Another expression of this same approach was Yeltsin’s acting as a court of appeal for suppliants. It was a partial continuation both of his populism, which implied listening to voices from below, and of his CPSU bossism, which gave the chief the right to settle disputes over resources. Yeltsin acted in this mode with the greatest frequency in his first several years in the Kremlin. “Witnesses say,” wrote one political journalist, “that from morning to evening Yeltsin’s reception area is under attack by foot-messengers and applicants with draft decrees in their pockets.” Since there were many more requests than Yeltsin could give thoughtful consideration to, the process let well-placed bureaucrats decide whom to give “access to the body” (Yeltsin’s) and which edicts to give priority to, with no one looking out for coherency and comprehensibility. “They commission expert reviews of the drafts and assess their results. They ‘report’ drafts for [the president’s] signature, correcting the texts by their lights. As a result, today’s decrees often contradict yesterday’s decrees and the-day-before-yesterday’s.”42
Mindful of the danger, managers on the Kremlin staff tried throughout the first term to rationalize the process by restricting access to Yeltsin by suitors for loans, subventions, and pork-barrel projects. Decree No. 226 in February 1995, written by Aleksandr Livshits and Anatolii Chubais, lifted the bar by requiring that any presidential decision touching on the budget kitty first be authorized by the Council of Ministers. Yeltsin found ways around this rigmarole, mostly by issuing offhand rulings. The Presidential Business Department and the Center for Presidential Priorities, headed by Nikolai Malyshev, provided convenient off-the-books funds, and provincial governors could always be enmeshed in the same spirit. Yevgenii Yasin, Yeltsin’s economics minister in 1995, shortly after adoption of Decree No. 226, protested a promise to extend financial credits for retooling to the Krasnodar Automotive Works. Yeltsin remonstrated, “And who is president of Russia? They have told me you are a saboteur, and now that is obvious. I gave you an instruction. How to carry it out is your problem.” A loophole was eventually found and the loan funded.43
The phenomenon was larger than Yeltsin. It was rooted also in the governing cohort he assembled, which sector by sector and across them all was fractious and fluctuating. Why so? Some of it was out of Yeltsin’s hands, in that he had to split the difference over personnel and policy with other forces in the political system. Inside the executive, the CPSU horse collar was not succeeded by the norms of rule of law and collective responsibility that prevail in the cabinets and bureaucracies of established democracies. Faced with uncertainty, government bureaus strove for autarky, and jurisdictional boundaries among them, not crisp to begin with, were imprecise in the extreme—“everyone was interested in everything.”44 The legislature was another serious constraint on Yeltsin. The Congress of People’s Deputies was the main factor behind the removal of economic liberals like Yegor Gaidar and the promotion of more conservative figures like Viktor Chernomyrdin. Although the State Duma had fewer powers than the congress, Yeltsin continued to make concessions, “willing to sacrifice . . . executive officials at critical junctures in order to placate a parliament that was hostile to zealous reformers.”45 This happened after both the 1993 and the 1995 Duma elections. Gaidar left the government for the second time after the first; Chubais and Foreign Minister Kozyrev were among those demoted after the second.
But Yeltsin and his preferences were also centrally involved in building disunity into the executive. For one thing, he liked to take his chances with individuals whose egos were as strong as his. He several times told Chubais that “he really liked working with bright people and even with people brighter than he.”46 He would never select a collaborator who was after his throne or discourteous toward him. Within those doughy limits, personal qualities weighed almost as much as opinions. Policy intellectuals and semi-intellectuals, red directors from the planned economy, ex-apparatchiks, journalists, security officers, oligarchs and their tagalongs—Yeltsin found room for all of them under his institutional big tent. Were someone not to work out, he would be handed his walking papers, and that would be that.
