Yeltsin полностью

Another member of the coterie was Tatyana Dyachenko, who had no formal role in government after the 1996 campaign. When Yeltsin returned to work in 1997, he realized that he wanted her involvement, yet was illpositioned to ask for it since he had always segregated home from work and had censured Gorbachev for nepotism in making his wife a public figure. He recalled hearing that Claude Chirac, the daughter of President Chirac of France, had been a special adviser to her father since 1994. He asked the Chiracs to receive Tatyana and explain how the arrangement worked. She went to Paris and was satisfied, and on June 30, 1997, Yeltsin had Yumashev name her to the Kremlin staff and assign her an office on the presidential floor of Building No. 1. It was explained that she would be his image adviser (sovetnik po imidzhu).⁷⁵ Her alliance with Yumashev was close and at this point political and platonic only. They would marry in 2001, after Yeltsin and the two of them were out of politics.

Dyachenko’s meteoric rise, her familial relationship with the chief, and his frequent nonattendance stoked the impression that she filled a void and was a major power in Russian politics. In the savants’ ratings of influence carried monthly by Nezavisimaya gazeta, she showed up in the top twenty-five in September 1996 and in the top ten in July 1997, where she remained until the end of 1999. She was to be ranked as high as third in the nation in June, October, and November of 1999.

That Dyachenko was a significant presence is beyond doubt. She busied herself with much more than Yeltsin’s image, as she traveled with him, made the odd foray to the provinces as his surrogate, sat in on staff meetings, edited speeches, and was the back-channel communications conduit to him. Her main role, she said in an interview, “was that I could tell Papa certain unpleasant things, which for other people, you see, it was not so comfortable to do. . . . I was better able to find the right moment and the necessary words.” But the understanding between father and daughter was that in general she was to express opinions only on matters that he broached to her or that flowed from assignments she had been tending to at his request. She had no right to raise questions about personnel unless invited and never weighed in on security-related issues. She did not make public statements or deal with journalists. Neither did she possess anything like the standard bureaucratic toolkit. She had only one aide and no authority whatsoever to sign directive documents or commit government funds.⁷⁶ Unlike Boris Yeltsin and her older sister, and like her mother, Tatyana did not have much talent for organization or time management.⁷⁷ And, in the grand scheme of things, she did not have a political agenda or preferences of her own. Dyachenko was no vizier, and there never was a Dyachenko program or strategy autonomous of Yeltsin’s.