But Yeltsin was not yet ready to fade from the scene, and he was not bereft of political resources, as would be evident in 1999. What Tret’yakov’s diagnosis also overlooked was that the Primakov solution was in some ways a blessing in disguise for Yeltsin. Defeat in a third Duma ballot, if that was the alternative, held more dangers for him than it did for the communist-led opposition, which most likely would have come back from an election strengthened. Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow was a much-bruited option for prime minister in September. Put off by his ambition and forwardness, Yeltsin was passionately against the candidacy and sacked several close aides for pushing it.38 Had a Chernomyrdin restoration come about, it would have been a standing reproach to Yeltsin for his poor judgment in ousting him earlier. Unlike Primakov, Chernomyrdin had open presidential aspirations that Yeltsin would need to manage. Chernomyrdin had reason to feel aggrieved at Yeltsin’s treatment of him and to reckon that he could feed off it politically.39 And parliamentary approval for Chernomyrdin would have come at the price of a huge power-sharing concession, to be in effect until 2000. During the negotiations Yeltsin had offered to waive his right to dissolve the legislature (it would waive its right to vote no-confidence) and to give it a veto over the appointment of deputy premiers, the minister of finance, and the heads of the force agencies. Gennadii Zyuganov renounced the pact on August 30, thinking there were more concessions to wring out of Yeltsin.40 Yeltsin took it off the table when he submitted Primakov’s name, leaving him able in future to put his new prime minister through the same meat grinder he subjected Chernomyrdin and Kiriyenko to in 1998.
Primakov, most importantly, was in a position to pursue the needed course correction with far more credibility than Chernomyrdin. Talk of a constitutional revision to dilute Yeltsin’s presidential powers withered on the vine in October. Yeltsin was prepared to give Primakov as much autonomy to select collaborators as the young liberals Gaidar and Kiriyenko had in their time. Primakov filled many positions in his White House apparat with reserve intelligence officers. In staffing the cabinet, he would say in a memoir, “The president and his entourage . . . desisted from imposing . . . particular people on me.”41 As his first deputy premier for economic affairs, he lined up the communist and dirigiste Yurii Maslyukov.42 At Primakov’s urging, Viktor Gerashchenko, evicted from the position by Yeltsin in 1994, came back on September 12 to chair the central bank.
Primakov on the whole was a moderate and pragmatic prime minister. He ran for Yeltsin what was essentially a coalition government. Fourteen of thirty-one cabinet members, among them reformists like Finance Minister Zadornov, were carried over from Kiriyenko, and he blended in leftists, centrists, and clients of Luzhkov and other politicos. Primakov and his ministers employed administrative levers to put failed banks into receivership, slow capital flight, and force the payment of some back wages to civil servants and the disgruntled miners.43 The budget they submitted had a deficit of only 3 percent of GDP. Primakov and Gerashchenko financed the deficit that remained through the printing press, thereby ramping up inflation to 84 percent in 1998 (from 11 percent in 1997) while short-circuiting the ruinous lending cycle. The feeble economic growth of 1997 yielded to still another slump in output, by 4.9 percent in 1998, but the bottom did not drop out of the system, as had been feared. Primakov, in Yeltsin’s assessment, “chose the perfect intonation” to reassure the nation. “With his confident unhurriedness, Yevgenii Maksimovich managed . . . to convince almost everybody that things would calm down.”44
