Festive days may have kept the Russians from really assessing the consequences of what happened after President Boris Yeltsin’s resignation. His theatrical address to the Russians on December 31, 1999, and the appearance on television of Acting President Vladimir Putin on New Year’s Eve, could well be interpreted as an integral part of the millennium celebrations. The pictures of Mr. Yeltsin saying goodbye to the Kremlin were in the same footage that showed the dazzling lights of the Eiffel Tower and the Kiribati female dancers. But when the feast ended, it became clear it had been exactly the first, and perhaps the main, piece of news not only in Russia’s year 2000. How is the situation going to unfold in that country in the immediate future? Does Putin’s rule promise a long period of stability and will this rule last long? Will Mr. Putin only be the first in the cohort of figureheads of the post-Yeltsin epoch? Will the people, who surrounded the throne in the last period of Yeltsin’s rule, also preserve the same influence on the first Russian president’s heir?
These are the main questions being asked by the observers who monitor developments in Moscow. It is quite noteworthy that such questions did not come up, for some reason, in the first hours after Mr. Yeltsin’s resignation. On the contrary, it seemed that the ailing Russian leader had taken a wise and balanced step: a spectacular departure, relinquishing power to his hand-picked successor, the guarantor of his own security and the security of his family, which had been having lately a strong impact on the authorities. However, it was difficult at that time to assess the weight categories, and above all the political heft of Mr. Yeltsin himself. It was difficult not only for outside observers but also for Messrs. Yeltsin and Putin themselves. Against the background of an elderly and sick president, his energetic heir, who was making trips to the Chechnya front and promising to zap the terrorists, looked very good and seemed to have no alternative. But now this background is no longer there. Mr. Putin has remained face to face with the potential electorate, the regional elite, oligarchs, and the West. And it is becoming increasingly clear that Mr. Yeltsin was the only true heavyweight on the Russian political stage, that he was not only respected but also feared, that Mr. Putin received assurances of allegiance exactly according to his own will, and that even the most reckless regional barons could hurl criticisms at the presidential entourage but never at Mr. Yeltsin himself. And the West, too, could criticize Russia but always spared the pride of its dear friend Boris.
Mr. Putin does not have this charisma and authority, he does not arouse in his subordinates the sensation of holy trepidation which Mr. Yeltsin used to arouse one way or another. Mr. Putin can become a strong president but he is unlikely to become a monarch, which in Russia means to be weak. In addition, the Acting President’s election campaign is conducted against the backdrop of failures of the Russian Army in Chechnya. The bloody battles in Grozny, the explosions set off by Chechens in towns occupied long ago by Russian troops, demonstrate to Russian society that the new war in Chechnya will not be a piece of cake, and that all talk that now it is going to be different is only the demagogy of revenge-seeking generals and their patrons in the country’s political elite. One can also hardly expect any serious economic changes in two months, which was testified to by the new President’s first cadre decisions.
These appointments constitute a special subject. I mean, first of all, the dismissal of Pavel Borodin as the Kremlin’s chief of staff, of Nikolai Aksenenko and Viktor Khristenko as first vice-premiers, and the appointment of Minister of Finance Mikhail Kasianov as the new and only first deputy prime minister. These decisions by Mr. Putin can receive different assessments by optimists and pessimists. The optimists will be glad that the Acting President is immediately getting rid of the most odious figures from his predecessor’s entourage, opting for pragmatists. The pessimists, who, in Russia, are in fact exceptionally well-informed optimists, will recall that, although the name of Aksenenko was linked with that of Roman Abramovich as long ago as when Sergei Stepashin was forming his cabinet, another resounding scandal happened at the same time exactly over the appointment of Mr. Kasianov as Minister of Finance. The press would persistently call the hero of London Club negotiations Boris Berezovsky’s boy, while Mikhail Zadornov preferred to refuse from the post of first deputy premier, for he was stubbornly denied combining this post with that of the Minister of Finance — not so much because of his unwillingness to see Mr. Zadornov in the ministerial chair as because of willingness to see Mr. Kasianov in it. The pessimists know only too well that it is former Kremlin quartermaster general Borodin who was always considered a self-sufficient figure, totally independent of the oligarchs in the presidential entourage. Is this not the reason why he became one of the first officials relieved of his duties by the Acting President?
The optimists will see in Mr. Putin’s first cadre decisions the attempt to begin forming a new team. The pessimists will disagree, saying that it is the same team and that the Acting President of Russia has so far very limited chances for cadre maneuvers. Moreover, these chances are linked with the interests of not the family but those people whose influence on the family in the last period of Mr. Yeltsin’s rule is difficult to overestimate. If we accept this logic, we must agree that the decisions to dismiss Tatiana Diachenko and Pavel Borodin were wise and, what is more, natural. If we accept this logic, we must agree that the decisions to keep Aleksandr Voloshin and to appoint Mikhail Kasianov were also wise and natural. The notions of family and entourage seem to be growing apart in the newest Russian political vocabulary. It turned out that family refers to Mr. Yeltsin and entourage to Mr. Berezovsky.
We are now coming to the main point in the Russian political drama. Will this entourage become (so far, in any case, it is becoming) the entourage of the Acting President or is he himself only a marionette, although now the most important, of this entourage? (In the final analysis, the chessboard king differs from one in flesh and blood precisely in that he is only a figure in the hands of a skilled player. Still, he is a king). Will Mr. Putin wish, after becoming a full- fledged President, to turn from a figure into a player and, what is more, will he be able to do so? For, while the Acting President is talking about the temporary nature of his appointments, those at the chessboard might as well be thinking about the temporary nature of Mr. Putin himself.
Today, the question is not whether Mr. Putin will manage to win in the elections but whether he will manage to rule. This is the pivotal question of all Russian history, and, just on the eve of the Julian Epiphany, the answer to it can determine the future development of political situation in Russia.
INCIDENTALLY
As the London Times reports, Vladimir Putin was recruited to KGB in Leningrad in 1974 shortly before he graduated, majoring in jurisprudence and the German language, with honors in German. Mr. Putin was then placed in the Federal Republic of Germany as an intelligence officer. In 1975 Mr. Putin was a TASS corespondent in Bonn, specializing in working with researchers. Sources of the Dresden newspaper Sachsische Zeitung report that he coordinated the activities of KGB agents in West Germany and Austria. According to Western intelligence information, Mr. Putin recruited employees at German enterprises and universities for cooperation. He was detected by Western counterintelligence in the mid-1980s, when he resided in Dresden. There, Mr. Putin mainly worked to create a network of agents to get access to the most advanced technologies of Western industrial companies. To this end, he used the connections one East German firm had with Robotron and Siemens, the latter being of great interest to Russia. In the late 1980s Mr. Putin was awarded a meritorious order by Stasi, the GDR’s spy service. This was confirmed recently by the spokesman of the Gauk Commission in Germany, which is investigating into Stasi activities.
In addition, Gazeta Ru, an Internet publication, recently reported that Mr. Putin had begun to promptly get out of the “Family” control. This was evidenced by the dismissal of Pavel Borodin, coordinator of the Presidential Administration, who, as it turned out, was not transferred to a different post but was simply thrown out of the Kremlin. As became known last Wednesday, the next step in this direction will be radical reorganization of the coordination office which will be merged with the logistics department headed by Aleksandr Streltsov, a trusted lieutenant of Putin’s. Thus Mr. Putin received a unique opportunity to place, in a matter of three months, the state apparatus under his total control. To do so, he chose the economic mechanism, a very simple and effective one. For, according to Gazeta Ru, all bureaucrats, irrespective of their ranks and offices, like taking advantage of the perks.
