Burbulis, Gaidar, and the mavens of shock therapy, their ties to the older radicals flimsy, learned a little later about Yeltsin chasing his own star. Burbulis unburdened himself in an interview in 2001:
Soon we felt that the trust that had let us spread our wings, that untied our hands to make decisions and put them into life, had somehow changed into a well-thought-out distancing, into what I would say was the putting of us into orbit [orbitnost’]. Gradually, the president made over his image from courageous leader of a transformative program into not even a partner but some kind of arbitrator—and he convinced himself that this was the reality. This was the wellspring of his vagueness, of the combinative voting [he encouraged in the Congress of Deputies], of his dangerous ambiguity in relation to the intractable [anti-reform] group in the congress, of his reprisals against people on our side. And then we got inconsistency in his ideas, which was tangled up with big blows to Yeltsin’s instinct for power. This came out in the incoherence of the reforms. Before you knew it, everything was clear—Polevanov, Soskovets [two relatively conservative officials], and the so-called checks and balances, which bore not only on personnel decisions but on the loss of ideals, the loss of goals and orienting points.27
Yeltsin could not get over Burbulis’s refusal to serve as presidential chief of staff in 1991 and was ever more of the belief that Burbulis had an allergy to the gritty work of government, whereas the blemish he observed in Gaidar was inexperience and impracticality, not sloth. But the pulling back from the reform maximalists expressed a deeper tendency—in turn an outgrowth of character and habits of Urals self-sufficiency—that would apply to helpmates of sundry orientations. Everyone in the game was to be in orbit, and flight plans could be revised on short notice. The conservatives cited by Burbulis as beneficiaries of Yeltsin’s decisions help make the point. Vladimir Polevanov, a Siberian provincial leader who was named deputy premier and head of the State Property Committee in November 1994, and who used the appointment to try to undo the privatization of the aluminum industry, lasted only three months and was fired at the demand of Anatolii Chubais. Oleg Soskovets, an ethnic Russian technocrat from Kazakhstan and the last minister of metallurgy of the USSR, was made first deputy premier, the number two to Chernomyrdin, in April 1993. His turn to run afoul of the president came in June 1996, for factional activities in league with Aleksandr Korzhakov.
“Checks and balances” (sderzhki i protivovesy), as the catchphrase went, were built into Yeltsinesque administration from the start, and spanned the bounds between external and internal resistances to purposive change. They would mean that no Kremlin staff and no government, from Gaidar through the premiership of Vladimir Putin in 1999, was homogeneous, and that all of them would present Himalayan challenges of coordination. The president “turned out to have people around him who in terms of their views and approaches would be difficult to call like-minded or brothers-in-arms.”28
Fractious government contributed to the aforesaid arrhythmia of decision making. However, it did not foreclose an underlying persistence of trajectory, a wobbly equilibrium within a broad band of possibilities. It was stabilized by the solar object—Yeltsin—around which all lesser bodies in the system, planetary and asteroidal, spun. To the extent that the country had a defined course in the 1990s, Viktor Chernomyrdin is surely correct to say that within the structures of government its conservator and guarantor was the president:
Yeltsin was the flywheel. He could have said, “Hold it, let’s go back to where we were,” and we would have gone back. His strength was that he understood we had to take this path…. How to do it was another matter. But to move a whole gigantic country along—do you understand what that is? Yeltsin never faltered, Yeltsin never got distracted by trifles…. He had a very powerful intuition in this respect. He made it through it all and led the country through it all.29
Yeltsin’s subjective resistances to the oversights of reform policy at the micro level were not enough to knock him off his macro course.
Here the vagaries of economic policy in the year or two after the exit of Gaidar are revealing. There was much more continuity substantively, if not stylistically, than Burbulis’s elegy would admit. To take the place of Gaidar as minister of finance and deputy premier, Yeltsin hit upon Boris Fëdorov, who was two years younger than Gaidar and had held the job under Ivan Silayev in 1990. Fëdorov tilted against Viktor Gerashchenko and easy money and made some progress on monetary and fiscal restraint in the spring and fall of 1993, twinning with Gaidar when Yeltsin brought him back into the cabinet as deputy premier in September. These gains have been interpreted as evidence of “how much one forceful individual [Fëdorov] in a key post can accomplish in such a volatile situation,”30 but this disregards the role of a second individual—the Yeltsin who provided Fëdorov with political cover and encouragement. As Fëdorov found his bearings, Yeltsin called him with a tip that Chernomyrdin was preparing a directive on reimposition of curbs on some consumer prices. Fëdorov, with Gaidar’s help, sent Yeltsin a memorandum bashing the proposal as inconsistent with marketization. Yeltsin then invited Fëdorov and the prime minister into his office, gave the table a thump, and told Chernomyrdin that if he brought out such an order it would be countermanded by a presidential decree, which he said was ready in the file folder on his desk—a folder that, known to Fëdorov but not to Chernomyrdin, held one sheet of paper, the Fëdorov memo. Chernomyrdin dropped the plan.31
In January 1994 Gaidar and Fëdorov resigned from the government for a second time, after a parliamentary election in which liberal candidates were outvoted, and Chernomyrdin gave hints of wage and price controls. But in reality he perpetuated Fëdorov’s and Gaidar’s policies in 1994 and 1995 and took them further by developing a bond market for government debt. The authors of The Yeltsin Epoch, who hold no brief for Chernomyrdin, write of his economic record that, “with less gusto but more reliance on common sense and Russian conditions, [he] basically continued what Gaidar had begun” in 1991–92.32 This happened not because of Chernomyrdin’s priors but because he, like Yeltsin, was learning from changing conditions and because he worked for Yeltsin.