Power Plays in Moscow

...AFTER AN unexplained 10-day delay in announcing the new Chemomyrdin-Chubais Cabinet, a new complication was added to the mix: the surprise designation of a second "First Deputy" Prime Minister, Boris Nemtsov...

...Though it may be failing economically, Russia is succeeding at political reform...

...But Chubais faced a major obstacle in his drive to displace the Prime Minister and put himself in constitutional line for the presidency: Hated for his role in turning the economy over to the profiteers, he would never be able to secure the necessary confirmation by the Communist-nationalist Duma majority without a confrontation on the order of Yeltsin's 1993 "White House" shootout...

...That would avoid a confirmation fight...

...Theories among the Moscow pundits about the Nemtsov appointment were utterly contradictory...

...Chubais' immediate task was to ensure that Yeltsin would survive the opening round of the summer presidential balloting...

...When the contest to become Yeltsin's successor heats up again—in the year 2001 or whenever his psyche or his health fail him once more—the temptation among all presidential aspirants to play the nationalist card will be irresistible...

...The strategy he hit upon was clever, though risky: building up the charismatic outsider, General Aleksandr I. Lebed, to draw votes away from the moderates in the first round and throw them to Yeltsin in the second...

...The Russian Gazette agreed, calling it "a task that simply cannot be accomplished...

...Yeltsin's recovery abruptly redefined the fortunes of the contenders around him...

...President Clinton appears to have been lucky in his NATO gambit: Yeltsin recovered enough to deal with him in Helsinki and turned out to be willing to grant reluctant acquiescence to the planned expansion in exchange for loose assurances of Russia's being welcomed into the international economy...

...As a result, much of the time his staff has ruled in his name—as the Russians say, "Korolya igraet svita" ("The role of king is played by his suite...

...Lebed's fall left only two serious rivals for power, Chubais and Chernomyrdin (leaving aside the longer-term ambitions of Moscow's aggressive Mayor, Yuri Luzhkov...

...Russia also resembles a monarchy in that everything in the nation's politics revolves around the health, competence and mood of the President...

...For the past year, however, his situation has been made more complicated by the ascendancy of Anatoly B. Chubais...

...In March 1996, when Yeltsin was still in a funk and his polls were in the single digits, Chubais took control of the presidential campaign with the blessing of the new kingmaker, Yeltsin's younger daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko...

...Meanwhile, no one manages to do anything except talk about crime, corruption and the crisis of nonpayment of wages and pensions (though the decline in actual production seems to have bottomed out lately...

...In October, charged with plotting acoup, Lebed countered by forming a bizarre alliance with the fallen Korzhakov and was fired from the Security Council, even though—or perhaps because—polls showed him to be the most popular political figure in Russia...

...Whether or not the motive was to strengthen Chubais, the effect may well be the creation of a new rival, especially as Nemtsov reaches out to Yavlinsky and the Centrists...

...Only hours of importuning by Dyachenko and a meeting with Yeltsin himself finally brought Nemtsov around...

...almosthalf the Russian electorate was disillusioned enough to vote to turn the clock back...

...The plan, according to the theory first broached by the liberal editor of Moscow News, Sergei Roy, was for Chubais to take effective control of the Cabinet, relegating Chernomyrdin to a figurehead role—a sort of "vice presidency," as one Russian commentator styled it...

...Kulikov is now the deputy prime minister in charge of all the "power ministries" (military and police) and tax collecting besides...

...Free and reasonably honest elections have been held: for the Duma in December 1995, for President in June and July 1996, and for provincial governors in the months since then...

...his eight-month absence from the halls of power had prompted widespread calls for resignation...

...Aiming only to perpetuate their own enrichment, they may well focus their presidential hopes on Mayor Luzhkov, a man more popular than Chubais and less threatening to them than Lebed or the Communists...

...Lebed was the first loser, despite his spectacular success in negotiating a truce with the secessionist state of Chechnya...

...Then on March 7, the day after the State of the Nation speech, he had himself restored to the Cabinet as First Deputy Prime Minister, with a mandate to merge the powers of the presidential administration with the regular government, overhaul the leadership, and jumpstart economic reform...

...Chernomyrdin's power has regularly risen and fallen with Yeltsin's moods...

...Russia thus acquired what amounted to three antagonistic governments, with Chubais and Lebed drawing on the illusion of presidential authority, and Chernomyrdin relying on the tacit support of the Communist-dominated Duma...

...The appointment, he said, could be "political suicide...

...Nikolai Vardul of Kommersant was equally sure that Chernomyrdin had him appointed to counterbalance Chubais...

...As for Lebed, his payoff came a mere two days after the first electoral round, when he was appointed National Security Adviser and Secretary of the Security Council...

...Despite the faith that Western governments have placed in economic "reform," it is a prescription for more of the same dubious medicine with the same disastrous side effects...

...To insert the variable of NATO expansion into this equation only makes its resolution less predictable...

...Many governmental functions, especially financial oversight, were shifted to the presidential administration...

...This frequently has made it difficult to know when Yeltsin was speaking for himself and when the Kremlin's statements were being manufactured in his name...

...Rumors of Chernomyrdin's impending removal circulated throughout the winter...

...He would turn the Security Council into the leading arm of government, extending its scope from foreign policy and defense to crime and the economy, thereby making it his launching pad to the presidency...

...Moreover, the devious behind-the-scenes maneuvering for power among the decrepit leader's supposed loyalists reminded Russians of the later years of Leonid I. Brezhnev...

...But the rising financial oligarchy that Chubais had fostered rallied in defense of its own interests to salvage Yeltsin's chances in the impendingpresidential election...

