Word: kremlins
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...face is that if Yeltsin were to pass from the scene tomorrow, not a single member of his team is believed to be capable of winning the general election that must, according to Russia's 1993 constitution, be held within three months. By the brutal logic that prevails in Kremlin corridors, that leaves only one obvious solution: change the constitution...
There are several ways to do this, and last week Yeltsin advisers began launching trial balloons. The first was proposed on Itogi, the ponderous Sunday-night television program that is often believed to reflect the views of Yeltsin's chief of staff, Anatoli Chubais. Itogi reported that Kremlin insiders were discussing the idea of a constitutional amendment to allow Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin to serve as Acting President not simply for three months but for the almost four years left in Yeltsin's term. That might give the stodgy PM time to develop into a marketable candidate. A second idea...
Late last week both Chernomyrdin and Chubais put out the word that the President is on the mend. As if to reinforce that perception, Yeltsin announced on Friday that he was opposed to any "hasty" changes in the constitution. He also made a couple of appearances at the Kremlin but they served only to underscore the harsh fact that Yeltsin's primary task these days is simply to keep himself upright and ticking. If he can manage that, the Kremlin may be able to stave off an early election and avoid succumbing to the impulse to tamper with an already...
...always overly optimistic. The President's onetime press secretary, Vyacheslav Kostikov, says in an as yet unpublished memoir that Yeltsin's mood, morale and appetite for work all took a turn for the worse as early as 1994. The nasty little secret in the history of Boris Yeltsin's Kremlin is that the President was in decline long before his health began to fail openly last year...
MOSCOW: Through a long succession of sick days, Boris Yeltsin has definitely retained his sense of timing. Kremlin officials happily announced today that not only was the Russian president back in the Kremlin, but that Yeltsin would indeed keep this weekend's meeting with French President Jacques Chirac in Moscow. Yeltsin, who turns 66 on Saturday, returned to work in Moscow for the first time since Jan. 18, ostensibly to meet with Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and review government documents. But in what has become a symbolic gesture of declining value, the president's real purpose was to prove that...