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Primakov's problem was that he did his job too well. He stabilized the condition of the terminally ill economy, and with Yeltsin's physical decrepitude keeping him out of the Kremlin for months on end, Primakov increasingly took over the reins of government. By simply appearing to create a measure of calm and negotiating some rollover in Russia's debt to the IMF, the former KGB leader improbably became the most popular politician in Russia.
That sealed his fate. "Primakov was sacked primarily because he was irritating the president by overshadowing him," says TIME Moscow bureau chief Paul Quinn-Judge. Yeltsin's naked envy of Primakov's popularity was compounded by the prime minister's failure to go through the motions of pretending that the increasingly absent president was actually pulling the strings of power.
As the personification of a compromise between Yeltsin and a Communist-dominated Duma, Primakov and his plodding search for consensus with the legislature alarmed Western bankers. Meanwhile, his challenges to the West in foreign policy also upset the Yeltsin-era formula of Western financial aid to Russia in exchange for Moscow's political compliance. Primakov also pressed ahead with corruption charges against Yeltsin's onetime political savior Berezovsky, and did nothing to help attempts by the presidential administration to stop a bribery investigation by the country's top prosecutor, Yuri Skuratov, that may implicate Yeltsin's daughter and key aide, Tatyana Dyachenko.