The mooted “fundamental reform” of the state was explored but never brought to life. Kremlin assistants Mikhail Krasnov and Georgii Satarov got Yeltsin to write the commitment into his March 1997 address to parliament. Although they preferred a reform that encompassed rule-of-law questions and the judiciary, the task was narrowed to the executive branch. By August 1997 Krasnov had produced three drafts of a conceptual document, and by March of 1998 twelve. The thrust was to simplify the bureaucratic estate, make it less opaque, and institute a merit-based, Western-style civil service. Yeltsin was agreeable but unprepared to invest in the project. Yumashev did not make it a high priority, either. In the summer of 1998, as economic and political problems accumulated (see Chapter 16), the report was quietly tabled and Krasnov left office.81
The ouster of Lebed, Ryurikov, and Defense Minister Rodionov showed that Yeltsin kept the capacity to make mincemeat out of any lesser official who dared provoke him. The passage of time did not tranquilize the governing stratum. Far from slowing down, the revolving door for officials swung faster in the second term than in the first. Deputy premiers served for an average of eight months in the second term, compared to sixteen months in the first; for other government ministers, the drop was to fifteen months in the second term from twenty-three months in the first term. Of the informal coordination mechanisms on which Yeltsin placed some reliance in 1991–96, several were inapplicable after 1996. The extramural fraternization withered as tennis matches, collective soaks in the steambath, and like pursuits became but a pleasant memory. The Presidential Club ceased to function; in 1997 the buildings on the Sparrow Hills were turned over to receptions and conferences. The inflow of trusted townsmen from Sverdlovsk also dried up. Those associates Yeltsin valued most had made their contribution and gone on to other things, and he did not want to be identified with a territorial subgroup.82 Yeltsin was as antipathetic as ever to collegial procedures for bringing about more coherent governance. Interior Minister Kulikov proposed to him twice that a new State Council be created, “with the powers of the Politburo,” partly to correct for Yeltsin’s physical incapacity. He says he explained to Yeltsin, “One head is good but ten are better!” The president indicated sympathy but did not reply when Kulikov sent him a memorandum elaborating on the idea.83
Even as he went along with the limited cleanup Chubais promoted, there was something in Yeltsin that made him continue to abhor an overly systematic, impersonal approach to governing Russia. Sergei Kiriyenko, who was first deputy minister and then minister of fuel and energy for a year until taking over the prime ministership in the spring of 1998, remembered the attitude well from the safaris outside of Moscow on which he accompanied the president:
Boris Nikolayevich, who… had such a feeling for power, did not very much like to take the hierarchy into account…. He vented a sort of internal democratism. If he had decrees or decisions to sign, he was likely to do it on a tractor or on a tank or, I don’t know, on the tire of a bus or at a mill or factory. This was not just public relations, it was a reflection of his heart and soul, of protest again the hated bureaucratic machine of Soviet times. His directives were never written so as to encourage the implementers to maneuver or palm things off. But everybody wanted to palm [costs] off anyway…. This is what got us into the nonsense of [granting favors] that were not in the interests of the state. [Yeltsin would tell us that] there was a promise; it had to be discharged right away or on a three-day deadline, and so on. After the fact, it was very hard to persuade him that the supplicant—for example, the governor who sent him a letter in which he lied barefacedly about being owed subsidies from the budget—should have his ears boxed. This was very tough…. It was like getting him to part with a dear toy…. My feeling was less that he had trouble letting go of financial questions per se than that he was irked that, “Heck, everything is already decided,” and he was unable to take care of problems expeditiously. He seemed to think, “Here we go again with all this bureaucracy, studying and checking everything. I don’t give a fig; you people aren’t able to decide anything.”84
Heart and soul, the late Yeltsin still believed in his right to make decisions on the go. No amount of organizational streamlining could have gotten him to give it up.
A few changes were made in the Council of Ministers after the confirmation of Viktor Chernomyrdin by the Duma in August 1996. Vladimir Potanin, appointed first deputy premier for macroeconomics at Chubais’s behest, was the first private businessman to take high political office. Boris Berezovskii was the second when he was made deputy secretary of the Security Council in October. Chernomyrdin brought in miscellaneous red directors, and Viktor Ilyushin and Aleksandr Livshits moved over from the executive office. The cabinet was adrift, disparate, and, in Yeltsin’s view, “not capable of resolving the country’s slew of economic and social problems.”85
Only on March 17, 1997, did he intervene to replace Potanin with Anatolii Chubais and to recruit Boris Nemtsov, the photogenic governor of Nizhnii Novgorod province and longtime favorite of his, to work alongside Chubais as first deputy prime minister. Chubais (forty-two years old) and Nemtsov (thirty-eight) in turn selected like-minded members of their generation for many of the economic and social portfolios. The press labeled them the young reformers, and it was hard not to see echoes of the Gaidar team of the early 1990s.
There was, though, one difference: Yegor Gaidar as acting prime minister ran the show in the Council of Ministers in 1992; in 1997 Yeltsin would not take Chernomyrdin out of the premier’s chair and award it to one of the upand-comers. It would be another year before he would, and the delay cost them and him dearly. In his memoirs, Yeltsin defended the combination as a way to harness the talents of both sides: “to get [Chernomyrdin] going” by flanking him with “two young and in a good way pushy and aggressive” deputies who would keep him under “high tension and steady, positive pressure.”86 The arrangement was too byzantine by half. Having learned his lesson and excluded antagonistic factions from his Kremlin sanctum, Yeltsin consciously wove them into the machinery of the government. Chernomyrdin still worked quite amicably with Chubais. He did not warm to Nemtsov and required constant reassurance from Yeltsin that his job was not in jeopardy. A specific source of tension was policy toward Gazprom, the hugely profitable gas producer Chernomyrdin had founded. Nemtsov supervised the energy sector and headed the energy ministry until November 1997, and made attempts to limit Gazprom’s operational autonomy. He also scuppered a deal under which the Gazprom president, a Chernomyrdin man named Rem Vyakhirev, would have acquired a large block of the company’s shares for a few million dollars. Nemtsov came to rue that he had not held out for the retirement of Chernomyrdin, and the hoopla he generated—such as his campaign to have bureaucrats driven only in Russian-made limousines—led Yeltsin to suspect he was not prime-ministerial or presidential timber. Chubais had the aptitude for the premier’s job but was not willing to ride roughshod over Chernomyrdin to get it, and in any event would have had difficulty gaining a majority in the Duma.87