Cleaning up unpaid wages and social allowances was like rolling a boulder up a steep hill again and again. To give the government the wherewithal to make good on claims, Yeltsin in October 1996 appointed a Temporary Extraordinary Commission for Strengthening Tax and Budgetary Discipline. Chaired by the prime minister, it went colloquially by the name VChK, a contraction of three of the Cyrillic letters in its tongue-twisting title—the very same acronym as the first version of the Soviet secret police in 1917, and taken as instilling the Kremlin’s seriousness of purpose. Yeltsin thought the problem well on the way to solution until he met with the commission in January 1997 and learned there was no timetable for catching up in the state sector. He threatened to issue a decree mandating full back payment of pensions by April 1 and then settled grumpily for a July 1 deadline.41 There was no fix by July 1. Only strenuous effort got the total nonpayments in the economy by year’s end down to the level of about $8 billion where they had stood in January, and they were to rise in the first half of 1998. Individuals and Russian families made adjustments on their own, as well as they could.42
The most urgent item on the presidential agenda was Chechnya, where fighting had resumed right after the electoral runoff. On August 6, 1996, Chechen units commanded by Aslan Maskhadov attacked Grozny. The Russians under Konstantin Pulikovskii counterattacked, and the city was ablaze as Yeltsin took his oath of office. On August 11 he made Aleksandr Lebed, the electoral rival whom he had brought into his administration in between rounds of the election, his personal envoy to the republic and ordered him to hammer out an agreement that would honor his pledge to put a stop to the war and bring the boys home. With General Pulikovskii’s troops encircled and running short of supplies, Lebed and Maskhadov signed an armistice at Khasavyurt, Dagestan, on August 30. Yeltsin may have been able to push around the Chechen delegation in the Kremlin in May; on the field of battle, the superior morale and mobility of the rebels gave them the edge over the Russian conscripts. Khasavyurt deferred determination of the province’s final status until 2001 and made provision for the exodus of all army and MVD forces. Yeltsin and Maskhadov, by then the elected president of Chechnya, would formalize the agreement as a treaty on May 12, 1997. The Chechens had won de facto recognition, the expunging of all Muscovite influence, and a promise of economic aid. Yeltsin had bought peace, at a heavy price but one that public opinion at the time wanted paid.
Dissension over Chechnya between Lebed and Anatolii Kulikov, the free-spoken interior minister who had helped talk Yeltsin out of canceling the presidential election, and who was on close terms with Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, broke into the open in September 1996. Kulikov, not without reason, felt the Khasavyurt terms were ambiguous and that it was only a matter of time before the war restarted. Lebed further antagonized him by reproving the MVD troops under Kulikov’s command and, says Kulikov, by scheming to institute a “Russian Legion,” a crack military force that would report to Lebed as national security adviser and would be reinforced by 1,500 Chechen guerrillas. Anatolii Chubais publicly backed Kulikov and drew counterfire from Lebed.43
As Yeltsin saw it, the general in mufti was after bigger game than Kulikov or Chubais. It was no coincidence that Lebed had picked this moment to strut his stuff: “All that went on in the Kremlin during those months was closely connected with one specific circumstance—my illness.” Yeltsin disliked Lebed’s pugilism about everything under the sun and, worse, his transparent attempt to come across as the alternative to an infirm civilian leader: “With his demeanor, he was trying to show that the president is doing badly and I, the general-politician, am ready to take his place . . . [and] I alone know how to communicate with the people at this trying moment.” The last straw was when Lebed had the impertinence to call on September 28 for the president to step down from office until he was fully recovered from surgery. Yeltsin stayed his hand for several weeks because, interestingly, Lebed “someways reminded me of myself, only in caricatured form.”44 On October 17 Yeltsin came out of preoperative quarantine to fire Lebed and found the strength to shoot a clip about the decision for the evening news, in which he compared Lebed, not to himself, but to another politicized general, Aleksandr Korzhakov.45 Lebed had made it through nearly four months on the job. As was his way, Yeltsin did not further punish the defrocked comrade. Lebed spent the coming year networking and raising funds; in May 1998 he won election as governor of the Siberian province of Krasnoyarsk.
