Just as the impeachment motions were coming to a vote, Yeltsin, written off for dead only months before, grabbed hold of the initiative. Keeping the Duma in his sights, he began in March and April to make the most of a weak hand. In foreign policy, Yeltsin appointed Viktor Chernomyrdin as his personal envoy on the Yugoslav crisis, sent several warships into the Mediterranean, and offered in a telephone conversation with Bill Clinton, in a shocker even for Yeltsin, to meet him for negotiations aboard a Russian submarine he would send specially for the occasion; the Americans passed on the invitation.73 Once the NATO bombing campaign got the Serbs to agree to terms in June, Yeltsin approved the dispatch of two hundred Russian troops from Bosnia to establish a presence in Kosovo. It was Moscow’s only unilateral use of force in Europe since the Cold War and caused a deep division on the NATO side between Wesley Clark, the American supreme commander, who wanted to block the Russians, and Michael Jackson, the British officer in command on the ground, who was alarmed by the risks of trying. “I’m not going to start World War III for you,” Jackson told Clark.74
In domestic politics, Yeltsin on March 19 fired his KGB-reared chief of staff, Nikolai Bordyuzha, and appointed Aleksandr Voloshin, a civilian with business experience, some of it with Berezovskii. The Kremlin inner circle had found Bordyuzha unresponsive to political concerns and readier to listen to Primakov than to the president. Bordyuzha had tried to get Yurii Skuratov, the procurator, to resign. Skuratov at first agreed, only to rescind his agreement and then to have the Federation Council refuse on three occasions to exercise its constitutional right to approve his removal. The Kremlin’s response was to deploy kompromat of the tawdriest sort: It authorized the showing on Russian television of a videotape showing the procurator in bed with two prostitutes. On April 2 Yeltsin suspended Skuratov from his duties. Although Skuratov was not properly dismissed for another year, he was locked out of his office and unable to carry out further inquiries.75
Tension between Yeltsin and his prime minister mounted over the winter of 1998–99. The specifics mattered less than the overall point that the president was coming to the conclusion that their continued cohabitation was no longer in his interest. Primakov posed an opposite political problem to the one posed by Chernomyrdin a year before. The Russian public was tired of Chernomyrdin and blamed him for governmental failures; it warmed to Primakov and gave him credit for recent successes. Polls in early spring showed that two-thirds of the electorate approved of his work as head of government, that he was trusted by more Russians than any other leader, and that he was being put in the category of potential president. Given Primakov’s age and socialistic proclivities, that was not an outcome Yeltsin could live with. He was nervous that Primakov, while not disloyal to him, could be a focal point for dissent and opposition if he chose to speak out on policy differences from inside the establishment, not unlike Yeltsin had in 1987.76
Yeltsin waited for his moment, one of the very last he was to have in the political arena, and acted. Some on his staff wanted to wait until the impeachment vote was held before handling the Primakov problem, reasoning that a dismissal would increase the chances of impeachment going through. Yeltsin saw it differently in part due to a technical point: He knew that the adoption of even one impeachment motion would take away the weapon of threatening to dissolve the Duma in the case of a disagreement over chairmanship of the government. But the essence of his thinking was intuitive, as it had been so many times before. “A sharp, unexpected, aggressive move,” he wrote about the choice, “always knocks your opponent off his feet and disarms him, especially if it appears absolutely illogical and unpredictable. I was convinced of this more than once over the course of my presidential career.”77 The “utter unpredictability” that Vitalii Tret’yakov wrote off the preceding summer was not yet gone from the scene.
