CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Endgame
The effective length of Yeltsin’s second presidential term was less than half of the first. Constitutionally limited to four years, it got off to a late start owing to the heart operation and was foreshortened by early retirement in December of 1999. Indeed, the nomination of Vladimir Putin as prime minister and heir apparent put him partway out the door that August. If the front half of term two was about taking power back, the back half was about letting go of power and, in so doing, not rubbing out everything he had tried to achieve. His behavior at the time, ridiculed by some contemporaries as impulsive and unserious, accomplished his short-term goals, against the odds. The long-term effects are still being acted out and debated today.
The Yeltsin endgame began in earnest with his government. He first gave thought to revamping it in November–December 1997. The brunt of his disaffection was borne by the man who had been his prime minister since 1992. While Viktor Chernomyrdin and his ever-changing roster of ministers had rendered faithful service, they, in Yeltsin’s estimation, were not up to the task of bringing about sustainable development in a marketized economy. The strength of Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin set down in Presidential Marathon, was his “exceptional capacity for compromises…. But that was also the problem. The main compromise Chernomyrdin ‘sat on’ all these years was… between market relations and the Soviet directors’ corps,” a bargain from which Russia had to move on. Yeltsin, moreover, was looking ahead to the making of the next president, a prize Chernomyrdin had lately grown hopeful of attaining. Yeltsin was sure that his love for “the commonplaces of cautious administration” and the masses’ weariness of “the same old faces” in politics would make him unelectable when the next presidential campaign rolled around. Chernomyrdin would have to make way for someone younger, more resolute, and with “another view of the world” in his head.1
Testimony on all sides makes it plain how greatly Yeltsin at the conclusion of his career relied on personnel renewal within the executive branch as the key to presidential leadership. In the role of political impresario, he was to gloat in 2000, he and no one else had populated Russia’s blank public stage. “By giving a politician the chance to occupy the premier’s or a vice premier’s seat, I instantly made him famous, his actions significant, and his personage notable.” Yeltsin acknowledged that this role flourished out of necessity: “I sometimes think I had simply no other way to bring new people into politics,” and through them new ideas and approaches.2
There was no other way because Yeltsin’s energies were depleted and his charisma blotted, and because of his past choices. He had refused to create a political party that would furnish a Yeltsinist organizational framework for those seeking office and a Yeltsinist conceptual framework for those holding it. A last gasp at drawing him into partisanship occurred right after the 1996 election. Georgii Satarov sent him a memorandum in July about a new party of power that he would head and that would subsume Chernomyrdin’s Our Home Is Russia and a raft of centrist and liberal organizations. It would consolidate the new political system and “the pro-system political elite.” The sketch interested him, Yeltsin assured Satarov. But he was unfit and awaiting coronary surgery, and took no steps to implement after the operation.3
Yeltsin met with contenders for prime minister under “various pretexts,” on the lookout for a technocrat free of “debts and obligations to his party or his section of the political elite.” This ruled out party heads and power brokers, national and subnational. The search narrowed to three members of Chernomyrdin’s latest cabinet, another person who held economic positions earlier in the decade, the director of the central bank, and a former commander of Russian border troops.4 As lists go, it was an obscure one, and only one on it (the former minister, Boris Fëdorov) had ever run for election or worked in a party. Two ministers were excluded for closeness to the sectors they controlled; Fëdorov was “too politicized and ambitious”; the banker, Sergei Dubinin, and the military officer, Andrei Nikolayev, were quick-tempered and unsteady.5 Yeltsin’s later conduct makes the otherwise unmemorable Nikolayev noteworthy. Yeltsin knew and respected him in Sverdlovsk and was full of praise for him in the border-guards job, which he left in December 1997 after squabbles with other security officials. That the general was a candidate at all shows that the soldierly style was exercising an appeal to Yeltsin well before the rise of Putin.6
By a process of elimination, Yeltsin went to the sixth name on his list. Sergei Kiriyenko, a protégé of Boris Nemtsov in Nizhnii Novgorod, had worked in the Komsomol, commercial banking, and oil refining; he relocated to Moscow with Nemtsov in the spring of 1997 and made energy minister in November. He was by far the youngest on the short list, at age thirty-five, and had a mild manner and a decidedly boyish appearance. Yeltsin valued his business experience and restrained articulateness, yet conceded there was “something of the honor-roll graduate student” to him.7 The two first met on the 1994 layover in Nizhnii at which Yeltsin spoke improvidently of Nemtsov as his successor. In early March 1998, Kiriyenko handed Yeltsin a clipped report about streamlining the Russian coal industry; Yeltsin liked it and Kiriyenko’s “youthful maximalism” on market principles.8 More than Chubais and Nemtsov in 1997, Kiriyenko was Yeltsin’s second-term Yegor Gaidar, the well-connected wunderkind who would accelerate change as the agent of an impatient president.9
Yeltsin precluded doing in 1998 what he suspected he should have done in 1997: put the seasoned young reformers around Chubais in unqualified control of the government. Svyazinvest had cheapened the stock of Chubais and Nemtsov, who had far more hands-on experience of government and elite folkways than Kiriyenko. Practiced junior members of the team, untouched by the incident, were available for promotion. Yeltsin knew whom he wanted, and it was Kiriyenko. First thing on March 23, 1998, he informed Chernomyrdin. Kiriyenko took on the nomination and Yeltsin signed the papers making him acting prime minister. Yeltsin, according to Kiriyenko, shed a tear when he briefed him on the exchange with Chernomyrdin.10
The nominee had to be confirmed by an absolute majority of 226 votes in the State Duma. The deputies were of no mind to oblige. The constitution’s Article 111 stated that if they rejected the president three times in the two weeks allowed, he was to disband the house and call a parliamentary election. Were there to be an initial turndown, it did not lay down whether he was free to resubmit the name of his preferred candidate. After Kiriyenko took only 143 votes on April 10, Yeltsin unflinchingly asserted that right and renominated him; in the second ballot, on April 17, Kiriyenko sank to 115 votes. Yeltsin pulled out all the stops on a third try. He hosted a roundtable for politicians in Catherine’s Hall of Kremlin Building No. 1, importuned leaders of the Duma factions, and got the Federation Council to sanction Kiriyenko. Vladimir Zhirinovskii of the nationalistic LDPR, with the third largest bloc of Duma votes, swung them to Yeltsin and Kiriyenko—to ensure political stability, he said (“A bad government is better than no government”), and for pecuniary benefit, it was widely believed.11 Nikolai Ryzhkov, Yeltsin’s old foe and now the kingpin of a small socialistic caucus, helped by rationalizing a positive vote as a strike “against the destruction of the Duma.” The Duma speaker, Gennadii Seleznëv of the KPRF, came out solidly in the affirmative and warned that dissolving the Duma for the first time ever would endanger the unity of Russia. “The president,” he said for good measure, “is tightening the screws on us and we have no alternative.”12 Seleznëv got the chamber to conduct the third ballot anonymously, enabling many communists and others to elude party discipline. Unpopular though Yeltsin was, he was able to play on fears by rank-and-file deputies that in a new election they might not secure nominations and seats, would have to campaign without their Duma office base, and would be blamed for economic side effects. As icing on the cake, Yeltsin went on television to say he had asked Pavel Borodin of the Presidential Business Department “to tend to the deputies’ problems” if they took a “constructive” approach to the confirmation vote—the problems being those of housing and perks. “One can only guess whether this should have been understood as responding to their material needs or as classic bribery.”13