“If you don’t mind, Boris Nikolayevich, I would like a private word with you when the session of the Defense Council is over, and I will give you an answer then.”
“Fine, sit down.”
The president turned to the secretary of the Defense Council [Yurii Baturin], seated at his left hand, and uttered a single word: “Decrees.”
Baturin left to phone the State Legal Directorate, which was responsible for composing presidential decrees. While Yeltsin was delivering an irate and not exactly fair speech berating the generals, several alternative draft decrees were brought over from the directorate—alternatives, since there was no clarity about the chief of the General Staff. Having had his say, the president headed off to the defense minister’s office for the talk with Chechevatov. All of a sudden, on his way there, he handed his aide a form on which he had written, “Call in [Anatolii] Kvashnin [the commander of the North Caucasus Military District] for a chat.” Yeltsin had made up his mind that Chechevatov was not to be chief of the General Staff. If he had not agreed to the offer right away, so be it. The president does not offer twice. He almost never made exceptions to this rule of his.
Soon [on May 23] Anatolii Kvashnin was appointed chief of the General Staff. And Yeltsin was to work well with the new defense minister, Igor Sergeyev, and always respected him greatly.47
Yeltsin had evidently all but made up his mind to dismiss Rodionov before the meeting. The flow of it confirmed his decision and then had unexpected knock-on effects in the General Staff.48
Out of uniform, Rodionov turned to forming a lobby organization for retired officers; in 1999 he was elected to the Duma on the KPRF ticket. Like Lebed and Ryurikov, he may have had reasons to feel abused on the substance of policy, and he and Samsonov (and the poor Chechevatov) had more reason than the others to dislike the way they were disciplined.49 All, however, had brought this penalty on their own heads by misreading Yeltsin and poaching on presidential turf. As the saying goes, when the cat’s away, the mice will play. The cat was back from limbo, though not for too long.
Right after his second-round victory over Gennadii Zyuganov, Yeltsin tested the turbid waters of cultural and symbolic politics. Speaking laboredly at a reception for several hundred campaign workers on July 12, 1996, and presenting them with wristwatches as souvenirs, Sverdlovsk-style, he thanked them for their assistance and asked them not to twiddle their thumbs now that the election had been won. The new Russia, he said, in contradistinction to the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union, lacked a “national idea” or “national ideology,” “and that is too bad.” He asked them to give it some thought and promised to ask for a report by one year later, saying it would come in handy then or when his successor was elected in 2000.50 Yeltsin appointed an advisory committee chaired by his Kremlin assistant for political affairs, Georgii Satarov, and the government newspaper
The project fizzled on the launching pad. Satarov denied that Yeltsin meant to enact some Soviet-type ruling doctrine. No, what was being proposed was a consensual process to discover an idea that already existed in the minds of Russians, as opposed to inflicting one on them: “A national idea cannot be imposed by the state but should come from the bottom up. The president is not saying, ‘I’m going to give you a national idea.’ On the contrary, he is asking, ‘Go out and find it.’”51
