What Does Yevgeny Want?

For the Western reader, the flashing red letters on Yevgeny Primakov's résumé may be KGB, but that might be jumping to misleading conclusions. "After all," says TIME Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier, "nobody refers to George Bush as an 'ex-spy chief.'" Although Mikhail Gorbachev named him deputy director of the secret service in 1991, Primakov is an arch-pragmatist and Moscow's consummate political survivor -- a former senior Communist bureaucrat who has served in every Russian government since the Soviet Union's collapse.

Although his foreign policy credentials are impeccable, his views on the economy offer little comfort to Western leaders hoping for a pliant Kremlin to carry through monetarist economic reforms. Primakov recently urged that Russia adopt a Roosevelt-style New Deal -- not exactly IMF orthodoxy.

In the end, however, the foreign minister's primary skill is the art of the deal, and given the fractious coalition over which he'll preside, it's unlikely that he'll produce dramatic policy surprises. Also, at age 68, he's not planning to stay in the job too long. "Primakov is essentially a caretaker prime minister, chosen in the hope that he can take the explosive edge off the crisis," says Meier. "He's not viewed as a long-term option. And he's not exactly enthusiastic about the job."