Russia. A History полностью

Lacking the support of either the electorate or the parliament, Yeltsin became ever more imperious and erratic. As his threat to cancel elections in 1996 revealed, he was hardly a convinced democrat; faced with universal unpopularity, he acted more like a party boss determined to impose his will, regardless of the Duma or public opinion. Most, including former close associates, concur with a former press secretary that Yeltsin ‘has no ideology of his own except the ideology of power’. For Yeltsin, ruling meant decreeing: in 1996, when the Duma passed 230 laws, the president promulgated 1,000 personal ukazy (decrees) and signed another 2,000 edicts and directives from his Presidential Administration. Apart from ‘ukazomania’, Yeltsin showed a strong penchant for wilfulness, with no apparent purpose other than to remind his entourage who was boss. During one yachting trip in Siberia, ‘Tsar Boris’ became furious with an aide and had him thrown overboard; another aide, positioned on the lower deck, saw the figure soar past, extremities wildly flailing, and at first glance thought it to be some exotic Siberian fowl. Yeltsin’s fondness for drink did not help; after imbibing the president was reportedly fond of drumming out rhythms on the foreheads of hapless aides and allegedly even bestowed this honour on President Oskar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan. Yeltsin turned the state cabinet into a royal court.

The court did not want for new faces: Yeltsin’s self-assertiveness expressed itself most dramatically and destructively in a high turnover of top officials. After Yeltsin sacked Viktor Chernomyrdin as prime minister in March 1998 (for appearing more presidential than the president), the country witnessed a parade of four different prime ministers in sixteen months. The Kremlin turned into a game of musical chairs; altogether, during his second term, Yeltsin had five prime ministers, three foreign ministers, three defence ministers, five finance ministers, five chiefs of staff, and seven heads of the national Security Council. Worse still, competence and tenure appeared to be inversely related, as the hasty dismissals of Aleksandr Lebed (as secretary of the Security Council in November 1996) and Evgenii Primakov (as prime minister in March 1999) attest. Given Yeltsin’s inability to govern, the turnover only accelerated the breakdown of rational, orderly governance.

It also flung the door wide open to corruption, with inordinate influence devolving upon close advisers and supporters, collectively known as the ‘Family’. An inner circle dominated by Yeltsin’s daughter (Tatiana Diachenko, officially appointed a paid presidential adviser in 1997) controlled access to Yeltsin and shaped decision-making. The entourage included some ‘oligarchs’, rich businessmen who had amassed fabulous wealth by dubious means and connections to high officials, and who repaid the favours by financing Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996. This élite included figures like Boris Berezovskii (former mathematician, car dealer turned plutocrat), who openly boasted that the oligarchs controlled ‘50 per cent of the Russian economy’, played a critical role in Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, and therefore claimed the right to ‘occupy the key posts in the government and to benefit from the fruits of victory’. Berezovskii himself became deputy head of the Security Council; another oligarch, Vladimir Potanin, served as deputy prime minister responsible for economic policy. But the oligarchs soon squabbled over the spoils of victory and used their control of the media to disseminate kompromat (compromising materials) about top officials, further eroding public trust in the Yeltsin government.

As the ‘centre’ imploded, the eighty-nine ethnic republics and regions became increasingly independent and assertive. In his struggle with Gorbachev, Yeltsin himself had encouraged centrifugal tendencies by urging local authorities to withhold taxes and act on their own—most vividly telling the leadership in Tatarstan in 1990 to ‘grab as much sovereignty as you can swallow’. The breakdown of central authority accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as republics and oblasti all across Russia withheld taxes, proclaimed ‘sovereignty’, appointed officials, and—in seventy of the eighty-nine regions—adopted laws and constitutions at variance with the federal constitution and laws. In Yeltsin’s second term, as the political and economic crisis deepened, some regions adopted price and export controls to protect their citizens. As in the case of the oligarchs, Yeltsin dispensed privileges and property in exchange for political support, codifying such deals in bilateral treaties with over half of the regions.