...For the moment—for as long, that is, as he remains in the current up phase of his emotional cycle—he appears to be in charge...

...He set about undermining Centrist elements like Grigory A. Yavlinsky, who opposed both Yeltsin and the Communists, so that in the runoff Yeltsin could be presented as the only alternative to a revival of the Soviet regime and its historic horrors...

...When Yeltsin's 1993 Constitution actually called the lower house of Parliament the "Duma," it was a dead giveaway...

...Petersburg economist and a protégé of the reformers in that city when Yeltsin put him in charge of his crash privatization program shortly after the failed hard-line coup of August 1991...

...Yeltsin's heart attack of late June, covered up long enough to secure his second-round re-election victory on July 3, created a power vacuum that Chubais quickly filled by having himself appointed Presidential Chief of Staff (presumably with Dyachenko's support...

...Under Russia's Constitution, presidential appointments to offices below Prime Minister are not subject to parliamentary confirmation...

...Now 41, Chubais was a St...

...Oddly enough, the team of American media advisers drawn from Governor Pete Wilson's California entourage may have had some influence on Chubais' appointment: Presented by Soskovets with the desperate scenario of annulling or postponing the election, the Americans dug in with polls and focus groups...

...Contrasted with this murky foreground, the background is remarkably clear...

...But the Russian President will be able to make his bargain stick only by asserting even greater executive authority over the legislative branch...

...Robert V. Daniels, professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont, isa fi-equent NL contributor and the author of 20 books on Soviet andpost-Soviet affairs...

...they fitted in far better when the more optimistic Chubais people took over the Yeltsin campaign...

...Even so, the Duma wasted no time in passing a resolution denouncing the new First Deputy...

...Although Yeltsin's victory delighted the West, it was in fact not a mandate for the man or the principles of reform so much as a forced choice between bad and worse...

...This young and popular reformist governor of Nizhny Novgorod (formerly Gorky) Province was decidedly unenthusiastic when asked to take on reform of housing and the utility monopolies (as demanded by the International Monetary Fund...

...when Yeltsin was in a takecharge frame of mind, Chernomyrdin would come to heel like a trained dog...

...Displaying an impulsive activism familiar from his reelection campaign last May and June, he reshuffled his Cabinet, upbraided his subordinates for his own failed reforms, and plunged into summit diplomacy with President Bill Clinton in an effort to reassert Russia's international stature...

...Accordingly, the Yeltsin campaign provided Lebed with funds, advisers and media beneficence, all of which helped him place third in the initial poll...

...His 11 million votes were to prove decisive in Yeltsin's ultimate 54-40 per cent win over Communist Party leader Gennadi A. Zyuganov...

...Whereas Mikhail S. Gorbachev's reforms harked back to the pragmatic Communism of the 1920s, Boris N. Yeltsin finds his model in the quasi-constitutional regime of Tsar Nicholas II, his tough Prime Minister, Peter Stolypin, and the feeble though noisy Parliament, the Duma...

...Despite massive spending and media bias in favor of Yeltsin and his people, the opposition— Communists, nationalists, and disaffected reformers—hold a majority in the Duma (though with little power) and have won many governorships (positions with much power now that they have become elective...

...Manic-depressive may be too strong a term for Yeltsin, but his is clearly a cyclothymic personality, exaggerated by alcoholic habits and medical troubles...

...From 1992 to early 1996, as one of several deputy prime ministers, he pushed free-market reforms and earned a reputation for the very unRussian qualities of determination and efficiency—reminding one in this respect of the early Lenin...

...The initial campaign manager, Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, and the Rasputin of the Yeltsin administration, Presidential Security Chief Aleksandr Korzhakov, were both shunted aside...

...Chubais was fired in the wake of the Communists' parliamentary election victory of December 1995, a low point in the fortunes of the Yeltsin regime and in the mood of its chief...

...The apparent loser was Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, Prime Minister since December 1992 and constitutionally the number-two man in this French-style governmental system...

...At the same time, though, political parties remain amorphous or splintered —in particular the Communists, who, chastened by their presidential defeat, do nothing more radical these days than endorse various trade union demonstrations and sustain Chernomyrdin against what they see as the greater evils of either Chubais or Lebed...

...Real power rests in the hands of the financial and media barons, perhaps a dozen billionaires, who have saved Yeltsin and made Chubais what he is...

...Ever since 1991 he has responded to challenges— medical as well as political—with vigorous, even frenetic activity, followed by collapse into illness and isolation...

...He has even numbered the two Dumas elected since then the "fifth" and "sixth," counting them as successors to the four of 1906-1917...

...So Chubais bided his time until Yeltsin was well enough to resume a public leadership role...

...A related maneuver was to put what was left of the office of presidential administration in the low-profile hands of Yeltsin's ghostwriter, Valentin Yumashev...

...But for the long run Russia's plutocrats, like the leaders of the early 1900s, only invite the deluge...

...Lebed, by contrast, had a very clear idea of what was to be done: "Power is never given," he declared, "it is always taken...

...This was presumably intended to signal its demise as a power center...

...Otto Latsis of lzvestia thought he was brought in to exploit his popularity and back up Chubais' fresh reform push against Chernomyrdin and the standpatters...

...With his State of the Nation address early this March, Yeltsin bounced back euphorically from heart surgery and pneumonia...

...Balked in his quest for more authority and strangely denied appointments with Yeltsin until he threatened to announce the President's death, he failed to secure the ouster of Interior Minister Anatoly S. Kulikov, whom Lebed's enemies used as the point man against him...

...The latter is an extra-constitutional advisory body whose authority had previously been so nebulous that one incumbent, Marshall Yevgeni I. Shaposhnikov, quit after two months because he couldn't figure out what he was supposed to do...