Word: kremlins
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...traditional Russian bylina, or folk epic, a dashing warrior in shining armor rescues the good Czar from the evil influence of his scheming boyars. Much the same sort of tale seemed to be unfolding as a rapid-fire Kremlin drama last week. It began on Tuesday, two days after the initial round of the presidential elections in which retired Lieut. General Alexander Lebed made a surprisingly strong third-place finish and Boris Yeltsin came in first. In Yeltsin's office that day, Lebed, 46, a hero in a dark business suit, perched stiffly on the edge of an ornate chair...
With that pen stroke, Yeltsin had hired the tough-talking maverick paratrooper for two jobs: the President's top national security adviser and secretary of the Kremlin's Security Council, which coordinates foreign and domestic policy. "This is not just an appointment," Yeltsin told reporters. "This is a union of two politicians and two programs. I will now make corrections in my own program in the areas of military reform, national security and the battle against crime and corruption...
...unpopular Defense Minister, Pavel Grachev. Then on Thursday the President purged three more hard-liners, including the man closest to him, his drinking buddy and tennis partner Lieut. General Alexander Korzhakov, who served as chief of security. The firings amounted to an almost clean sweep of the so-called Kremlin war party, an inner circle of authoritarian, antireform power brokers. Their departure could lead to a quicker end to the war in Chechnya, which the fired officials had originally urged on Yeltsin, and a return to influence for some key reformers. Last week may have set the country...
...Lebed's plan to prove that the general is not merely a figurehead, they set to it quickly. In a TV interview last week Lebed claimed that he had fired Grachev. Lebed has been denouncing and sneering at the Defense Minister for years, so his arrival in the Kremlin did mean Grachev would have to go. But in fact it was the President who told his Minister...
Since this purge the two most visible figures on the Kremlin stage after the President are Lebed and Chubais, a seemingly odd couple. Chubais is despised by large segments of the population for his role in dismantling the old Soviet industrial complex. Others admire his management of the program that put two-thirds of Russian enterprises into private hands, and in the West he is lionized for this achievement. After the Communists won most of the seats in the legislative elections last December, however, Yeltsin fired Chubais as a sacrifice. He took the humiliation, then bounced back in February...