10 Boris Nemtsov,
11 These are the components of the regal bearing given in Arnold M. Ludwig,
12 The appellation ignored Boris Godunov, whose life was fictionalized in Alexander Pushkin’s play and Modest Mussorgsky’s opera. Godunov reigned from 1598 to 1605, during the Time of Troubles preceding the Romanov dynasty.
13 His granddaughter Yekaterina related in the late 1980s that when she asked Yeltsin’s help with a personal problem (removing the bodyguard attached to her when she enrolled in university), “The tsar resolved the problem in his own manner” and ordered the guard removed. “Sensatsionnoye interv’yu rossiiskoi ‘printsessy’” (Sensational interview with a Russian princess),
14 Boris Nemtsov, first interview with the author (October 17, 2000). The exchange in Stockholm occurred on December 2, 1997, in Yeltsin’s second term.
15 Pavel Voshchanov, interview with the author (June 15, 2000). That incident occurred in February 1992, just before Voshchanov stepped down, when he questioned a personnel decision by Yeltsin.
16 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002)
17 Aleksandr Livshits, interview with the author (January 19, 2001).
18 Yu, M. Baturin et al.,
19 Yegor Gaidar, second interview with the author (January 31, 2002).
20 Boris Fëdorov,
21 Livshits interview.
22 The Kremlin had constitutional authority over 30,000 positions in the executive branch (Donald N. Jensen, “How Russia Is Ruled—1998,”
23 Yeltsin concerned himself with golden parachutes only for functionaries who had been close to him. In 1993, for instance, he made Yurii Petrov head of a new State Investment Corporation, in control of several hundred million dollars of capital. When Viktor Ilyushin stepped down as senior assistant in 1996, he was appointed deputy prime minister, and when he left that position he was hired as a vice president of Gazprom. But most of the departed easily found opportunities in the new private sector. As Oleg Soskovets, the ranking member of the Korzhakov group, with whom Yeltsin broke in 1996, put it, “In contemporary Russia, you can use your knowledge outside of the public service. They give you something to occupy yourself with, thank God.” Interview with the author (March 31, 2004).
24 Officeholders are given at http://rulers.org/russgov.html. Not counted here are the new defense minister and the new head of internal security appointed in late June 1996.
25 Baturin et al.,
26 Yeltsin allies from the democratic opposition to the Soviet regime criticized the appropriation of the health directorate. See, for example, Ella Pamfilova, “Grustno i stranno” (Sadly and strangely), in Yurii Burtin and Eduard Molchanov, eds.,
27 Quotation from Ivan Goryaev, “The Best of the Empires, Or Crafty Devil of a Manager,” http://www.newtimes.ru/eng/detail.asp?art_id=150. Borodin, a former CPSU apparatchik, had been mayor of Yakutsk since 1988 and met Korzhakov while a deputy to the Russian congress in 1990–91. He was named deputy director of the unreformed business department (then called the Main Social-Production Directorate) in the spring of 1993. The USSR Council of Ministers and the Central Committee of the CPSU had separate business offices before 1991. The head of the party unit, Nikolai Kruchina, committed suicide after the August putsch. The presidential equivalent was then kept apart from the government’s, and the congress of deputies had its own benefits arm.
28 Boris Fëdorov, interview with the author (September 22, 2001).
