Yeltsin полностью

So far as the actuality and not the myth of influence goes, it bears mentioning that Yeltsin as president had only several direct conversations all told with Berezovskii. He did not give the tycoon telephone access; in fact, the two never seem to have spoken on the phone. Nor was Berezovskii ever once invited into the Yeltsins’ home or to an out-of-Moscow residence like Zavidovo or Bocharov Ruchei.⁶² Their dialogues were purely business. “I felt that Yeltsin was not fond of me personally,” Berezovskii said in an interview in 2002; “he did hear out what I had to say and took it seriously.”⁶³ But listening was not the same as agreeing, on either one’s part. When Berezovskii saw it as in his interest, he was not afraid to come out against the government line (as on Svyazinvest in 1997) or even to have his newspaper, Nezavisimaya gazeta, in 1998 predict devaluation of the ruble and question the fitness of Yeltsin to finish out his term. At a press conference in September 1999, Berezovskii spoke disparagingly of Yeltsin’s lack of a master plan and his “abominable” cadres decisions.⁶⁴

What, then, of an oblique connection to Yeltsin? Berezovskii got together with Tatyana Dyachenko once every two or three months in the late 1990s. With adversaries, he found it useful to brag that he played Svengali to the unsophisticated daughter of the president and had psychological sway over her.⁶⁵ Asked in 2002 whether she was his gateway to number one, he was much more guarded. This would be “a worse than mistaken judgment,” he replied. “I was well acquainted with her, but mark my words: Tatyana is in the same genetic mold as Boris Nikolayevich. And Tatyana also kept her distance [tozhe derzhala distantsiyu]. It was as if she constantly felt that she was the daughter of the president.” Tatyana acknowledged that she thought well of Berezovskii’s intellect and drive but at the same time related to him with “great caution,” as she was unsure of his motives and did not want to favor or be seen as favoring one particular plutocrat. Chief of staff Yumashev, who had worked with Berezovskii in the publishing industry, was friendlier. “A lot of what I wanted to say to Boris Nikolayevich,” Berezovskii has stated, “I said to Yumashev.”⁶⁶ And yet, Yumashev’s primary loyalty was unambiguously to Yeltsin, and he and Berezovskii were not on the same wavelength on every issue. To give one example, Yumashev and Dyachenko, fearing that Berezovskii would be deadweight on Yeltsin, both opposed his appointment to the CIS position in 1998 and favored his removal from it in 1999. To give another, in March 1999 the Yeltsins and Yumashev were reliably reported to be livid at stories in the press that Berezovskii was using one of his companies to record their cell phone calls and that Dyachenko was financially dependent on him.⁶⁷ In other words, mutual wariness between Berezovskii and the other two set the tone within the threesome as much as mutual appreciation.

As he did repeatedly in his first term as president, Yeltsin in his second term sent out mixed signals about whether he intended to seek another. He and aides talked both sides of the question. He mostly said he had no interest in a third term; they tended to qualify his disclaimers and say nothing should be ruled out. The State Duma asked the Constitutional Court in October 1997 to review the question of his eligibility to seek another four years. Although Article 81 of the basic law prescribed that no one could hold the office for more than two consecutive terms, lawyers for Yeltsin reasoned that, since he had been elected to one term before the constitution was ratified, he was eligible to stand again. On November 5, 1998, the justices ruled in favor of the Duma brief. There was “an absence of uncertainty” on the merits, they said. Yeltsin had begun a second term in 1996 and had no right to stand for re-election when it ended in the summer of 2000. That was fine by Yeltsin, since “I long ago answered for myself the main question—about the fact that in 2000 I will not participate in the presidential election.”⁶⁸