Yeltsin полностью

There was, though, one difference: Yegor Gaidar as acting prime minister ran the show in the Council of Ministers in 1992; in 1997 Yeltsin would not take Chernomyrdin out of the premier’s chair and award it to one of the upand-comers. It would be another year before he would, and the delay cost them and him dearly. In his memoirs, Yeltsin defended the combination as a way to harness the talents of both sides: “to get [Chernomyrdin] going” by flanking him with “two young and in a good way pushy and aggressive” deputies who would keep him under “high tension and steady, positive pressure.” ⁸⁶ The arrangement was too byzantine by half. Having learned his lesson and excluded antagonistic factions from his Kremlin sanctum, Yeltsin consciously wove them into the machinery of the government. Chernomyrdin still worked quite amicably with Chubais. He did not warm to Nemtsov and required constant reassurance from Yeltsin that his job was not in jeopardy. A specific source of tension was policy toward Gazprom, the hugely profitable gas producer Chernomyrdin had founded. Nemtsov supervised the energy sector and headed the energy ministry until November 1997, and made attempts to limit Gazprom’s operational autonomy. He also scuppered a deal under which the Gazprom president, a Chernomyrdin man named Rem Vyakhirev, would have acquired a large block of the company’s shares for a few million dollars. Nemtsov came to rue that he had not held out for the retirement of Chernomyrdin, and the hoopla he generated—such as his campaign to have bureaucrats driven only in Russian-made limousines—led Yeltsin to suspect he was not prime-ministerial or presidential timber. Chubais had the aptitude for the premier’s job but was not willing to ride roughshod over Chernomyrdin to get it, and in any event would have had difficulty gaining a majority in the Duma.⁸⁷

Yeltsin got a kick out of demonstrating to the young reformers he had taken under his wing—and perhaps to himself—mastery of the Soviet functionaries who still predominated in the federal and regional governments. Mayor Luzhkov, long in disagreement with Chubais on privatization, decided to show his annoyance by fouling up Nemtsov’s registration for residency in Moscow, a communist-period formality still required in the capital and routinely expedited for newcomers at his level. Making small talk with Nemtsov, Yeltsin repeatedly asked him if the registration had gone through. Told that it had not, he at some point, with Nemtsov sitting there, picked up his hotline telephone, clicked the Luzhkov button, and without a how-do-you-do or explanation boomed, “You are behaving pettily, Yurii Mikhailovich!” and hung up. Nemtsov was befuddled: How would Luzhkov know what Yeltsin was talking about? Luzhkov was “a Soviet boss,” Yeltsin said. Leave him be, “young fellow”: Luzhkov would call the duty officer, ask who was in the president’s office, and do what was expected. Nemtsov’s registration went through the next morning. But Yeltsin did not identify completely with the Chubais-Nemtsov faction, as his clinging to Chernomyrdin showed. In one conversation, something in Nemtsov’s manner irritated him and Yeltsin accused him and Chubais of laughing at him behind his back and believing “that I don’t understand anything.” “Keep in mind,” Yeltsin said to Nemtsov, “that I am the president and you are simply boyars” (the nobles of Muscovy to Yeltsin’s tsar). “Yes, you are smart and you are educated, but all you are is boyars. I am not afraid of you. It is you who should be afraid of me.”⁸⁸