Just Call it Kremlinization

As the kaleidoscope settles on the government reshuffle the score looks something like this: President Boris Yeltsin, won; the State Duma, drawn; Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, lost. If we wanted a shorthand term we could call it Kremlinization.


It's a verdict that will surprise anyone from the West -- a prime minister, after all, is supposed to draw up his own cabinet, not lose control of it. But Russia is not so straightforward.


In the last month Chernomyrdin has been almost a bystander as a flood of presidential decrees have confiscated all the key economic portfolios from one team and awarded them to a new one. First he lost his old chum, the Central Bank chairman Viktor Gerashchenko, a kindred spirit in both girth and ideology.


Then Economics Minister Alexander Shokhin, one of his closer allies in the cabinet, quit over the naming of new Finance Minister Vladimir Panskov. For good measure Shokhin said that Chernomyrdin had not even met Panskov before the day of his appointment. The equivalent in Britain would be John Major shaking hands with someone and saying, "Hello, you must be my new Chancellor of the Exchequer."


Both Panskov and the new Economics Minister Yevgeny Yasin were plucked from Yeltsin's administration to be given their new jobs. On Wednesday the president underlined the message by presenting his new economics minister to reporters in the Kremlin and announcing why he had picked two new deputy prime ministers. Not even a shadow of Chernomyrdin.


Kremlinization seems to be Yeltsin's answer to a political fall that so far has not been very pleasant. He was evidently incandescent with rage at so-called Black Tuesday when the ruble crashed and left his claims of coming economic prosperity in tatters. And he is not a man who likes betrayal.


Chernomyrdin survived the crisis but he got a couple of nasty shocks. Yeltsin nominated his own Security Council committee to look into the crash, taking the matter out of the hands of the government. And then, when Chernomyrdin was vacationing beside the Black Sea, someone let loose a particularly pungent rumor that the prime minister was being sacked. I would lay heavy bets that the someone was inside the Kremlin.


The other key development is that the battle lines with parliament have been drawn and the big issue is the budget. The president lost a tactical skirmish over the weekend when he had to bow to the votes of both houses of parliament and revoke his own veto on their law which puts a strict timetable on the budget. Next up is the 1995 budget and the early signs are that the Duma doesn't like it one bit.


The budget is parliament's biggest weapon and Yeltsin, one of the world's wiliest politicians, clearly does not want the handling of something so important to be entrusted to the government alone. To take just one example, if military spending is slashed too far he could have an explosion in the army on his hands. So the president has been buying himself all the levers on the budget. The new finance minister, who recently worked in both the Kremlin and the Duma, would seem to be the ideal agent to play a new role: that of reporting back to the president, softening up the Duma, and working on a budget which will pay political dividends. The prospects are not good for the current austere outline budget, which Chernomyrdin defended so stoutly before the Duma two weeks ago. It was largely the work of the now departed ex-finance minister, Sergei Dubinin.


The beauty of this strategy from a political point of view is that the government, not the Kremlin, takes all the flak in the budget battle. Yeltsin can just sit back in his armchair and watch the bullets fly. Much of the opposition, however, is already wise to what is going on. Grigory Yavlinsky's faction, both liberal and anti-Yeltsin, loudly refused to vote on the no-confidence motion in the government on the grounds that it was Yeltsin, not Chernomyrdin pulling the strings. Yavlinsky then called for changes in the constitution and early presidential elections.


The men in the White House cannot be best pleased by the recent trimming of their powers. But Yeltsin has at least smoothed a few feathers with the announcement that the Kremlin apparatus is being cut by 500 people. So if the government cannot have the strongest political position, it can at least have the biggest bureaucracy.