Yeltsin полностью

Yeltsin had been sending out hints that he was restless with Primakov and had someone else in mind to put in his place. That someone was Sergei Stepashin, the easygoing interior minister, with a background in police administration, whom Yeltsin had known since 1990. Stepashin, generally viewed as a liberal but uninvolved in electoral politics, headed a string of law and order–related ministries (security, justice, and interior), recovering from his loss of the directorship of the FSB (Federal Security Service) as a result of the Budënnovsk terror incident of 1995. On April 27 Yeltsin appointed him first deputy premier.⁷⁸ On May 12, three days before the scheduled Duma vote on impeachment, Yeltsin dismissed Primakov and named Stepashin acting prime minister. Commentators were incredulous that Yeltsin had done it again. For the third time in fourteen months, he had made a splashy move to “deflect the country from discussing the president’s inadequacy for his job” or so it was seen.⁷⁹

The Duma roll calls on impeachment were carried live on television. A Lenin double paraded in front of the entranceway, flanked by died-in-thewool communists with placards denouncing “Führer Boriska.” Many of the witnesses invited to testify at the two days of committee-of-the-whole hearings failed to show. Fire-breathing rhetoric did not carry over into coherent legislative action on the part of the opposition, and Yeltsin’s representatives craftily played on divisions among the parliamentarians. Two hundred and ninety-four deputies voted on May 15 for at least one of the five motions, but no individual motion received that many. The Chechnya resolution got 283 ayes, or seventeen fewer than required; the motion on the 1993 events got 263, that on the Belovezh’e accord 241, that on the army 240, and that on genocide 238. The Chechnya motion, which was championed by the reformist Yabloko Party, was seen as the only one having a realistic chance of passing. A number of legislators who were willing to vote yes on another motion abstained or spoiled ballots on Chechnya. The LDPR refused to let its deputies participate at all; Yabloko ended up allowing its members to vote their conscience (nine of them voted against the Chechnya resolution); and a small caucus of regional representatives asked their members to lodge one positive vote each.⁸⁰

Yeltsin had gambled and won on impeachment. Sergei Stepashin needed only one ballot to win Duma confirmation on May 19, with 301 votes in favor, almost as many as Primakov took in 1998.

Was the endgame without larger purpose, a contest entered into for the sheer pleasure of it? Yeltsin’s delight in dealing and playing the cards is undeniable and is confirmed in the chapter in Presidential Marathon about the summer of 1999, one titled “Prime Ministerial Poker.” There Yeltsin recounted a double ruse. Shortly before sending Stepashin’s name to the Duma, and knowing full well that he was going to do so, he phoned Speaker Seleznëv to say that he was nominating somebody else entirely—Nikolai Aksënenko, the Russian minister of railways. Tall, burly, and Siberian-born, Aksënenko had worked his whole life in the transport system. In Yumashev’s words, he “reminded Yeltsin of himself in his days as a builder of apartment houses in Sverdlovsk.”⁸¹ He was one of the candidates Yeltsin had considered for premier in the spring of 1998 and had scant backing on the Duma benches. Yeltsin says at one point that the Aksënenko feint had the tactical motivation of making Stepashin look good by contrast. But he also paints it as an enjoyable test in its own right: “I liked the way I had ginned up intrigue around Aksënenko. It was a nice little bit of mischief [zagogulina].”⁸² Minutes after Seleznëv passed on word about Aksënenko to the members, the envelope containing Yeltsin’s letter of nomination for Stepashin was delivered to him. Seleznëv voiced annoyance and helplessness at the trickery: “The president has five Fridays in his week.”⁸³