Yeltsin met with contenders for prime minister under “various pretexts,” on the lookout for a technocrat free of “debts and obligations to his party or his section of the political elite.” This ruled out party heads and power brokers, national and subnational. The search narrowed to three members of Chernomyrdin’s latest cabinet, another person who held economic positions earlier in the decade, the director of the central bank, and a former commander of Russian border troops.4 As lists go, it was an obscure one, and only one on it (the former minister, Boris Fëdorov) had ever run for election or worked in a party. Two ministers were excluded for closeness to the sectors they controlled; Fëdorov was “too politicized and ambitious”; the banker, Sergei Dubinin, and the military officer, Andrei Nikolayev, were quick-tempered and unsteady.5 Yeltsin’s later conduct makes the otherwise unmemorable Nikolayev noteworthy. Yeltsin knew and respected him in Sverdlovsk and was full of praise for him in the border-guards job, which he left in December 1997 after squabbles with other security officials. That the general was a candidate at all shows that the soldierly style was exercising an appeal to Yeltsin well before the rise of Putin.6
By a process of elimination, Yeltsin went to the sixth name on his list. Sergei Kiriyenko, a protégé of Boris Nemtsov in Nizhnii Novgorod, had worked in the Komsomol, commercial banking, and oil refining; he relocated to Moscow with Nemtsov in the spring of 1997 and made energy minister in November. He was by far the youngest on the short list, at age thirty-five, and had a mild manner and a decidedly boyish appearance. Yeltsin valued his business experience and restrained articulateness, yet conceded there was “something of the honor-roll graduate student” to him.7 The two first met on the 1994 layover in Nizhnii at which Yeltsin spoke improvidently of Nemtsov as his successor. In early March 1998, Kiriyenko handed Yeltsin a clipped report about streamlining the Russian coal industry; Yeltsin liked it and Kiriyenko’s “youthful maximalism” on market principles.8 More than Chubais and Nemtsov in 1997, Kiriyenko was Yeltsin’s second-term Yegor Gaidar, the well-connected wunderkind who would accelerate change as the agent of an impatient president.9
Yeltsin precluded doing in 1998 what he suspected he should have done in 1997: put the seasoned young reformers around Chubais in unqualified control of the government. Svyazinvest had cheapened the stock of Chubais and Nemtsov, who had far more hands-on experience of government and elite folkways than Kiriyenko. Practiced junior members of the team, untouched by the incident, were available for promotion. Yeltsin knew whom he wanted, and it was Kiriyenko. First thing on March 23, 1998, he informed Chernomyrdin. Kiriyenko took on the nomination and Yeltsin signed the papers making him acting prime minister. Yeltsin, according to Kiriyenko, shed a tear when he briefed him on the exchange with Chernomyrdin.10
