If Yeltsin’s memoir is to be believed, a second deception, on the strategic and not merely the tactical plane, lay behind the shenanigans of May 12. He meant to execute a final change in headship of the government, in favor of a dark horse, Vladimir Putin. He had decided to make Putin not only prime minister but his successor as leader of Russia—metaphorically, “to transfer to him Monomakh’s Cap,” the fur-trimmed crown of gold worn by the rulers of medieval Moscow. But the time was not yet right. Only the impending electoral struggle, in late 1999 over parliament and in 2000 over the presidency, would give Putin the chance to shine. For two or three months, Stepashin was to be the placeholder. The whole scheme had to remain Yeltsin’s secret, not known to Putin himself, to the Duma, to Stepashin, or even to Tatyana Dyachenko and his close advisers. “I did not want the public to get too used to Putin in those lazy summer months. This mystery, the suddenness of it all, could not be allowed to evaporate. It would be so important for the elections, this factor of the expectations aroused by a potent new politician.”84
Not every piece of this tale is a true guide to what happened in 1999. The ill-fated Stepashin’s stretch of time in the Russian White House was pure “torture.” He called the president on the telephone every day, wanting him “to feel something from me in a purely psychological way,” but never felt appreciated in return. He is convinced that Yeltsin very nearly made up his mind to appoint Aksënenko in May and that Aksënenko, not Putin, was at first the intended beneficiary of the shell game. He has no explanation for why Aksënenko lost out to Putin.85 Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s confidant and, after retirement, his son-in-law, is convinced Aksënenko was never really in the running and that Yeltsin left open the possibility that Stepashin would be the chosen one. Yeltsin abandoned Stepashin when he was wishywashy in the face of the two big crises of the summer of 1999—a renewal of violence in the North Caucasus and the attempt by a coalition of anti-Kremlin elites to field a winning slate for the Duma election—and when Stepashin did not deal firmly with lobbyists for governmental favors, passing on some of the pressure to Yeltsin himself.86
So why did the needle spin around to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin? Yeltsin had time and again shown a partiality for younger politicians. Putin, though, was older than many earlier favorites and, at forty-seven, was the very same age as Stepashin. Putin’s St. Petersburg roots could hardly have been decisive; Yeltsin had no network in Russia’s second city, and Chubais and Stepashin, among others, were also from there. In personal style, Putin was in some regards the un-Yeltsin—medium in height, trim, imperturbable, abstemious—but there were plenty of individuals out there who were different from Yeltsin. It has been suggested that Yeltsin chose Putin because Boris Berezovskii or some other master manipulator put him up to it, or because Putin had a unique ability to protect Yeltsin and his family from prosecution after his retirement. Neither of these interpretations holds water, either. There is no evidence that Berezovskii or anyone like him advocated Putin. My guess is that Berezovskii’s support, had it been extended and had Yeltsin known of it, would for Yeltsin have been the kiss of death to any candidate.87 Any senior politician Yeltsin would have considered, not only Putin, would have been happy to extend him the limited immunity Putin was to give him (not him and his family) by decree on December 31, and any presidential edict of this sort could subsequently have been superseded by legislation. Yeltsin never negotiated over immunity or any aspect of the Putin decree, which was finalized only in the hours after his resignation.88
