When the congress gathered for its winter session (it assembled two or three times a year), Yeltsin’s twelve months to make staffing and economic decisions by decree had expired. He asked the deputies to regularize Gaidar’s appointment as prime minister, which they refused to do by 486 votes to 467 on December 9, 1992 (the congress had 1,068 members, of whom 252 sat in the Supreme Soviet). Flustered, Yeltsin decided to take his brief to the people. On December 11 he was driven to the AZLK Works, the carmaker in southeast Moscow that manufactured the rattletrap Moskvich. He knew from government documents that Russian workplaces were having hard times:
But this was all on paper. Here in the immense assembly shop, darkish and slathered in machinery oil, all of the disillusionment and discontent heaped up over the year of reforms poured out. The workers met Yeltsin with a hush. All that rang out were some peals of applause, to which he was completely unaccustomed. There were no cries of acclaim, no supportive posters. The president plainly got skittish. Workers, mute and tense, listened. The concluding words of his speech—“I trust I will have your support”—struck no sparks. The prepackaged resolution was approved, but without any ardor.15
Workers bawled that Yeltsin should bury the hatchet with Khasbulatov and reanimate the socialist economy. Only ten or twenty, one observer divined, would have raised their hands for the motion if management and the trade union committee had not cracked the whips. Yeltsin was downcast as he climbed back into his limousine.16
AZLK and the dyspepsia of the parliamentarians took the wind out of Yeltsin’s sails. He sat down with Khasbulatov and reached a deal on a baroque formula for selecting a prime minister to serve until Russia had a new constitution. The congress on December 14 came up with eighteen candidates; Yeltsin shortened the list to five, and in the process disallowed the favorite of the deputies, Georgii Khizha, an arms manufacturer from St. Petersburg; the congress did a straw poll with three choices per deputy; the president was to make a choice from among the three leading nominees and submit that name for confirmation. Yurii Skokov was the top candidate with 637 votes, followed by Viktor Chernomyrdin with 621 and Gaidar with 400 votes. Chernomyrdin was Yeltsin’s pick of the three and was confirmed with 721 votes for.17 Gaidar, Burbulis, and several other reformists were excluded from the new Council of Ministers. The kamikazes had flamed out—and the commodore who had ordered them into the air stayed at his post.
Yeltsin was gratified in 1991 by Gaidar’s minimum of “Soviet baggage.” This could not have been said about Chernomyrdin, a jowly veteran of the petroleum industry and the founding head of Gazprom, the state company that took over the assets of the USSR Ministry of the Gas Industry in 1989. Two decades older than Gaidar and only seven years younger than Yeltsin, he was out of Orenburg oblast, the home region of Naina Yeltsina. He had hooked up with Yeltsin when the latter was Sverdlovsk party boss and together they supervised pipeline laying; he was kinder to Yeltsin than most after the rift with Gorbachev.18 “Viktor Stepanovich and I are united by common views on many things,” Yeltsin would say in Notes of a President, and were of the same generation. Chernomyrdin had principles but “is not up in the clouds.”19 The earthbound Chernomyrdin was to be an indispensable man, the prime minister for five-plus years, and to win fame equally for his competence, his wiliness, his partiality toward the Gazprom monopoly,20 and his mangled syntax and diction. Like Yeltsin, he evolved with the times.
The headlines of 1992 illuminated the environmental encumbrances to Yeltsin’s reform program in all their abundance. Until he forcibly shut down the Congress of People’s Deputies in late 1993 and imposed a presidentialist constitution, an obstructionist legislature lurked over his shoulder and had the legal and often the political force to foil him. But some of his biggest problems were within the amorphous executive branch. It contained a runaway vice president, a chief banker more attuned to parliament than to Yeltsin, and ministers and counselors raring to score points and to draw him into their corner. Large producers in Russia, still the property of the state, entreated for financial assistance. Private business, which was in its infancy, was strong enough in one area, banking, to create a sordid interest-group politics. The banks plumped for, and profited bounteously from, measures to assign them contracts for transferring credits from the central bank to specific firms and sectors, to allow them to pay negative real interest rates to depositors, and to protect them from contributory deposit insurance and foreign competition.21 Although the populace only looked on from a distance, all principals knew well the peril of social unrest, and grassroots opinion was still viewed by government and opposition as mobilizable.
What was not so apparent in Yeltsin’s first year, except to those with inside dope, was the importance of his endogenous thought processes and inhibitions—some of them evincing the Soviet baggage he sought to escape in his advisers, some responding to his reading of popular sentiment. In the springtime flap over bank credits and economic stabilization, to take one example, Gaidar found the president a hard sell on the subject of tight money: “Time after time at meetings between us or sessions of the government, he returned to the question of why we were not increasing the money supply” and thus keeping cash-strapped firms going. “The arguments we advanced did not seem persuasive enough to him anymore.”22 Yeltsin also vetoed Gaidar’s call for an instantaneous, Russian-imposed end to the ruble zone in the former USSR. The currency reform occurred only in July 1993.
Yeltsin, rehashing the 1992 Lopukhin story in his memoirs, emphasized that he had his own reasons, and it was not just about pesky parliamentarians or lobbyists:
The thing is that I myself worked for decades in Soviet economic management. It has no secrets for me. I know just what disorder there is there, what life is really like in factories big and small, what are the best and worst qualities of our directors, workers, and engineers. Despite the fact that I am a builder by profession, which has left its mark on me, I know all about heavy and light industry. In Sverdlovsk I had to be involved in this up to my elbows.
So let’s say some elderly industrialist comes to me and says in an agitated voice, “Boris Nikolayevich, I have been working for forty years in the gas industry. Now look at what this Lopukhin is up to, things are going on, here are the statistics to prove it, it is a nightmare, everything is going to hell.” What am I going to do? I cannot be indifferent… and I feel I have to respond.
Gaidar, Yeltsin elaborated, “was putting the squeeze on me” via Lopukhin to approve liberalized energy prices, and “I considered that we could not adopt so hard a policy.”23
The jockeying over forming and re-forming the cabinet brought out another phenomenon: Yeltsin’s determination as president to have political independence from allies and associates. It applied to the intelligentsia-based movements with which he had made common cause in his tramp to power. Gavriil Popov, who had been elected mayor of Moscow, left city hall in June 1992 to found a private university—Yeltsin named Yurii Luzhkov, a red director and municipal bureaucrat, in his place—and no member of the former Interregional Deputies Group was given a high-level position. Leaders of the related Democratic Russia movement felt that Yeltsin owed them for their help in 1990 and 1991. Lev Ponomarëv and Gleb Yakunin, two of its three co-chairmen, stated publicly that Yeltsin should listen to their recommendations on cabinet positions and appoint members of the organization as his emissaries to the provinces. Ponomarëv and Yakunin invited themselves to Sochi in October 1991, during Yeltsin’s sojourn there, and prevailed on him to receive them. The president took notes during the meeting, commended joint action, and did nothing to follow up.24 Yurii Afanas’ev, the third co-chairman, well known to Yeltsin from the Interregionals, led a faction that was against any collaboration with him. In early 1992 he and ex-dissident Yurii Burtin, ruing “authoritarian degradation” under Yeltsin, walked out of Democratic Russia, which promptly split up into pettifogging sects. Why, Burtin asked, was reform “put in the hands of a bunch of youngsters… about whom no one had heard a word a half-year ago?”25 Yeltsin’s attitude is condensed in his memoir putdown of Afanas’ev as a scholastic “eternal oppositionist”: “Such people are very necessary, but not in government—somewhere to the side, or on a hilltop where the view is better.”26