Of all the transformations under way in Russia, the one at the top will have to be watched most carefully: Boris Yeltsin is turning into Leonid Brezhnev right before our eyes. In a rerun of the Kremlin drama circa 1978, the President is ever more frail and shambling, his eyes glazed and his speech slurred. He rules like a czar--from on high, without much attention to detail, and by decree. Like Brezhnev, Yeltsin has no intention of stepping down, and the people around him will do anything to keep him in power, lest they lose their own. Last week they launched what may be their campaign for re-election in 2000 by shoving aside the most potent rivals to the President.
Feeble as he is, Yeltsin is still a cunning politician with an almost feudal authority over the ambitious operators in his shadow. He can crank up short bursts of devastating energy, as he did last week when he fired Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin and his entire Cabinet. With one sharp stroke, Yeltsin eliminated everyone he thought might be a threat to his political future. He left the reactionaries, the nationalists, the billionaire crony capitalists to pick themselves up, to scheme and struggle over whom to back and how to lay hands on still more of the vast wealth of Russia. During Yeltsin's most recent illness, they had begun to act as if his reign had ended and he didn't have to be taken into account. Yeltsin knew that. Now the schemers know they were mistaken.
About 8:15 a.m. last Monday, very early for him, Yeltsin and his motorcade (including the ever present rolling hospital, nicknamed "the catafalque") swept into the Kremlin. When Chernomyrdin arrived a bit later, Yeltsin called him into the presidential office, presented him with a medal for service to the state and fired him. Normally, this would have been a full day's work for Yeltsin, but he didn't stop to rest. He phoned his incessantly controversial First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoli Chubais, the inflicter of Western-style economic reforms, and fired him.
Then Yeltsin did the same to the Minister of Internal Affairs, General Anatoli Kulikov, the hard-line chief of 500,000 police and 257,000 well-equipped internal troops. The President paused then for a chat with Minister of Defense Igor Sergeyev and federal security chief Nikolai Kovalev. Just routine, said presidential spokesman Sergei Yastrzhembsky. Not entirely, says another Kremlin official. That chat was "a prudent precaution," simply common sense when you have just fired Kulikov, an unreconstructed hawk with enormous ambition and many troops within marching distance of the Kremlin.
Finally, Yeltsin ousted the rest of the Cabinet. It's clear now that while he intends to reduce the total number of ministers, most of those purged will be reappointed, starting with Defense Minister Sergeyev and Foreign Minister Yevgeni Primakov. This was a domestic political coup and had nothing to do with international or defense policy. No one knew that at first, though, and when the news burst out of nowhere, the Clinton Administration was badly shaken. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was on her way to Europe to meet Primakov, among others, and she asked for reassurance that he still had a job. Primakov officially said yes in public in Cologne, with a grin, and vowed that Russian policy would not change.