Sergei Ivanov, another former KGB general, also from St Petersburg, was made head of analysis and strategy; later on, under the Putin presidency, he was to turn up as minister of defence and, since mid-2008, first deputy prime minister.
Meanwhile, the health of Yeltsin was deteriorating and the Moscow rumour mill produced, at regular intervals, news about his impending demise. Each time Yeltsin surfaced on TV, but it was obvious that his health could not forever withstand the waves of vodka he was consuming, sometimes even in the morning. By that time, the Yeltsin ‘family’ had gone through most or all of the political options and consumed all the more reform-minded prime ministers. What was left was to put all bets on the old KGB and its modern-day reincarnation. This put the head of the FSB into a key position. He concentrated all the loose ends in his hands because he must have understood that in this situation the stakes were very high: win or lose, with very little in between. And there was no doubt that he wanted to win.
Win or lose
But Primakov, buoyed by his popularity at home, now began to give up his neutrality and put pressure on the oligarchs. This implied looking also at deals with which the ‘family’ was associated. Money-laundering and corruption were among the accusations hurled in the direction of powerful owners of powerful concerns. The General Prosecutor Skuratov was said to have in his safe a list of foreign bank accounts in the name of high-ranking Kremlin officials. Yeltsin, against a vote in the Duma, ordered him to stop his investigations. Was he a hero, or a gangster? How could people tell? What was going on was a struggle for control, and the stakes were as high as the spoils. In retrospect it looks like an unscripted fight for raw power. At the time, it was a cloak-and-dagger story defying description, let alone detailed analysis from outside.
One of the key figures was Berezovsky, and he might have been taken into custody had it not been for the protection extended by the FSB, more precisely by its chief. Berezovsky was close to Yeltsin, and if Berezovsky fell, Yeltsin would be badly hurt. Putin, however, stood by the oligarch and by the ‘family’. This, in turn, earned him another promotion. In March 1999 he was appointed head of the National Security Council while continuing to be in charge of the FSB.
While the succession crisis was looming, East-West relations took a turn for the worse. NATO intervened against Serbia in order to prevent genocide or, in the modern version, ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Kosovo. The Albanian guerrillas fought Serbian troops, and vast numbers of Albanians fled north towards Austria, Switzerland and Germany. In Russia, age-old sympathies with Serbia threatened to boil over while the Kremlin recognized the mounting danger to the Russian federation if Kosovo set a precedent for other ethnic groups fighting for independence. Russians have not forgotten the separatist temptations affecting many of their minorities in the early Yeltsin years. Even where those concerns were seen as way beyond reality, the fact that NATO forces could attack while Russia’s opposition in the UN was simply pushed aside was a shock, and has certainly contributed in no small way to the surge of Russian nationalism ever since. Kosovo was a traumatic experience, taking off the shine from Western democracy and encouraging strong-arm solutions to Russia’s own problems, especially in the Northern Caucasus. But while Primakov tried to use outrage in Russia to consolidate his support in the population at large, the ‘family’ decided – and Putin obviously concurred – that given the sad state of the oil price and the looming succession crisis, discretion was the better part of valour. Kosovo and the future of Serbia’s strong man Slobodan Milosevic were not the most pressing item on the agenda.
The power struggle under way reached crisis point, and high drama ensued. The Duma majority, dominated by Zyuganov’s communists, went for the jugular and prepared impeachment charges against Yeltsin, citing five major reasons: high treason against the Soviet Union in 1991 and destruction of the army; coup d’état in dissolving parliament in 1993, which led to the bombardment of the ‘White House’ in the centre of Moscow; misuse of office in unleashing the Chechen war of 1994; failing the Russian people through misguided reform. If the Duma succeeded, Yeltsin, after having lost most of his political power, would also lose the legal right to run Russia. In constitutional terms, the legislature and the executive blocked each other. In real terms, the spectre of the erstwhile Soviet Union stood up from its shallow grave to threaten the new, post-Soviet Russia.
In the ensuing struggle, Yeltsin answered the opening move of parliament by firing Primakov, although his government had presided over a modest improvement of state finances, a reduction in runaway inflation, a slight economic recovery and had even secured new loans from the IMF. The Duma had the right to refuse three times Yeltsin’s nominee for prime minister, but then the President could dissolve parliament; however, he could do so only if the impeachment process had not yet been set in motion. There was talk in Moscow about civil war.
These were trying times, especially for the man at the helm of the National Security Council and the FSB. Putin had gone too far to entertain second thoughts about where his loyalties lay, but he had his usual luck. The five-point impeachment vanished when the Duma, with the smallest of majorities, refused to open proceedings – whatever reasons lay behind the change of mind of a crucial number of deputies. The Kremlin administration had, by hook or by crook, won the day. Berezovsky, the Kremlin’s éminence grise at the time, boasted to the communists: ‘We shall never cede power to you.’ The Kremlin had won back the initiative. The new prime minister was Sergei Stepashin, a former general in the police and, more recently, first deputy prime minister under Primakov and minister of the interior, in charge of the most powerful ministry.
Stepashin was more of a bureaucrat and by no means a mud-on-the-boots military type like Alexander Lebed who, with his considerable diplomatic skill and popular charisma, might have become a Russian Pinochet if given the chance. Stepashin was, for the time being, a compromise candidate, acceptable to the victors around the President, acceptable also to the vanquished in the Duma. His paramount task was, as Yeltsin’s entourage put it, possibly with a sardonic smile, ‘to safeguard the legal character of the elections’.
Once again, the choice was between returning to a Soviet-style regime or soldiering on, pursuing more or less the road to a post-Soviet sustainable system of government. ‘God will be merciful,’ a Soviet energy minister had said when on a visit to Bonn in 1998, referring to the lack of basic provisions. And God, or the archangel presiding over oil prices, was indeed merciful.