Boris Yeltsin, Boris-Yeltsin.com

Czar

Czar Boris awakes.

Yeltsin abruptly fired his entire cabinet, apparently in attempt to bolster his rule and to prevent any coup attempt. Top officials maintain that the sudden decree will not bring any change to Yeltsin’s policy.

Yeltsin fires his ministers, but can he rule alone?

MOSCOW–Only a few close advisers, huddled at Boris Yeltsin’s country residence, Gotky 9, were in on the secret. And in the crucial hours leading up to his bombshell decree dismissing the entire cabinet, extraordinary steps were taken to keep it a secret. The special telephone lines between key government offices were shut off, preventing ministers from sharing information or rallying political support. Immediately after his TV address to the nation, Yeltsin met with the heads of the military, the domestic intelligence service, and his bodyguards to secure their loyalty.

In fact, Yeltsin’s move had all the hallmarks of a pre-emptive strike to prevent a coup. There is no public evidence that former Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin or any other cabinet member actually was plotting to take power. But Yeltsin, who has been sick, seems to have been both irritated and alarmed that his ministers were increasingly ruling in his name, sapping his authority and prestige. Chernomyrdin, in particular, had unofficially begun a campaign to succeed Yeltsin in the next elections in the year 2000-relegating Yeltsin to the status of lame duck. The former prime minister also had immodestly let it be known during a recent meeting with Vice President Al Gore in Washington that he, rather than Yeltsin, was really running the show in Moscow. “As soon as Chernomyrdin started to act like a successor to the president, he started to acquire power from the president, and he became a real danger,” says Russian political scientist Nikolai Petrov.

Fresh approach. In his TV speech, Yeltsin said he was firing the entire cabinet because it was “lacking in dynamism and initiative, fresh approaches and ideas.” But Foreign Minister Yevgeni Primakov and other top officials stressed that Yeltsin was not making any radical shift in policy. The president’s own comments and demeanor indicated that the real purpose of the mass firing was to demonstrate that Russia’s political universe still revolves around him and him alone. With boyish delight in his caprice, Yeltsin chose the youngest, least experienced, and least well known member of his old cabinet to be the new prime minister. Taking 35-year-old Sergei Kiriyenko by the arm on Friday, Yeltsin ceremonially ushered him into Chernomyrdin’s old office in front of TV cameras and pointed to a portrait of himself. “Don’t knock it off the wall until 2000,” Yeltsin said.

Yeltsin also warned the obstreperous State Duma, or lower house of parliament, not to fight against Kiriyenko’s appointment. If the Duma rejects Yeltsin’s nominee three times, the president can dissolve the parliament. “Save time,” Yeltsin told lawmakers in a commanding tone. “Approve the new government as soon as possible, and off we go!”

Reformers generally agreed that the change presages no departure from Yeltsin’s overall policy of reform. But as a particularly flagrant exhibit of Yeltsin’s penchant for one-man rule, it has dismayed many liberals. “This pattern of action is very far from the dreams and expectations of the second generation of liberals in Russia,” said Moscow constitutional lawyer William Smirnov. “The reality is that these actions are very much in the tradition of the authoritarian personalized style of leadership. It’s very reminiscent of the Soviet style, or the personal regimes of Latin America.”

Yet the reality of Yeltsin’s predicament is that, at 67 and chronically ill, lacking his old endurance, far below the peak of his popularity, and never very solid in his grasp of free-market economics, he cannot possibly govern alone. He may have been moved to humiliate his subordinates precisely because he is so dependent on them.

Kiriyenko’s main advantages to Yeltsin are that he has no power base and that he is a nonpolitical technocrat–just as Chernomyrdin was five years ago. A protege of popular First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, Kiriyenko was appointed as minister of fuel and energy, his first government post, just last year. Before that, he ran a bank and an oil company in his hometown of Nizhni Novgorod, to generally high acclaim. “The company was foundering when he came here,” says Maksim Krokhin, an official at the Norsi Oil Co. “He stabilized the situation and worked out a strategic program to get us out of the crisis.”

No pay. Russia’s economic problems, of course, will be harder to fix. The worldwide drop in the price of oil, Russia’s main export, has cut state revenues. Wages owed to public employees, from soldiers to teachers, are once again growing at an unnerving pace (6.5 billion rubles at the end of January, 7.6 billion rubles a month later). Duma Speaker Gennadi Seleznyov, a leader of the Communist opposition, charges that Kiriyenko “lacks the economic experience that would enable him to be in charge of the huge Russian economy.” And even liberal observers are inclined to agree. “The work of this [new] government will depend on the ability and the readiness of the president to give Kiriyenko daily support in his dealings with the Duma and the regional governments,” says Andrei Kortunov, president of the Russian Science Foundation, a Moscow think tank. “Kiriyenko by himself won’t be able to do it. He just doesn’t have the advice, the contacts, the status that Chernomyrdin did.”

Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and Primakov, the influential foreign minister, are among the few top officials that Yeltsin said he would reappoint. But Kiriyenko’s ascent may presage one change in Russian foreign policy: In January, he was one of the few Russian officials to criticize Primakov’s friendly line toward Iraq. Kiriyenko argued that pressing to lift sanctions on Saddam Hussein would only depress oil prices further.

Kiriyenko’s appointment was also claimed as a political victory by Boris Berezovsky, a millionaire Moscow financier who formerly served as secretary of Yeltsin’s security council and has been battling for influence with Chernomyrdin and other ministers. Recently injured in a snowmobiling accident in Switzerland, Berezovsky rose from his sickbed, rushed back to Moscow on the night before the president’s announcement, and predicted in a TV interview that the government was about to be dismissed. But press reports may have exaggerated his role. “My personal impression is that Boris Berezovsky didn’t know anything specific. I watched the broadcast several times, and I could see no evidence that he knew the decision was going to be taken the next day,” says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who studies the Russian business elite.

Chernomyrdin’s fate is unclear. Yeltsin said he had “instructed” the former prime minister to “concentrate on political preparations” for the presidential election in 2000. But Chernomyrdin’s firing weakens his chances to succeed Yeltsin. The centrist party that he heads, Our Home Is Russia, received 10 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections when he was prime minister and “won’t even get half of that if he doesn’t have the prerogatives of office,” predicts Kortunov.

Besides Chernomyrdin, possible successors to Yeltsin include the reformer Nemtsov, Moscow’s powerful Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, charismatic retired Gen. Alexander Lebed, and Communist Party leader Gennadi Zyuganov. But Kiriyenko also has time to grow into his post and develop a following-as long as he does not try to take that presidential portrait off his wall prematurely.

Yeltsin’s surprises

JULY 1990: Yeltsin quits Communist Party and walks out ot its congress.

AUGUST 1991: Rallies opposition to har-line Communists who staged coup against Gorbachev.

DECEMBER 1992: Fires Acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, taps industrialist Victor Chernomyrdin.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1993: Dissolves legislature and calls new elections. Hard-line legislators barricade themselves in parliament. Troops storm the building.

JUNE/JULY 1996: fires best friend and bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov. Reappoints economic reformer Anatoli Chubais to manage his administration.

MARCH 1998: shakes up cabinet, names a neophyte as prime minister, and fires Chernomyrdin (shown with Yeltsin at a presidential hunting lodge in 1996).

With Bruce B. Auster in Washington