Russia's New Faces

...A year ago, to buttress the embattled Chubais, Nemtsov was brought to Moscow as his equal and placed in charge of energy, social services and the breakup of monopolies...

...More than any other contender, too, Luzhkov fits the mold of the strong leader the polls say most Russians want...

...Chubais, the brains behind the sell-off of state-owned industries and the organizer of Yeltsin's 1996 election victory, would have fit the rather peculiar slot...

...Aside from his daughter, Tatyana B. Dyachenko, who makes up the inner clique is as debatable as it was in the doddering days of Leonid I. Brezhnev...

...Most observers think he is being manipulated by a small group of insiders...

...He has the best poll ratings of any Russian leader, and is careful to utter no breath of presidential ambition...

...But he has waffled in his assessments of Chernomyrdin and Kiriyenko, trying to appear sophisticated about developments that are really beyond him...

...In February, following a lackluster State of the Nation speech to the Duma on the need for economic growth and "a fundamental revamping of the government's work," he showed up at a Cabinet meeting to threaten a shakeup and then mysteriously left after an hour...

...His opponent in 2000 will probably be Yuri I. Luzhkov, the flamboyant, authoritarian Mayor of Moscow during Gorbachev's last year and again since 1992...

...The government [i.e...

...And the selection of the 35-year-old Sergei V Kiriyenko to head the Cabinet was a total surprise, to Russians as well as to veteran Russiawatchers...

...He blamed the Cabinet for not solving problems stemming from his own myopic leadership over the past six and a half years and warned: "Failure to fulfill orders means death...

...Stealing the show recently at the founding congress of the "Movement for a New Socialism" and at a conference on "The Century of Domestic Social Democracy," he made it apparent that he was positioning himself as the centrist alternative between the Communists and the Yeltsinites...

...Last fall, after a period of bitter confrontation with the Communist-led Duma, Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin appeared to have reached a modus vivendi with the opposition (including the Right of the Duma) on the confirmation of individual Cabinet members...

...Within hours, though, certain background clues made the event less startling, even if some aspects of it remained an enigma...

...The New Russians who are taking over in government as well as in business are young enough to have escaped the stultifying effects of the Communist past, but there the uniformity among them stops...

...Although for Yeltsin the sudden scapegoating of a hapless subordinate is entirely in character, this was the first time he fired the Prime Minister of the Frenchstyle system he inherited from Mikhail S. Gorbachev...

...His latest book, Russia's Transformation: Snapshots of a Crumbling System—much of which first appeared in The New Leader—will be published this fall...

...The removal or resignation of First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly B. Chubais, for example, had long been expected...

...Told this would be unconstitutional, he had to find another candidate...

...His patronymic, "Vladilenovich," bespeaks a father from an ardently Communist family...

...in fact, he says he tried to resign in February...

...That could make him hard to stop...

...He stands for "people's capitalism," whatever that might be, against "oligarchic capitalism"—with which both Chernomyrdin and Chubais are linked in most minds—and asserts that under Kiriyenko the government will no longer allow itself to be influenced by the big banks...

...The action set the Moscow rumor mill whirring—and pointed up a paradox...

...Given the demoralizing conditions Russia has been experiencing, however, almost any change seems bound to be for the better...

...A self-styled "technocrat," Kiriyenko has no political base, apart from being a member of Nemtsov's "team...

...An engineer by training with hands-on experience as a shipyard foreman in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod again) on the Volga, he became an apparatchik in the Young Communist League and moved up to its provincial leadership during the Gorbachev years, studying some economics along the way...

...He made a national name for himself there by implementing the privatization of local business with minimal distress and reasonable honesty...

...The former head of the vast stateowned gas company called Gazprom, who has been Russia's Prime Minister since 1992, survived as long as he did only because trying to get a successor confirmed by the Duma would have precipitated a political crisis even earlier...

...The second is the impending presidential election, due in the millennial year 2000...

...Simultaneously, Yeltsin began criticizing the whole Cabinet for the country's economic stagnation, corruption, and nonpayment of wages and taxes...

...But the same negatives ruled him out as a viable presidential contender, and he decided to go into business...

...Replied Nemtsov, "Indeed, this is harmful to me...

...Do you think that this is politically harmful to you...

...The only explanation for the lightning career of Sergei Kiriyenko," writes the Berezovsky-controlled Independent Gazette, "is his political indifference...

...All this makes it hard to accept the widely heard theory that the mastermind of the government shakeup was the banking and media mogul Boris A. Berezovsky, one of the "seven boyars" and Nemtsov's most explicit target...

...Whatever the outcome of the current brouhaha, Russia is soon going to find itself under a new generation of leaders, much as it did in the transition from Brezhnev to Gorbachev...

...Cabinet] has clearly been lacking in dynamism, initiative, new concepts and fresh approaches and ideas," he said, but the shakeup "does not mean change in the line of our policy...

...Robert V. Daniels is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Vermont...

...If true, Yeltsin's statement that he was releasing Chernomyrdin to let him "prepare for the presidential election" was a cruel joke...

...The guessing game of Kremlinology, it would appear, has not outlived its usefulness...

...He has the ability, and he would not have been perceived as a threat by Yeltsin because of a low public opinion rating (due to his identification with scandals during the privatization process...

...Though Kiriyenko is a mere three years younger than Nemtsov, he is much greener in terms of political experience and is not likely be a strong figure if, pursuant to the Constitution, he has to take over as acting president because Yeltsin is indisputably incapacitated or has died...

...It is plausible that Chernomyrdin was dumped because his presidential ambitions became too obvious...

...If Nemtsov is indeed the chosen standard-bearer of the Kremlin insiders, he will have to walk a fine line for the next two years—acting like a leader, yet without inflaming Yeltsin's jealousy, as Chernomyrdin evidently did...

...What is indisputable is that in recent months Russian politics has been dominated by three related concerns...

...Kiriyenko, taking advantage of the pioneering market reforms introduced by Nizhny Novgorod's new Governor, Nemtsov, got himself a bank and the local oil refinery...

...Russia's press is now as free as any in the world...

...The noose appeared to be tightening further around Chernomyrdin's government in mid-March when Yeltsin took sick again, but that did not prevent him from issuing a testy decree taking Federal bodyguards away from Cabinet ministers and provincial governors...

...The Communists immediately rejected him as inexperienced and called instead for a coalition government, despite Yeltsin's threat that he would use his constitutional power to dissolve the Duma if he did not get his way...

...Kiriyenko's appointment promises a new impasse in executive-legislative relations...

...Following the failed hard-line coup of 1991, Yeltsin tapped him to run his home province of Nizhny Novgorod...

...The one thing he has made clear is that he does not want anyone else to run, or appear to be running...

...This would be a gamble for everyone, unless Yeltsin decrees the new election law that he has talked about, which would have all deputies chosen from single-member districts and thus undercut the influence of the national party organizations...

...The President's explanation for the head-chopping was self-contradictory...

...A scandal over book royalties had prompted the President to fire his ministers of privatization and bankruptcy, and to relieve Chubais and Nemtsov of the finance and energy portfolios, respectively, that they had combined with their duties as deputy prime ministers...

...By contrast, Yeltsin's resentment of his prominent lieutenants, and Chernomyrdin above all, has been obvious for years...

...I feel frightened, very frightened," he confessed, but he added that he did not expect to be a "kamikaze...

...The President himself has repeatedly sent out contradictory signals about his intentions for the year 2000—assuming that his health holds up minimally, and that he could get the Constitution reinterpreted to allow a third term...

...For the time being, says the Communist Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov, "We will give the President no constitutional grounds to dissolve the Duma...

...Nevertheless, the doings of the executive branch are almost as concealed today as they were under the Communists...

...Less clear was the position of the second First Deputy Prime Minister, Boris Y. Nemtsov...

