Petrov and then Filatov had some substantive impact on policy, but had to compete for Yeltsin’s ear with a squadron of policy experts reporting to him through separate ganglia. In 1993 Yeltsin began to appoint thematic presidential assistants (pomoshchniks), who were either former party or state placemen of a technocratic stripe or Moscow intellectuals, mostly of a democratic orientation. In the group of about twelve assistants, Anatolii Korabel’shchikov (who managed relations with the provinces) and Dmitrii Ryurikov (a professional diplomat who coordinated foreign policy) were the most prominent representatives of the first category; Yurii Baturin (assistant for national security), Georgii Satarov (domestic politics), and Aleksandr Livshits (economics) were the most prominent from the second category.79 These individuals, a generation younger than the president, were required to communicate with him not through Filatov but through Viktor Ilyushin, the tight-lipped apparatchik from Sverdlovsk who was responsible for blocking out Yeltsin’s workday. Filatov, Ilyushin, and their respective groupings were rivals from the start. This was no accident. “For a long time, the president’s apparatus had two leaders. . . . The president saw the contradictions but did nothing to efface them. . . . Often Yeltsin even encouraged antagonism between parts of his executive office and between individuals. It seemed to him that this would make it easier to control things and avert any one person increasing his influence unduly.”80
There was another generator of dissonance: Aleksandr Korzhakov and the Presidential Security Service. The service was founded in 1990 as a small bodyguard for Yeltsin as parliamentary chairman. Upgraded in 1992, it was on paper part of the Main Protection Directorate (previously the Ninth Directorate of the KGB), but that agency was headed by Mikhail Barsukov, a brother officer Korzhakov had known since 1979, whose son was married to Korzhakov’s daughter, and who was willing to give him autonomy. Korzhakov freely admits in his memoirs that he was given to role expansion even in the first leg of his service to Yeltsin, in the Moscow party committee from 1985 to 1987.81 In national government, his star soared after the principal security forces flubbed the operation against parliament in October 1993. Yeltsin took to calling the service his “mini-KGB” and acceded to Korzhakov’s demand for status parity with Filatov and Ilyushin, enlargement of the service—it went from 250 men in September 1991 to 829 by June 1996—and improvement of their pay, housing conditions, and weaponry. Korzhakov convinced Yeltsin that, beyond keeping him safe, the service would fight corruption in the Kremlin and in the bowels of the bureaucracy.82
Armed with an unpublished presidential decree dated November 11, 1993, Korzhakov tapped telephones and fed Yeltsin dossiers of surreptitiously gathered compromising material (kompromat) on officials. Filatov, a target, sounded off in the press about Korzhakov turning the executive office into “a team of stoolpigeons.”83 Yeltsin, he said in an interview, “began to toss [Korzhakov’s] letters back to him,” but they kept coming, and some were directed to Prime Minister Chernomyrdin and other cabinet ministers.84 Unfazed, Korzhakov formed an in-house “analytical center” that made proposals on a wide range of public issues and badmouthed market reforms. Beginning in 1994, he wrote sharp letters on economic and other policy problems unrelated to his job description, not only to Yeltsin but to high-ranking leaders, including Chernomyrdin, and leaked information about his views to the media.85 By this time, Korzhakov was also a force in personnel decisions. Pavel Borodin and First Deputy Premier Soskovets were friends and allies of his, and in his last year in the Kremlin he had the principal say over the designation of a chief of the FSB (Barsukov), procurator general (Yurii Skuratov), and press secretary to Yeltsin (Sergei Medvedev).86 In January 1996 he engineered the replacement of Filatov by Nikolai Yegorov, the former governor of Krasnodar province, a hard-liner on Chechnya (who had been demoted from a ministerial position after Budënnovsk), and a man of “haughty manners and a slighting attitude toward those occupying more modest posts than he in the hierarchy of state service.”87 Korzhakov pressed Yeltsin to make Soskovets prime minister in Chernomyrdin’s place.88 And in the early months of 1996, he and Soskovets controlled the organization of Yeltsin’s campaign for re-election (see Chapter 14).
Yeltsin was later driven to lament the wideness of Korzhakov’s reach:
