Yeltsin did not put forth a spic-and-span approach or methodology for resuming the passage from one shore to the other. The emphasis was on two more measured points. The first was the need to reinvigorate economic reform through a stronger effort to draw the line between the public and the private arenas. Over the five years since the introduction of shock therapy, “the state has not mastered effective methods for regulating the market” and was standing in the way of a resumption of growth. Government, the president complained, “interferes in the economy in areas where it should not be doing that, and in places where it should be doing something it is inactive.” The second moral of the March 6 speech was that national government had to put its own house in order. The executive branch needed fundamental reform and to learn how to coordinate its efforts within a range of duties narrowed down from the all-embracing socialist state. Without that, it would continue to act like a fire brigade, rushing from one minicrisis to the next.69
The end to the Kremlin tenure of Aleksandr Korzhakov in June 1996 convinced Yeltsin to tame the sulfurous discord within the Presidential Executive Office. Korzhakov’s mini-KGB lost its surveillance rights and was folded into the larger body (headed by Mikhail Barsukov until he went down with Korzhakov) henceforth known as the Federal Protection Service. It steered clear of high politics for the rest of the 1990s. The crash-and-burn of Aleksandr Lebed in October quickly removed another threat to amity in the executive.70
Yeltsin brought Anatolii Chubais into the Kremlin establishment in July 1996 so as to give it a long-needed overhaul. The first Yeltsin lieutenant to carry a laptop computer, Chubais wasted no time weeding out parallel subunits and positions, centralizing decision making, and imposing a managerial style with a stricter division of labor and command hierarchy. The supernumerary post of senior assistant, held until the election by Viktor Ilyushin, was done away with. All aides now reported to the president through the one chief of staff and his deputies. The pre-1996 presidential assistants, most of them intellectuals by background, were allowed to stay with pruned responsibilities. The new crowd had less experience in academe and more in public administration, communications, and, in some cases, private business.71
This change came at the expense not only of the infighting of earlier days but of their restless energy. The old crowd did not take kindly to it. As a group of them were to write in 2001, “The time had passed when Yeltsin needed ‘eggheads’ to help him figure out pieces of ‘the transition to democracy.’ . . . Now the inconveniences presented by independent people outweighed their merits.”72 The eggheads left one at a time, the last departures being in mid-1998. At least one of the separations took a strange turn. Yurii Baturin, who had been the presidential assistant for legal and security policy, made inquiries about satisfying his life’s dream of training as a cosmonaut. Yeltsin heard of it, said all was well, and then fired him on August 28, 1997. Rushing back to Moscow from vacation, Baturin received a handshake, a two-minute audience, and an autographed photo portrait. Unhindered by Yeltsin, he was accepted into the space program in September and flew on two space missions.73 The duplicative Defense Council he had run for a year was abolished soon after.
Besides policy implementation, Yeltsin’s reshaped team immersed itself in public relations, the art that had allowed him to keep his job in the 1996 election. The Chubais “analytical group” was continued after inauguration as a session on “political planning” that met every Friday at ten A.M. and was chaired at first by Maksim Boiko, a Chubais deputy.74 Yeltsin agreed to give a weekly address to maintain contact with the electors. The chosen medium was national radio, which was judged friendlier than television and better at masking his infirmities. Ten-minute chats, taped on Fridays, went on the air every Saturday morning until the summer of 1998.
A regular in the Friday group was Valentin Yumashev, the Urals-born journalist and editor, amanuensis for the Yeltsin memoirs, and friend of the family. At age thirty-nine, he was made head of the executive office on March 11, 1997, in place of Chubais, who went to the government chambers in the White House. Yumashev stuck in the main to the Chubais mold, although, with no governmental experience, he had nothing like Chubais’s political heft.
