Word: yeltsin
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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...
...summer the Family has kept a fearful eye on the forces advancing on the Kremlin. Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow's mayor and the chief (if undeclared) aspirant to Yeltsin's throne, has long been the Kremlin's top rival. In early August, when Luzhkov's party allied with a bloc of Russia's muscular regional leaders (once loyal Yeltsin vassals), Yeltsin was infuriated. The alliance laid bare how fast and far power was draining from the Kremlin. Luzhkov's courtship of Yevgeni Primakov, the former Prime Minister sacked in May, to lead his party in the Duma campaign further caused Yeltsin...
...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...
...Soviet intelligence . Though he is known to have spent 15 years in East Germany as a KGB operative, little else has emerged about him. Colleagues who have worked by his side know almost nothing of his resume or private life. When a Russian TV interviewer, struggling to introduce Yeltsin's chosen heir to her audience, asked Putin for "a few words" about his family, he gave her a few: "Wife, two children. Two girls, 13 and 14 years old." Curtness, colleagues say, masks his real nature. He's a tough guy, they say, but an enlightened, modern one. Still...