Word: korzhakov
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...lured into debating Zyuganov, two greater threats loomed in early May. The Americans had been hoping to ignore Soskovets' instructions to signal a possible loss so that the elections could be canceled or delayed, but the issue was forced on May 5 when Yeltsin's closest aide, General Alexander Korzhakov, suggested a postponement...
Yeltsin scolded Korzhakov and said the election would be held on schedule. At the same time, he suggested that others besides Korzhakov believed a communist victory could provoke a civil war. That comment was widely interpreted as signaling that Yeltsin might indeed be planning to follow Korzhakov's advice later on. In fact, it was part of the strategy to make re-electing the President look like the best way for Russians to avoid chaos...
Then the following day brought another crisis. On orders from Korzhakov, officers of the presidential security service arrested two Yeltsin campaign workers coming out of the White House, the Russian government headquarters in central Moscow. The two were Sergei Lisovsky, who is an advertising executive, and Arkadi Yevstafyev, an aide to campaign manager Anatoli Chubais. Korzhakov claimed that the two were trying to remove a box full of foreign currency without proper authorization, a charge Lisovsky denies. They were held overnight for questioning but were released, with a warning to keep their mouths shut, after news of their detention...
Chubais also made his case to Yeltsin that day after a meeting of the Security Council, at which Lebed took his seat as secretary for the first time. After talking with Chubais, Yeltsin announced that he was firing Korzhakov, Barsukov and First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, the overseer of the military-industrial complex and reputed godfather of the antireform cabal. Korzhakov and Barsukov, the men who had been working to prevent a putsch, were suddenly ousted themselves. Yeltsin said he was tired of accusations that he allowed the hard-liners to run things, "as if the President were working...
Yeltsin did not link the firings to the detention of the campaign workers the night before, but others did. Reformers said the government had been split for months between a group that believed Yeltsin could win re-election and a faction led by Korzhakov that wanted to cancel the vote. Planting currency is an old KGB trick, and the hard-liners might have set up the campaign workers to embarrass the reformers; or the two men might really have been carrying foreign notes without proper documents, and the hard-liners simply seized on this infraction. In either case, they overplayed...