sign directive documents or commit government funds.76 Unlike Boris Yeltsin and her older sister, and like her mother, Tatyana did not have much talent for organization or time management.77 And, in the grand scheme of things, she did not have a political agenda or preferences of her own. Dyachenko was no vizier, and there never was a Dyachenko program or strategy autonomous of Yeltsin’s.
Yeltsin’s iffy health necessarily affected decision making in other regards. Yurii Yarov, who supplanted Ilyushin as superintendent of his schedule, cut back on meetings, which made for glancing contact with some of his officials and next to none with others. Early in the 1990s, Yeltsin had hosted up to twenty visitors a day to his study, and a prime minister, first deputy premier, or foreign minister could count on running into him five days a week. After 1996, only his chief of staff and press secretary (and Dyachenko) were in daily touch and the names on his calendar for weekly or biweekly meetings were down to a half dozen. The Kremlin’s lead speech writer, Lyudmila Pikhoya, who huddled with Yeltsin once or twice a day in the first term, usually at her initiative, was seeing him once or twice a month, and communicating with him mostly on the telephone hotline, when she departed in the late 1990s.78 As the press reported, formal Kremlin briefings were quite often canceled. In the first three months of 1998, Yeltsin called off nine of his scheduled get-togethers with Chernomyrdin and met only once in his office with the foreign minister, twice with the minister of the interior, three times with the head of the FSB (Federal Security Service), four times with the defense minister, and not once with the chief of foreign intelligence.79 What the press rarely divulged was that many of these meetings were held at Gorki-9, Zavidovo, a vacation spot, or, if Yeltsin was under the weather, in the Barvikha sanatorium or even in hospital. Failing that, telephone calls replaced face-to-face conversations. With top functionaries, Yeltsin clung religiously to the weekly reports in whatever form was available.80 The further down the line an official was, the more likely he was to have phone contact only. That was tolerable for workers who knew the boss well but not for new recruits, some of whom were never to have a single substantive talk with him. Yeltsin’s travel outside of Moscow was also restricted, and provincial leaders found it much harder to get in the door than before, although some did manage to take appeals to him to reverse decisions made by other federal officials. Nonstaff advisers, who had intermittent access in the first term, had little in the second. Yeltsin’s Presidential Council, though never disbanded, was not to meet after February of 1996.