The backbiting would have been extraneous unless Yeltsin had the reservations he did. They went back to the rationale for the State Council, which, as Stankevich was later to say frankly, was “to make up for [Yeltsin’s] shortcomings” and for his “inadequate vision of the future.”66 Getting his back up at the tutorship, Yeltsin waffled. He would not commit to a firm schedule or appoint more counselors, and missed most of the early sessions. This left Burbulis to lead them, which it was hard to do when political heavyweights sat around the table. Yeltsin took offense at press reports that the council would elevate the tone of government and that Burbulis was his “gray cardinal,” pulling wires from backstage: “This, of course, was balderdash. For there to be a ‘cardinal,’ the person in the president’s chair would have had to be spineless, soft, and apathetic,” adjectives inapplicable to the first president of Russia.67 The State Council convened about twice a month until Yeltsin abolished it in May 1992. Of the counselors, now “presidential advisers,” Shakhrai made a good career as a government minister, Lakhova entered electoral politics, and Skokov stayed on in the Security Council Yeltsin established by decree in April 1992. Burbulis and Starovoitova walked the plank in November 1992 and Stankevich, after losing his Kremlin office and hotline connection to the president, in December 1993.68 A Presidential Council, chaired by Yeltsin, continued to function throughout his first term as an unpaid sounding board for thirty or so opinion makers and an audition chamber for future aides.
From time to time, journalists and analysts would proclaim that some other body was succeeding where the State Council had not. Invariably, speculation about the latest candidate petered out. Modest requests by staffers for small-group meetings with the president were laughed off. At the reception for Yeltsin’s sixty-third birthday in 1994, assistant Georgii Satarov saluted him and said it would be good if all his aides sat down with him once a week. Yeltsin said no: “Why is this necessary? After all, each of you can come to see me and chat. What do you want to do, bring back the Politburo?”69
Yeltsin put higher stock in two other ways of mitigating the unruliness of the executive branch. The first was the extramural hobnobbing that he had practiced in the Sverdlovsk committee of the CPSU. An aspect of it was the new apartment house in Krylatskoye, which the Yeltsins made their legal Moscow domicile in 1994. Chernomyrdin, Korzhakov, Gaidar, Borodin, and Yurii Luzhkov were among the tenants who danced to a live orchestra at the housewarming. The building was a poor stimulant of friendly feelings, since the family rarely overnighted in their flat and those registered there, like them, lived mostly at country homes. Those who stayed behind avoided their neighbors due to political disagreements and to a psychological reaction against being cooped up in the same company.70
Yeltsin sank more effort into an association named the Presidential Club. It was established in June 1993 in a facility taken over from the CPSU Central Committee at 42 Kosygin Street, on the Sparrow (formerly Lenin) Hills. Yeltsin got the idea, through Korzhakov and Shamil Tarpishchev, from the Il’inka Sports Club attached to the Council of Ministers. The plant combined a sports complex (covered tennis courts, a swimming pool, a weight room) with lounges, a restaurant, and a movie theater. Yeltsin played doubles tennis at the club with Tarpishchev twice a week and others when possible. His most rollicking steambath parties and dinners were held there, and some political scuttlebutt was digested with the meals and drinks. Yeltsin was president of his club, which was to be for “people who are close in spirit and in views, who like one another, and who want to see one another regularly.”71
