What was the role of Skokov in Yeltsin’s ingroup? It was a reasonable question. Skokov was really my “shadow” prime minister. . . . I understood that his general political position, in economics above all, was quite different from mine and from the positions of Gaidar and Burbulis. His double-dealing always concerned my supporters. But I thought that if a person understood that it was necessary in today’s Russia to work for a strong government and not against it, then what was wrong with that? Let the shadow premier . . . urge on the real prime minister.55
Yeltsin lost faith in Skokov and fired him only when he dissented from Kremlin policy toward the parliament in the spring of 1993.
Chernomyrdin, who got the prime minister’s job in December 1992, would not have lasted for almost two-thirds of the Yeltsin presidency if he had not been forbearing toward his leader’s juggling of people and interests and had not displayed some of the same aptitude himself. The construction organizer Oleg Lobov, from Sverdlovsk, acquired some of Skokov’s and Deputy Premier Georgii Khizha’s military-industrial responsibilities and fought to decelerate the privatization program. Lobov wrote several memorandums to this effect to Yeltsin: “He never expressed dissatisfaction about what I wrote. He never said I was not right. No, he was surprised that my memos were not moving forward or being looked into.”56 Metallurgist Oleg Soskovets was named the ranking of the deputy premiers in the autumn of 1993, answering for heavy industry and the defense complex and chairing the cabinet’s committee on daily “operational questions.” He lobbied unabashedly for state credits, bailouts, and tariff barriers and, through Korzhakov, had a privileged relationship with Yeltsin. He was a thorn in Chernomyrdin’s side until his dismissal in June 1996.57
President Yeltsin was not unobservant of the hazards of his polycentric modus operandi. Beginning in 1991, he deployed several safeguards to prevent balkanization from degenerating into chaos. One of those was to declare proprietary rights over the ultrasensitive precinct of national security and foreign policy and put it out of bounds to all but him and the agency heads. Yeltsin met one-on-one weekly with his foreign minister, spy chief, and police ministers and shut the prime minister and most of the Kremlin staff out of those colloquies.
Another low-cost response was to infiltrate protégés from earlier in his career into strategic positions, as Soviet party bosses had always done. Because Yeltsin’s term as head of the Moscow party organization had been so brief and doleful, few products of it worked in his presidential office. The main exceptions were Viktor Ilyushin (who started with him in Sverdlovsk), Valerii Semenchenko, and Mikhail Poltoranin. The best pool Yeltsin had at his disposal was the “Sverdlovsk diaspora,” the old-boy network whence he drew his chief of staff from 1991 to 1993 (Yurii Petrov), his senior presidential assistant from 1991 to 1996 (Ilyushin), the head of the Kremlin business department before Pavel Borodin (Fëdor Morshchakov), and a representative in the Council of Ministers and Security Council (the peripatetic Oleg Lobov).58 Gennadii Burbulis, head speech writer Lyudmila Pikhoya, and her colleague Aleksandr Il’in were Sverdlovskers but low-ranking members of the professoriate—advantageously for them, at Yeltsin’s alma mater, UPI.59 “You feel more confident, you feel certain warmth, among people from your area
A related habit for Yeltsin was to find new favorites. These might be all-round comrades and purveyors of good cheer with whom he had
