Russian Roulette

What faith can anyone put in Boris Yeltsin's words? Five months ago, the Russian President said Viktor Chernomyrdin was not good enough to be Prime Minister and fired him. Last week he hired him back as the "heavyweight" who could save Russia from collapse.

The obvious conclusion is that neither Yeltsin nor Chernomyrdin nor any of the other figures spinning in and out of the government's revolving door have a firm plan to quell the economic and political chaos. And even if one did, he probably could not muster the political support to make his program stick. There is, at the core of the Yeltsin regime, a vacuum of power and an absence of leadership. Yeltsin seems to be President in name only, a figure so diminished that he was forced onto national TV last Friday to insist, "I'm not going to resign." The merry-go-round of Prime Ministers bespeaks the destructively ad hoc nature of the country's governance. No wonder Russians and the rest of the world were left wondering anxiously last week, Is anyone in charge here?

Well, yes, in a way. Stepping boldly in to exploit the crisis was money power. Men made rich through political connections in the post-Soviet economy have wielded substantial influence ever since they got rich buying up government assets at bargain prices and two years ago financed Yeltsin's come-from-behind election victory. The reappointment of Chernomyrdin, the ponderous former natural-gas bureaucrat who was for years Yeltsin's most obedient Prime Minister, signals the intention of these rich men to obtain a government that will protect their ill-gotten assets.

Of course, they could not have done so without the consent of the man most responsible for the mess, Boris Yeltsin. As the economy crumbled around him, the physically and politically ailing President was more isolated than ever, humiliated and dismissed as irrelevant. Former supporters abandoned him, and some in the outgoing government even raised doubts about the loyalty of his staff. No longer hinting at the possibility of a third term, Yeltsin was left struggling to convince the Russian political establishment that he should serve out the last two years of his term.

Smelling blood in the economic meltdown, the lower house of parliament, or Duma, took the offensive, calling for Yeltsin to resign, demanding a greater share of power and disdainfully offering the President guarantees that he would not be prosecuted or harassed once he left office. More troubling still, the communists, led by Gennadi Zyuganov, prepared to parlay the failure of Russia's cutthroat capitalism into a rollback of the reforms that, for better or worse, have been credited to Yeltsin's account, such as a freely convertible ruble, a tight money supply, even some industrial privatization.

Behind the machinations that brought back Chernomyrdin stood one nimble figure in particular--Boris Berezovsky, financial baron turned political wheeler-dealer, the most ruthless of the so-called New Russians in the art of turning money into power. Unlike the men officially running the government, he always knows what he wants and has the brashness, tenacity and clout to get it. For him. Yeltsin's weakness offered a chance to strengthen the puppet strings.