Word: primakov
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Last week even Yeltsin seemed to have taken on too much in the war with his old enemies in the Duma, Russia's lower parliamentary body. The day before impeachment discussions opened, Yeltsin fired his popular Prime Minister, Yevgeni Primakov. Primakov was officially dismissed because of the President's concern about the slow pace of economic change. In fact he was dropped because he broke all the rules in his relations with Yeltsin. He was independent, he answered back, he even interrupted the President in public. This smacked of disloyalty. And in the twilight of his career, Yeltsin values loyalty...
...communist-dominated opposition in the Duma was infuriated by Primakov's dismissal--he enjoyed good relations with the communists--but was certain that it would guarantee the 300 votes needed to impeach Yeltsin on at least one of the five counts leveled against him. The motion with the best chance of success accused Yeltsin of starting a violent civil war in the breakaway Russian province of Chechnya in 1994. But once again Yeltsin thwarted his opponents. Last Saturday one-third of the Duma failed to turn up for the most important vote in their careers. Opposition deputies claimed, without offering...
...Russia these days, one battle just leads to another. The Duma presents Yeltsin with a similarly complex enigma. The very machinations he used to wriggle out of impeachment--everything from firing Primakov to making promises to the opposition--now present him with a new maze to negotiate...
...first challenge will be winning approval for his choice to replace Primakov, a colorless former political commissar named Sergei Stepashin. Unlike Primakov, Stepashin is largely unknown outside Russia. In the corridors of power he is recognized as a capable bureaucrat, and someone who in recent months has quietly become a presidential favorite. As head of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the kgb, he was a hawk during the war in Chechnya. And he remains deeply unpopular among Russian officers for the way he sent a covert force into Chechnya at the start of the war and disowned...
...Primakov was certainly not a perfect Prime Minister, and it was easy for Yeltsin to find a reason to dismiss him. Officially his crime was nonfeasance: the failure to drag Russia from its spiraling depression. In the days before his dismissal, Yeltsin aides began to prepare for the change by depicting Primakov as a man suffering from lockjaw on the crucial economic issues Russia now faces. But there was also worry inside Yeltsin's circle that the Prime Minister was suffering from a more pernicious disease: ambition. While he had studiously denied any interest in running for President...