Yeltsin notified Kiriyenko on August 22 that his premiership was done, after four months. The choice to replace him was the amazing one foreseen by Tret’yakov in July—Chernomyrdin, the same veteran of the red directors’ club whom Yeltsin had deposed in March. As he made the offer to Chernomyrdin in his Kremlin office on August 23, Yeltsin made a fulsome apology for the past spring and offered to repeat it on the airwaves. Chernomyrdin said the confidential amends were sufficient. It was made clear in this meeting and others that Yeltsin expected Chernomyrdin to sit until 2000 and to run for president then with his support. Yeltsin was more acceptant of Chernomyrdin’s return than excited by it.34 He divulged his decision in a televised speech the next day. “Today we need the people who are usually called ‘heavyweights.’ In my view, the experience and weight of Chernomyrdin are needed.” Yeltsin drew a link to the succession question, saying the reinstatement would help assure “continuity in power in 2000” and that human qualities such as Chernomyrdin’s “will be the decisive argument in the presidential elections.”
The Duma would have none of it. In the first round of the voting, on August 31, only ninety-four deputies voted for the former and acting prime minister, worse than Kiriyenko had fared in April. Meeting on September 2 with Bill Clinton, in Moscow to show the flag, Yeltsin was truculent. He was not afraid to provoke a system-wide crisis if the Duma would not confirm his nominee: “Yeltsin seemed ready for that, even to welcome it. He could use his presidential powers, he said, to ‘wreck the Communist Party once and for all.’ The communists ‘have committed plenty of sins in the past. I could make a list of those sins and take it to the Ministry of Justice and prosecute them.’ Clasping his hands and gritting his teeth, he added, ‘I could really put the squeeze on them.’”35 But Yeltsin also shared with the Americans that he was debating alternatives, and Chernomyrdin knew it full well.36 Doubts only grew when, upon resubmission, Chernomyrdin could garner no more than 138 votes. While this was more than Kiriyenko received in the second round in April, the climate of opinion was different: Gennadii Seleznëv would not arrange a secret ballot; the communist caucus stuck to its guns; the Federation Council was not on board; Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin were damaged goods. There was also a constitutional complication. The communists were preparing to introduce a bill to impeach Yeltsin. Under Article 109, the president was not empowered to dissolve the Duma and force a new parliamentary election if an article of impeachment had passed the lower house. Had Yeltsin persisted, militant KPRF deputies had a chance to tie his hands by railroading through an impeachment bill before the nomination of Chernomyrdin came to a vote.
Yeltsin now executed another U-turn: As in December 1992 with Chernomyrdin, he agreed to a compromise candidate. Yevgenii Primakov, two years older than Yeltsin (and thirty-three years older than Kiriyenko), had been Russia’s spymaster and latterly its minister of foreign affairs. Before that he was a journalist, academic, and nonvoting member of the Gorbachev Politburo, always working hand in glove with the security services. Primakov was portly, avuncular in comportment, and center-left in his politics. He wanted a broad-based government, heightened state regulation of the market, and a more muscular foreign policy, all of which fit better with what parliament and the populace wanted than Chernomyrdin or Kiriyenko had. Primakov needed to be talked into taking the position of prime minister. After three meetings with Yeltsin and many more with staffers, he acquiesced on September 10. The nomination sailed through the Duma on September 11, with 317 votes in favor to sixty-three against.
Yeltsin’s back-to-back reversals, in a setting of economic distress, led some to the surmise that his star had set irretrievably. “The Yeltsin factor, with his . . . utter unpredictability in the struggle for personal power, has departed for all time from Russian politics,” Tret’yakov submitted in
