Tension between Yeltsin and his prime minister mounted over the winter of 1998–99. The specifics mattered less than the overall point that the president was coming to the conclusion that their continued cohabitation was no longer in his interest. Primakov posed an opposite political problem to the one posed by Chernomyrdin a year before. The Russian public was tired of Chernomyrdin and blamed him for governmental failures; it warmed to Primakov and gave him credit for recent successes. Polls in early spring showed that two-thirds of the electorate approved of his work as head of government, that he was trusted by more Russians than any other leader, and that he was being put in the category of potential president. Given Primakov’s age and socialistic proclivities, that was not an outcome Yeltsin could live with. He was nervous that Primakov, while not disloyal to him, could be a focal point for dissent and opposition if he chose to speak out on policy differences from inside the establishment, not unlike Yeltsin had in 1987.76
Yeltsin waited for his moment, one of the very last he was to have in the political arena, and acted. Some on his staff wanted to wait until the impeachment vote was held before handling the Primakov problem, reasoning that a dismissal would increase the chances of impeachment going through. Yeltsin saw it differently in part due to a technical point: He knew that the adoption of even one impeachment motion would take away the weapon of threatening to dissolve the Duma in the case of a disagreement over chairmanship of the government. But the essence of his thinking was intuitive, as it had been so many times before. “A sharp, unexpected, aggressive move,” he wrote about the choice, “always knocks your opponent off his feet and disarms him, especially if it appears absolutely illogical and unpredictable. I was convinced of this more than once over the course of my presidential career.”77 The “utter unpredictability” that Vitalii Tret’yakov wrote off the preceding summer was not yet gone from the scene.
Yeltsin had been sending out hints that he was restless with Primakov and had someone else in mind to put in his place. That someone was Sergei Stepashin, the easygoing interior minister, with a background in police administration, whom Yeltsin had known since 1990. Stepashin, generally viewed as a liberal but uninvolved in electoral politics, headed a string of law and order–related ministries (security, justice, and interior), recovering from his loss of the directorship of the FSB (Federal Security Service) as a result of the Budënnovsk terror incident of 1995. On April 27 Yeltsin appointed him first deputy premier.78 On May 12, three days before the scheduled Duma vote on impeachment, Yeltsin dismissed Primakov and named Stepashin acting prime minister. Commentators were incredulous that Yeltsin had done it again. For the third time in fourteen months, he had made a splashy move to “deflect the country from discussing the president’s inadequacy for his job” or so it was seen.79
The Duma roll calls on impeachment were carried live on television. A Lenin double paraded in front of the entranceway, flanked by died-in-thewool communists with placards denouncing “Führer Boriska.” Many of the witnesses invited to testify at the two days of committee-of-the-whole hearings failed to show. Fire-breathing rhetoric did not carry over into coherent legislative action on the part of the opposition, and Yeltsin’s representatives craftily played on divisions among the parliamentarians. Two hundred and ninety-four deputies voted on May 15 for at least one of the five motions, but no individual motion received that many. The Chechnya resolution got 283 ayes, or seventeen fewer than required; the motion on the 1993 events got 263, that on the Belovezh’e accord 241, that on the army 240, and that on genocide 238. The Chechnya motion, which was championed by the reformist Yabloko Party, was seen as the only one having a realistic chance of passing. A number of legislators who were willing to vote yes on another motion abstained or spoiled ballots on Chechnya. The LDPR refused to let its deputies participate at all; Yabloko ended up allowing its members to vote their conscience (nine of them voted against the Chechnya resolution); and a small caucus of regional representatives asked their members to lodge one positive vote each.80
Yeltsin had gambled and won on impeachment. Sergei Stepashin needed only one ballot to win Duma confirmation on May 19, with 301 votes in favor, almost as many as Primakov took in 1998.
Was the endgame without larger purpose, a contest entered into for the sheer pleasure of it? Yeltsin’s delight in dealing and playing the cards is undeniable and is confirmed in the chapter in Presidential Marathon about the summer of 1999, one titled “Prime Ministerial Poker.” There Yeltsin recounted a double ruse. Shortly before sending Stepashin’s name to the Duma, and knowing full well that he was going to do so, he phoned Speaker Seleznëv to say that he was nominating somebody else entirely—Nikolai Aksënenko, the Russian minister of railways. Tall, burly, and Siberian-born, Aksënenko had worked his whole life in the transport system. In Yumashev’s words, he “reminded Yeltsin of himself in his days as a builder of apartment houses in Sverdlovsk.”81 He was one of the candidates Yeltsin had considered for premier in the spring of 1998 and had scant backing on the Duma benches. Yeltsin says at one point that the Aksënenko feint had the tactical motivation of making Stepashin look good by contrast. But he also paints it as an enjoyable test in its own right: “I liked the way I had ginned up intrigue around Aksënenko. It was a nice little bit of mischief [zagogulina].”82 Minutes after Seleznëv passed on word about Aksënenko to the members, the envelope containing Yeltsin’s letter of nomination for Stepashin was delivered to him. Seleznëv voiced annoyance and helplessness at the trickery: “The president has five Fridays in his week.”83
If Yeltsin’s memoir is to be believed, a second deception, on the strategic and not merely the tactical plane, lay behind the shenanigans of May 12. He meant to execute a final change in headship of the government, in favor of a dark horse, Vladimir Putin. He had decided to make Putin not only prime minister but his successor as leader of Russia—metaphorically, “to transfer to him Monomakh’s Cap,” the fur-trimmed crown of gold worn by the rulers of medieval Moscow. But the time was not yet right. Only the impending electoral struggle, in late 1999 over parliament and in 2000 over the presidency, would give Putin the chance to shine. For two or three months, Stepashin was to be the placeholder. The whole scheme had to remain Yeltsin’s secret, not known to Putin himself, to the Duma, to Stepashin, or even to Tatyana Dyachenko and his close advisers. “I did not want the public to get too used to Putin in those lazy summer months. This mystery, the suddenness of it all, could not be allowed to evaporate. It would be so important for the elections, this factor of the expectations aroused by a potent new politician.”84
Not every piece of this tale is a true guide to what happened in 1999. The ill-fated Stepashin’s stretch of time in the Russian White House was pure “torture.” He called the president on the telephone every day, wanting him “to feel something from me in a purely psychological way,” but never felt appreciated in return. He is convinced that Yeltsin very nearly made up his mind to appoint Aksënenko in May and that Aksënenko, not Putin, was at first the intended beneficiary of the shell game. He has no explanation for why Aksënenko lost out to Putin.85 Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s confidant and, after retirement, his son-in-law, is convinced Aksënenko was never really in the running and that Yeltsin left open the possibility that Stepashin would be the chosen one. Yeltsin abandoned Stepashin when he was wishywashy in the face of the two big crises of the summer of 1999—a renewal of violence in the North Caucasus and the attempt by a coalition of anti-Kremlin elites to field a winning slate for the Duma election—and when Stepashin did not deal firmly with lobbyists for governmental favors, passing on some of the pressure to Yeltsin himself.86