The Yeltsin constitution of 1993 cleared up the struggle between the executive and the legislative wings. Other than excising the vice presidency, which Aleksandr Rutskoi had made a base for attacking the president, it did little to bring order to the executive. One option would have been to snuff out its structural duality. Gennadii Burbulis had wanted to scrap the office of prime minister and make the president a U.S.-type chief executive, with agency heads reporting to him and forming a presidential cabinet. He saw Yeltsin’s combination of the posts of president and premier in the autumn of 1991 as a first step toward realizing his goal. Initially open to the suggestion, Yeltsin was unalterably against it by mid-1992, wanting someone else do the legwork on reform and be a lightning rod. As Burbulis put it in an interview, “The president’s path [Yeltsin thought] would be the main source of will on questions of direction. The difficulties, pain, and burdensome decisions at any given moment would be undertaken by others, who could be removed [if they failed].”33 The new constitution reaffirmed the separation between a popularly elected president and a prime minister confirmed by parliament and in day-to-day charge of the civilian bureaucracy and the budget. The arrangement resembled the Gaullist Fifth Republic in France. In a way, it also honored the Soviet legacy: For most of the communist period, different individuals served as general secretary of the Communist Party and chairman of the USSR government, with the former, like the post-Soviet Russian president, very much in the driver’s seat.
The dispersive undercurrents within the state apparatus were never enough to prod Yeltsin into radical action. The bureaucracy, no longer the handmaiden of the CPSU apparatus, and with its economic monopoly burst by market reform, seemed to him a headless monster and not an immediate threat. Making it less corrupt and more responsive were desirable objectives but low on his to-do list. A ranking official who was caught red-handed peddling influence stood to be fired. In August 1993, for example, Yeltsin released Viktor Barannikov, the minister of security, for taking bribes. Barannikov then switched sides in the constitutional dogfight and was arrested after the October violence. In November 1994 Yeltsin removed Deputy Defense Minister Matvei Burlakov, who had been accused in the press of profiteering from the evacuation of troops from Germany, but the general was never prosecuted. On systemic graft, kickbacks, and falsification, Yeltsin promulgated ameliorative decrees to little effect. To the demand of Grigorii Yavlinskii, the leader of the liberal Yabloko Party, that he make a full-scale attack on corruption as a condition of Yavlinskii supporting him in the 1996 presidential election, Yeltsin came back with a shrug of the shoulders: “So what can I do about it? This is Russia, after all.”34
Boris Yeltsin as decision maker should be measured by an appropriate yardstick. Innovative statesmen in democracies or half-democracies do not address the dilemmas of the day singlehandedly. They identify problems, stir the pot, and begin to act. When followers join in, it may mainly serve the leader’s requirements and ramify his influence; empower followers to mold the relationship, so that leaders wind up following the followers; or mutually empower, as it was with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition in the United States in the 1930s. The most successful leaders respond to the material and psychic needs of followers and motivate them to invest in the shared cause and to help fix its terms.35
The early Yeltsin fostered mutual empowerment with acolytes on the street and in the halls of power. Once in the Kremlin, he still did, only with the difference that his empowerment of others tended to be ambiguous and, one could say, schizoid—the authorization of persons with multiple outlooks to speak and act in his name, either serially or simultaneously. The president’s team was deficient in teamwork.