...Luzhkov, who runs the Russian capital as if it were his personal fiefdom (he brazenly orchestrated the re-election of his docile City Council), is popular because he got the city exempted from the Federal rules of privatization and austerity...

...Then, on March 23, endeavoring to show he was still the boss, he resurfaced at the Kremlin to drop his bombshell...

...But the son is a quintessential New Russian...

...Should he win a place in the presidential runoff against Nemtsov, he would have the edge in attracting support from the Communists and other anti-regime elements...

...One is the dubious state of Yeltsin's physical and mental health...

...A couple of days later, he fired three more ministers...

...In public he damned the fallen government chief with faint praise and compensated him with a medal...

...In mid-January, returning to the Kremlin from another of his periodic illnesses, Yeltsin abruptly ordered the reorganization of the Cabinet into a bizarre system of ministerial committees to address "12 tasks" in government administration and the economy...

...even though it is mainly owned by the big financial barons, there is a healthy pluralism among those the Russians call the "seven boyars" as they fight with one another and the government over the spoils of privatization...

...When Nemtsov went to Moscow a year ago, he took Kiriyenko along as Deputy Minister of Energy...

...Perhaps Berezovsky does belong to the clique whose machinations led to the Cabinet shakeup, as Chubais himself thinks, but the actual sequence of events shows that Yeltsin took a hand in the matter personally and improvised as he went along...

...Yet his entourage must know someone has to be put in position to carry the flag for the "party of power" should Yeltsin ultimately drop out of the picture...

...The speakers of the Duma and the upper house of Parliament were not consulted at all...

...Recently Nemtsov has been sounding off about the need to curb the financial barons and resume reform in the direction of a "social market...

...As a nationalist and populist, he makes one think of a Russian Mussolini...

...Russia's New Faces By Robert V Daniels Early reports on March 23 of President Boris N. Yeltsin's decision to dismiss Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and his entire Cabinet seemed to throw Russia's whole future into question...

...What sort of balance they will strike between self-interest and the public interest remains to be seen...

...A scientist by training, he got elected to the quasi-democratic Supreme Soviet of Russia in 1990...

...Of late Yeltsin has become more erratic than ever, oscillating between withdrawal under cover of illness and impulsive interventions in foreign and domestic policy alike...

...Yeltsin reportedly informed Chernomyrdin of his fate only the night before, scolding him for siphoning profits out of the natural gas monopoly he used to head...

...The third is the power of the financial oligarchy...

...Who is Sergei V Kiriyenko...

...But that would amount to another unconstitutional coup with unforeseeable consequences...

...The impulsiveness of Yeltsin's action was highlighted by his initial announcement that he would become acting prime minister himself...

...The alternative is 38-year-old Nemtsov...

...His off-the-cuff choice of Kiriyenko, a very junior Cabinet member, has just one rational explanation: Having shunted Chernomyrdin and Chubais aside, Yeltsin wanted Nemtsov to function as de facto prime minister, and to avoid his own excessive exposure Nemtsov put his former deputy forward to serve as the front man...

...Boris Yeltsin has often called you his successor," an interviewer probed in February...

...He trumpets his ties with Yeltsin's daughter and the President's Chief of Staff, Valentin Yumashev, both of whom he put on the board of his Russian Public Television...

...He calls himself a "Soviet man.' Actually, he is a Russian born in Georgia (in 1962) who has a Jewish father and a Ukrainian name...

...His outlook squares with Yeltsin's complaints that the government has failed to rise above petty politics and get the country moving again...

...Granted, Berezovsky is an enemy of most of the other barons, and of Chubais as well...

...With the collapse of Communist Party rule, he joined the gold rush of "nomenklatura privatization," as former Communist officials grabbed control of old or new enterprises...

...The strategy was to let First Deputy Prime Minister Chubais, and then Nemtsov, compete with Chernomyrdin for actual power—hardly the way to achieve the teamwork Yeltsin has been demanding...