Yeltsin’s iffy health necessarily affected decision making in other regards. Yurii Yarov, who supplanted Ilyushin as superintendent of his schedule, cut back on meetings, which made for glancing contact with some of his officials and next to none with others. Early in the 1990s, Yeltsin had hosted up to twenty visitors a day to his study, and a prime minister, first deputy premier, or foreign minister could count on running into him five days a week. After 1996, only his chief of staff and press secretary (and Dyachenko) were in daily touch and the names on his calendar for weekly or biweekly meetings were down to a half dozen. The Kremlin’s lead speech writer, Lyudmila Pikhoya, who huddled with Yeltsin once or twice a day in the first term, usually at her initiative, was seeing him once or twice a month, and communicating with him mostly on the telephone hotline, when she departed in the late 1990s.78 As the press reported, formal Kremlin briefings were quite often canceled. In the first three months of 1998, Yeltsin called off nine of his scheduled get-togethers with Chernomyrdin and met only once in his office with the foreign minister, twice with the minister of the interior, three times with the head of the FSB (Federal Security Service), four times with the defense minister, and not once with the chief of foreign intelligence. 79 What the press rarely divulged was that many of these meetings were held at Gorki-9, Zavidovo, a vacation spot, or, if Yeltsin was under the weather, in the Barvikha sanatorium or even in hospital. Failing that, telephone calls replaced face-to-face conversations. With top functionaries, Yeltsin clung religiously to the weekly reports in whatever form was available. 80 The further down the line an official was, the more likely he was to have phone contact only. That was tolerable for workers who knew the boss well but not for new recruits, some of whom were never to have a single substantive talk with him. Yeltsin’s travel outside of Moscow was also restricted, and provincial leaders found it much harder to get in the door than before, although some did manage to take appeals to him to reverse decisions made by other federal officials. Nonstaff advisers, who had intermittent access in the first term, had little in the second. Yeltsin’s Presidential Council, though never disbanded, was not to meet after February of 1996.
The mooted “fundamental reform” of the state was explored but never brought to life. Kremlin assistants Mikhail Krasnov and Georgii Satarov got Yeltsin to write the commitment into his March 1997 address to parliament. Although they preferred a reform that encompassed rule-of-law questions and the judiciary, the task was narrowed to the executive branch. By August 1997 Krasnov had produced three drafts of a conceptual document, and by March of 1998 twelve. The thrust was to simplify the bureaucratic estate, make it less opaque, and institute a merit-based, Western-style civil service. Yeltsin was agreeable but unprepared to invest in the project. Yumashev did not make it a high priority, either. In the summer of 1998, as economic and political problems accumulated (see Chapter 16), the report was quietly tabled and Krasnov left office.81
The ouster of Lebed, Ryurikov, and Defense Minister Rodionov showed that Yeltsin kept the capacity to make mincemeat out of any lesser official who dared provoke him. The passage of time did not tranquilize the governing stratum. Far from slowing down, the revolving door for officials swung faster in the second term than in the first. Deputy premiers served for an average of eight months in the second term, compared to sixteen months in the first; for other government ministers, the drop was to fifteen months in the second term from twenty-three months in the first term. Of the informal coordination mechanisms on which Yeltsin placed some reliance in 1991–96, several were inapplicable after 1996. The extramural fraternization withered as tennis matches, collective soaks in the steambath, and like pursuits became but a pleasant memory. The Presidential Club ceased to function; in 1997 the buildings on the Sparrow Hills were turned over to receptions and conferences. The inflow of trusted townsmen from Sverdlovsk also dried up. Those associates Yeltsin valued most had made their contribution and gone on to other things, and he did not want to be identified with a territorial subgroup.82 Yeltsin was as antipathetic as ever to collegial procedures for bringing about more coherent governance. Interior Minister Kulikov proposed to him twice that a new State Council be created, “with the powers of the Politburo,” partly to correct for Yeltsin’s physical incapacity. He says he explained to Yeltsin, “One head is good but ten are better!” The president indicated sympathy but did not reply when Kulikov sent him a memorandum elaborating on the idea.83
