Yeltsin полностью

Korzhakov came to influence the appointment of people in the government, in the executive office, and in the power [security] ministries. . . . With every passing month and year, the political role of the . . . guard service . . . and concretely of Korzhakov grew. Korzhakov fought tooth and nail with everyone who did not submit to him and anyone he considered “alien.” He interfered in the work of my secretariat and violated established procedures to bring his own documents to me. He fought with Filatov and Ilyushin and tried through Oleg Soskovets to have a say in the country’s economic policy. . . . I take full responsibility for his unbelievable rise and his deserved fall. It was my mistake, and I had to pay for it.⁸⁹

Yeltsin came to this wisdom in the rearview mirror. During his first term, though, it was his indulgence of Korzhakov that taught the Moscow high and mighty that the ex-watchman was a man to be feared and propitiated. Korzhakov family celebrations, such as his daughter’s nuptials and his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, became must-show events. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin gave the newlyweds a handsome china set. When Yeltsin dropped in on the silver anniversary party, Chernomyrdin, if Korzhakov can be believed, pouted because he had not been invited.⁹⁰ Korzhakov’s public reputation shot to rarefied heights. To go by the experts’ poll published monthly in newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta, beginning in late 1994, he was ranked among the ten most powerful political figures in the country. In November 1995 he placed fourth, behind no one but the president, the prime minister, and Mayor Luzhkov; in January 1996 he was fourth again, trailing only Yeltsin, Gennadii Zyuganov (the communist leader, who was about to run for president against Yeltsin), and Chernomyrdin.

The subdivision of executive authority between president and prime minister was sanctioned by Russia’s constitution and laws. It created, as Yeltsin observed in 1994 in Notes of a President, “a second center of power” within the state—existing on the sufferance of the first center yet still formidable—and this did not disturb him.⁹¹ To curb centrifugal tendencies in the formal structures of the state and to make decisions as he saw fit, Yeltsin had recourse to informal and personalistic means, some of them concocted anew, some of them out of the Soviet or pre-Soviet Russian armory. In Midnight Diaries, published in 2000, Yeltsin looked back at the Kremlin of the early and middle 1990s and remarked that it harbored a multiplicity of “informal leaders” and “centers of power” pushing in contradictory directions.⁹² The institutional remedy for polycentric government, Yeltsin’s shop within the executive branch, was itself wantonly polycentric—more tower of Babel than beacon of strength.

This outcome was reached with Yeltsin’s cooperation. It was a fine example of a paradox of post-communism, as dissected by the sociologist Alena Ledeneva—“that informal practices are important because of their ability to compensate for defects in the formal order while simultaneously undermining it.” This contradiction, Ledeneva adds, “serves to explain why things in Russia are never quite as bad or as good as they seem.”⁹³ Governing the state from 1991 to 1996 the way he did allowed Yeltsin to maintain his power within it and avail himself of diverse talent and knowledge. He orchestrated a leader-centered ruling coalition by cowing and cajoling political and bureaucratic actors into compliance, playing potential rivals off against one another, and accepting—even glorying in—compromise and ambiguity in policy. That same mix of tactics, however, came at a price. It left the program for transforming Russia less integrated in its content, and jerkier in its phasing, than it ought to have been.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Reconnecting

The replenishment of his electoral mandate in June–July 1996 was a peerless ordering moment in the Yeltsin presidency. Holding an election for chief executive on track and in more or less competitive fashion affirmed the post-communist regime and its reliance on popular consent. Yeltsin’s 1996 victory must rate with the 1991 putsch as his magic hour as practitioner of mass politics. It gave him a fresh lease on political life and another crack at governing, at heavy cost to his health. It prevented neo-communists from retaking power and undoing some or all of the changes of the preceding decade. And it pulled new participants, and new techniques for exercising influence, onto Russia’s civil stage.