Word: chernomyrdin
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Feeble as he is, Yeltsin is still a cunning politician with an almost feudal authority over the ambitious operators in his shadow. He can crank up short bursts of devastating energy, as he did last week when he fired Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin and his entire Cabinet. With one sharp stroke, Yeltsin eliminated everyone he thought might be a threat to his political future. He left the reactionaries, the nationalists, the billionaire crony capitalists to pick themselves up, to scheme and struggle over whom to back and how to lay hands on still more of the vast wealth of Russia...
About 8:15 a.m. last Monday, very early for him, Yeltsin and his motorcade (including the ever present rolling hospital, nicknamed "the catafalque") swept into the Kremlin. When Chernomyrdin arrived a bit later, Yeltsin called him into the presidential office, presented him with a medal for service to the state and fired him. Normally, this would have been a full day's work for Yeltsin, but he didn't stop to rest. He phoned his incessantly controversial First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoli Chubais, the inflicter of Western-style economic reforms, and fired...
...agreements, Primakov assured a group of reporters, "do not depend on personalities." It is exactly what one of his famous predecessors, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, used to say. But of course personalities do matter, and Vice President Al Gore had spent four years cultivating friendly working relations with Chernomyrdin in a bilateral Russian-U.S. government commission. Gore believed he was investing in a future in which both of them might be President...
...Chernomyrdin was beginning to think so too, which is probably what got him in trouble. He was hinting so plainly that he was considering a run in 2000 that Yeltsin dismissed him. In fact, by week's end Chernomyrdin had confirmed his intention to run for President. Kommersant, a leading daily, concluded, "We can pronounce the once superpowerful Premier politically dead." But Boris Berezovsky, one of Moscow's most influential business tycoons, talked with Chernomyrdin last week and came out a booster. Only a week before, he had declared on television that Chernomyrdin was "unelectable" in 2000. Now Berezovsky says...
...Chernomyrdin's candidacy has the all-important support of media -- and oil tycoon Boris Berezovsky. "The big money follows Berezovsky," says TIME Moscow bureau chief Paul Quinn-Judge. "He's telling the other oligarchs that Chernomyrdin is perfect because he can work with the Communists. They feel safe with him because he's likely to ensure business as usual." That's assuming they can get the public to elect a man who, Quinn-Judge says, shows no discernible charisma, is unable to speak in public and has been publicly humiliated by Yeltsin. But first they have to get the unpredictable...