Word: yeltsin
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There are several answers, none of them reassuring. Most important, Yeltsin presides over a system that was built with one purpose: to give him as much power as possible and reduce to an absolute minimum the political latitude of both parliament and his own ministers. Second, Yeltsin is profoundly jealous of anyone who tries to steal his limelight, and during his illness he has divided caretaker duties between presidential chief of staff Anatoli Chubais and Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin, two men whose approaches to politics and government are diametrically opposed. The result, as the President undoubtedly intended, is political stalemate...
...this, Yeltsin's pneumonia seems to have produced a striking side effect: a collapse of confidence among his aides and top supporters. When Yeltsin faced surgery last fall, his entourage declared its support for the man and expressed enthusiasm about the future. But when pneumonia was diagnosed in early January, "a lot of the President's supporters and aides said, 'That's it,'" recalls a Yeltsin adviser. Some prominent supporters are quietly distancing themselves from the President; others are gravitating toward people like Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov or Alexander Lebed. There have been some nasty bursts of political infighting within...
...reform-minded politicians, businessmen and academics who worked for Yeltsin's electoral victory last year had hoped to goad Yeltsin into action by appealing to his desire for a prominent place in history. They wanted structural reform of the country's outdated industrial sector, along with dramatic measures to encourage foreign investment. They wanted a new tax code to replace the current unwieldy and unenforceable law. And they wanted to restore law and order. None of this has happened, nor is likely to happen in the foreseeable future...
...words of commentator Otto Latsis, "the lost year for reform." More than 30 million people are earning less than Russia's minimum wage. The transformation of Russia's bloated conscript army into a much smaller, more efficient and better-armed fighting machine has not begun. In foreign policy, Yeltsin's more liberal aides had hoped to move Russia further into the mainstream of international relations. Instead, Moscow is bogged down in an ill-tempered exchange with the West over NATO's expansion plans. Western diplomats say the President's absence injects uncertainty into their negotiations with Foreign Minister Yevgeni Primakov...
...hopes last fall for major reforms were 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...