Yeltsin полностью

There were multitudinous markers of poorer political health after August 1998—poorer than Yeltsin had ever been in as national leader. Public-relations and policy-planning endeavors begun in 1996–97 were inaudibly abandoned. The Friday brainstorming group did not convene after the 1998 crisis. The Saturday radio chats were canceled rather than having to make amends each time for “the disaster of the week.”⁵² In the monthly ratings of influence in Nezavisimaya gazeta for October, the superpresident, Yeltsin, was put in third place, below Prime Minister Primakov and Mayor Luzhkov; he remained there until the February 1999 poll, when he was back in second place, with Primakov still in first.⁵³ A corruption scandal broke out early in 1999 around the Swiss construction company Mabetex. Prosecutors in Switzerland alleged that it had paid kickbacks to Pavel Borodin and other high-level officials to secure the main contract for the reconstruction of Building No. 1, in Yeltsin’s first term. The procurator general, Yurii Skuratov, who had long been estranged from Yeltsin’s administration, launched an internal investigation. It eventually was claimed that the owner of Mabetex, Kosovar-Albanian businessman Behgjet Pacolli, had transferred a million dollars to a Hungarian bank account for President Yeltsin, supplied him and his two daughters with credit cards, and paid for expensive purchases through them. Guilt or innocence is impossible to ascertain with certainty, owing to the secrecy surrounding all these transactions, but the finger pointing at the Yeltsin family lacks credence and none of the charges was ever proved. Still, the affair was of sufficient magnitude for Yeltsin to mention it on the telephone with President Clinton in September 1999.⁵⁴

Proof of an embattled presidency could not be missed in various areas. In center-periphery relations, provincial governors were among those who summoned Yeltsin to cede power during and after the 1998 crisis, and there was a spike in regional noncompliance with central laws and policy at this same time. Chechnya, brutalized by the war of 1994 to 1996, remained an open sore. Leader Aslan Maskhadov proved incapable of reining in gangsters, terrorists, and Islamic fundamentalists; dealings with Moscow became tenser by the month.⁵⁵ Foreign policy had its own frustrations, as Yeltsin could not stop NATO from retaliating against Serbia for its repression of rebel forces and civilians in Kosovo. An air war against the Serbs began on March 24, 1999, leading Russia to freeze relations with the alliance.

Yeltsin’s hesitancy showed in the pattern of executive appointments. More than in unsettled periods in the past, he was prepared to select helpers who would score points for him with audiences that found him deficient. On Yumashev’s suggestion, Yeltsin on December 7, 1998, named career KGB officer Nikolai Bordyuzha to replace Yumashev as chief of the Kremlin administration. Bordyuzha retained the position of secretary of the Security Council that he had held since September. Yeltsin wrote afterward that he had doubts about Bordyuzha; they were only partly offset by assurances that at the beginning he would clear all big decisions with Yumashev. But Yeltsin swallowed his doubts, hoping the choice would send the message that he still meant business. His office “needed some force behind it, at least for show.” Let the opposition shout at him as much as they wanted. “It would be harder to do that when next to the president there stands the figure of a colonel general who simultaneously holds two of the principal positions in the state.” Yeltsin likened the decision to castling (rokirovka in Russian), the chess move that shelters the king beside a rook, away from the middle of the board.⁵⁶

Yeltsin saw himself as taking cover in a storm. Contemporary analysts often concluded, though, that he had made the more drastic step of surrendering control to a collectivity termed, in the parlance of this period, “the Family” (Sem’ya). The Family, so it was said, consisted of relatives of the president, high state officials, selected financiers, and hangers-on; at its hub were Tatyana Dyachenko, Valentin Yumashev, and especially Boris Berezovskii. The unspoken reference was to the Sicilian Cosa Nostra or the clan of Suharto, the corrupt president of Indonesia forced out of office in May 1998. The group was portrayed as bound together by consanguinity and marriage, frequent socializing, shared economic interests, and Berezovskii’s powers of persuasion. And it was Russia’s real government. “Few people do not know,” journalist Yelena Dikun wrote breathlessly in 1999, “that the Family rules our country. In the popular mind, it is the highest institution of power—higher than the president himself.”⁵⁷ The picture of an unassailable cabal, with a chief executive, unwell, acting as its stooge, has been a part of the conventional wisdom about the Yeltsin era.