Even as he went along with the limited cleanup Chubais promoted, there was something in Yeltsin that made him continue to abhor an overly systematic, impersonal approach to governing Russia. Sergei Kiriyenko, who was first deputy minister and then minister of fuel and energy for a year until taking over the prime ministership in the spring of 1998, remembered the attitude well from the safaris outside of Moscow on which he accompanied the president:
Boris Nikolayevich, who . . . had such a feeling for power, did not very much like to take the hierarchy into account. . . . He vented a sort of internal democratism. If he had decrees or decisions to sign, he was likely to do it on a tractor or on a tank or, I don’t know, on the tire of a bus or at a mill or factory. This was not just public relations, it was a reflection of his heart and soul, of protest again the hated bureaucratic machine of Soviet times. His directives were never written so as to encourage the implementers to maneuver or palm things off. But everybody wanted to palm [costs] off anyway. . . . This is what got us into the nonsense of [granting favors] that were not in the interests of the state. [Yeltsin would tell us that] there was a promise; it had to be discharged right away or on a three-day deadline, and so on. After the fact, it was very hard to persuade him that the supplicant—for example, the governor who sent him a letter in which he lied barefacedly about being owed subsidies from the budget—should have his ears boxed. This was very tough. . . . It was like getting him to part with a dear toy. . . . My feeling was less that he had trouble letting go of financial questions per se than that he was irked that, “Heck, everything is already decided,” and he was unable to take care of problems expeditiously. He seemed to think, “Here we go again with all this bureaucracy, studying and checking everything. I don’t give a fig; you people aren’t able to decide anything.”84
Heart and soul, the late Yeltsin still believed in his right to make decisions on the go. No amount of organizational streamlining could have gotten him to give it up.
A few changes were made in the Council of Ministers after the confirmation of Viktor Chernomyrdin by the Duma in August 1996. Vladimir Potanin, appointed first deputy premier for macroeconomics at Chubais’s behest, was the first private businessman to take high political office. Boris Berezovskii was the second when he was made deputy secretary of the Security Council in October. Chernomyrdin brought in miscellaneous red directors, and Viktor Ilyushin and Aleksandr Livshits moved over from the executive office. The cabinet was adrift, disparate, and, in Yeltsin’s view, “not capable of resolving the country’s slew of economic and social problems.”85
Only on March 17, 1997, did he intervene to replace Potanin with Anatolii Chubais and to recruit Boris Nemtsov, the photogenic governor of Nizhnii Novgorod province and longtime favorite of his, to work alongside Chubais as first deputy prime minister. Chubais (forty-two years old) and Nemtsov (thirty-eight) in turn selected like-minded members of their generation for many of the economic and social portfolios. The press labeled them the young reformers, and it was hard not to see echoes of the Gaidar team of the early 1990s.
