Yeltsin полностью

Whatever Dyachenko may have preferred, Yeltsin was opposed to reconsideration of the Svyazinvest auction, as Gusinskii and Berezovskii were demanding, but made oracular comments that sounded more critical of Potanin and his government backers than of the sore losers. He did not want to meet with the parties. Yumashev brought him around after an alarming article in the Berezovskii-owned Nezavisimaya gazeta painted Chubais as power-mad, Potanin as in cahoots with him, and the two of them as conspiring to find a “Trojan horse” candidate for president in 2000; in the interim, they meant to castrate Yeltsin politically, and would be much more devious at doing so than Aleksandr Korzhakov and Oleg Soskovets before them, who could not see “beyond the tennis court and the steambath” (no compliment to the president who whiled away so many hours with them in those locations). ¹⁰⁰ Potanin’s Russkii telegraf and Izvestiya, which his conglomerate partly owned, replied in a like manner.

On September 15, in the Oval Hall of Building No. 1, Yeltsin hosted the third of his four roundtables with high-flying businessmen. At the table with him and Yumashev were five of the six (Gusinskii, Khodorkovskii, Potanin, Aleksandr Smolenskii, and Vladimir Vinogradov) who had conferred with Yeltsin in February 1996 (see Chapter 14), plus Fridman as a substitute for Berezovskii. Yeltsin maintained neutrality between Gusinskii and Potanin but tested Potanin with a barb about how much government money (from taxes and customs duties) he had on deposit in his bank. Hearing that, Potanin feared the Svyazinvest auction was going to be overturned. Then Yeltsin pulled back. Potanin was at once relieved and let down: “Essentially, [Yeltsin] said, ‘Guys, I have had a look at you, and in principle I remind you that I am the chief here, so everybody should go ahead and live in friendship !’ But nobody was arguing with him about whether he was the chief. The chief is the chief. How were we to live from now on, and by what rules? He didn’t explain anything about the rules.” Yeltsin was to recount in his memoirs that he could tell as the conference broke up that no good would come of it. He does not say why. Be it out of fatigue, confusion of the oligarchs with state employees whose standing depended completely on him, or some other cause, Yeltsin had failed to lay down the law.¹⁰¹

For the Svyazinvest combatants, the only law for the moment was the law of the jungle. President and government did not act to change the auction result. After another six weeks of mudslinging, Yeltsin on November 4 agreed to a proposal by Chubais and Nemtsov to remove Berezovskii from his position in the Security Council. The decisive consideration was conflict of interest: He was mixing business and politics. Yeltsin was disgusted with Berezovskii and made a show of firing him by minor executive order (rasporyazheniye) rather than full-dress presidential decree (ukaz).¹⁰² On November 12 Berezovskii and Gusinskii struck back by releasing “kompromat,” compromising material put together by their corporate security branches, to the effect that Chubais and four of his young reformers had accepted honorariums of $90,000 each for a not-yet-written book on the history of Russian privatization. The money had come from a firm that was soon to be purchased by Potanin. Within days, Yeltsin felt compelled to dismiss all of the coauthors except Chubais, who had to relinquish his second cabinet title, as minister of finance, on November 20.¹⁰³ Nemtsov was also lowered a notch, losing his second position as minister of fuel and energy to Sergei Kiriyenko. After that, writes Yeltsin, “My meetings with Chubais became much less frequent.” ¹⁰⁴ Nemtsov noticed the same, as he dropped from two audiences a week to one every several weeks.