Word: stepashin
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When Yeltsin sacked Sergei Stepashin last week, few in Russia were surprised. True, Stepashin had been in office only 82 days. But in his jealous protection of his waning presidency, Yeltsin has made the unpredictable predictable. His second move of the day, however, created shock waves. In a seven-minute television address that bade Stepashin farewell, in which his tongue and eyes strained to find the words on the TelePrompTer, Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin, a virtual unknown to most Russians, not only his acting Prime Minister but also his heir. Bestowing his trust in Putin, Yeltsin implored voters...
Russia's embattled President rose early on Monday to greet Stepashin and Putin at Gorki-9, the presidential dacha outside Moscow. The hour--7:30 a.m.--meant Yeltsin was not seeking a casual conclave. Stepashin and Putin knew what was coming; the shake-up had already surfaced in the Moscow press. Anatoli Chubais--an early Yeltsin ally--had even met with Kremlin aides on Sunday to argue that firing another Prime Minister now, with parliamentary elections set for December and a presidential vote next July, was a dangerous move that could discredit the Kremlin, the government and Russia in general...
...Stepashin, meanwhile, had turned coy about his own presidential ambitions. Like Primakov before him, he had become too popular for the Kremlin's liking. Over the weekend, as polls showing Stepashin pulling even with Luzhkov landed on Voloshin's desk, and militant separatists in the Caucasus reappeared on Russian TV screens, the Family gathered and Yeltsin pulled the trigger. "Stepashin made no major mistakes," says a Kremlin aide. "He simply failed to become the good dictator...
...lose Dagestan. Things are bad over there," ex-Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin said as he was surrendering his office last week. Bad they are: a new bout of fighting in Dagestan, a tiny Muslim republic of 2.1 million people and more than 30 ethnic groups in the Russian North Caucasus, is turning into a full-fledged war. In Moscow's political back rooms, there's fear it may evolve into something even more frightening: an excuse to cancel coming elections and clamp a state-of-emergency rule over Russia...
Just two days before Stepashin was fired, some 1,500 Islamic militants armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, bazookas, self-propelled antiaircraft guns and armor marched into Dagestan from Chechnya. The move was the latest, most violent shot in a creeping war that has been ravaging Dagestan since Russia's invasion of Chechnya in 1994. Russian federal forces have been continually engaged in action against Chechen raiders eager to see the coastal province of Dagestan annexed into land-locked Chechnya. The province is of vital strategic importance to Russia, representing 70% of the nation's frontage on the oil-producing Caspian...