Russia's Puppet Master

By ANDREW MEIER/MOSCOW

On the eve of a visit to Rome last year, Boris Yeltsin chided a group of Italian journalists graced with a Kremlin audience. "It's a pity your Prime Ministers change so often," he said. "It makes things complicated..." Indeed. For a year and a half now, ever since Yeltsin began his ritual of sending his Prime Ministers packing on sudden notice, his rivals have spoken with solemn delight of Yeltsin's diminishing physical and mental state. Last week, however, when he fired his fourth Prime Minister in 17 months, even former loyalists joined Yeltsin's opponents in naming the culprit behind the latest beheading: Agoniya. The Russian word is usually translated as agony. But it means death throes. "This is not just another shake-up," said a former top Kremlin aide. "This is the beginning of the end."

When Yeltsin sacked Sergei Stepashin last week, few in Russia were surprised. True, Stepashin had been in office only 82 days. But in his jealous protection of his waning presidency, Yeltsin has made the unpredictable predictable. His second move of the day, however, created shock waves. In a seven-minute television address that bade Stepashin farewell, in which his tongue and eyes strained to find the words on the TelePrompTer, Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin, a virtual unknown to most Russians, not only his acting Prime Minister but also his heir. Bestowing his trust in Putin, Yeltsin implored voters to do the same: "I want those who go to polls next July to be confident in him as well." Putin, a former head of the Federal Security Service (the successor to the KGB), accepted the call to duty with alacrity. "We are military men," he declared in his remarks. "The decision's been taken, and we will carry it out." It was exactly what Yeltsin wanted to hear.

Russia's embattled President rose early on Monday to greet Stepashin and Putin at Gorki-9, the presidential dacha outside Moscow. The hour--7:30 a.m.--meant Yeltsin was not seeking a casual conclave. Stepashin and Putin knew what was coming; the shake-up had already surfaced in the Moscow press. Anatoli Chubais--an early Yeltsin ally--had even met with Kremlin aides on Sunday to argue that firing another Prime Minister now, with parliamentary elections set for December and a presidential vote next July, was a dangerous move that could discredit the Kremlin, the government and Russia in general. But Chubais was not even granted an audience with Yeltsin. His former place, that of the man closest to the presidential ear, was taken. In it sat Alexander Voloshin, Yeltsin's chief of staff and the public face of the clique of confidantes that now surrounds the President, an inner circle known in the Russian press as "the Family." The other core Family members are Yeltsin's daughter Tatyana Dyachenko and Voloshin's predecessor, Valentin Yumashev, a former journalist who ghostwrote Yeltsin's memoirs. Days before the sacking, the trio drew up a list of candidate-heirs. But in the end, there was only one. Yeltsin wanted Putin.

All summer the Family has kept a fearful eye on the forces advancing on the Kremlin. Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow's mayor and the chief (if undeclared) aspirant to Yeltsin's throne, has long been the Kremlin's top rival. In early August, when Luzhkov's party allied with a bloc of Russia's muscular regional leaders (once loyal Yeltsin vassals), Yeltsin was infuriated. The alliance laid bare how fast and far power was draining from the Kremlin. Luzhkov's courtship of Yevgeni Primakov, the former Prime Minister sacked in May, to lead his party in the Duma campaign further caused Yeltsin to fulminate. The Family fears a Primakov-Luzhkov pairing could take not only the Duma this December but also the Kremlin next July.

Stepashin, meanwhile, had turned coy about his own presidential ambitions. Like Primakov before him, he had become too popular for the Kremlin's liking. Over the weekend, as polls showing Stepashin pulling even with Luzhkov landed on Voloshin's desk, and militant separatists in the Caucasus reappeared on Russian TV screens, the Family gathered and Yeltsin pulled the trigger. "Stepashin made no major mistakes," says a Kremlin aide. "He simply failed to become the good dictator."

Enter Putin, best known for his anonymity. A slight man of few words, the 46-year-old is a veteran of Soviet intelligence . Though he is known to have spent 15 years in East Germany as a KGB operative, little else has emerged about him. Colleagues who have worked by his side know almost nothing of his resume or private life. When a Russian TV interviewer, struggling to introduce Yeltsin's chosen heir to her audience, asked Putin for "a few words" about his family, he gave her a few: "Wife, two children. Two girls, 13 and 14 years old." Curtness, colleagues say, masks his real nature. He's a tough guy, they say, but an enlightened, modern one. Still, in addition to a fondness for wrestling and judo, he professes admiration for the iron discipline of Yuri Andropov, the former KGB boss who ruled the U.S.S.R. in the early 1980s. On the 85th anniversary of Andropov's birth in June, Putin laid flowers on his grave at the Kremlin wall and cited Andropov's enduring popularity as proof "there's a demand for people like Andropov--honest, decent and tough."

For all his years in the KGB, Putin merited little notice among his colleagues. "He did what he was told," says a former high-ranking intelligence officer. Remarkably, in 1975, after getting his law degree in Leningrad, Putin entered the KGB and was sent abroad on his first posting. "It couldn't have been pure luck," says retired KGB Lieut. Colonel Konstantin Preobrazhensky. "He must have had family connections." As the U.S.S.R. unwound, Putin returned to Leningrad and rose through the city system to national power.

Putin is expected to be confirmed by the Duma this week, but few give him a prayer of becoming Russia's next President. His anointment is less a strategic move in a long-range plan than a sudden turn taken by an enfeebled President preoccupied with survival. "The Kremlin's not playing chess," says Alexander Oslon, Russia's leading pollster. "They're playing checkers--they're living one day at a time." With the end of Yeltsin's second term 10 months away, the Family is beset by fear of humiliation, if not prosecution. ("The Ceausescu scenario," a Kremlin staff member calls it, recalling the collapse of Romania's dictatorship in 1989.) Ironically, the gravest threat may be neither Luzhkov nor the Chechen rebels but a corps of Swiss prosecutors that has been probing allegations of financial malfeasance in the Kremlin, centering on lucrative contracts awarded a Swiss construction firm. Yeltsin is eager to ensure that whoever takes over the Kremlin next year won't be coming after him or his family. And while Putin may not survive in office long enough to become his successor, Yeltsin is counting on him to have the political muscle to shepherd the Kremlin's favorites into the Duma in December.

Naturally, the sudden ascent of a Federal Security Service boss has raised the specter of unconstitutional moves. Inside Russia, Putin is known as an "ice-head" or tough hardened guy--not the ideal pedigree for shoring up the nation's rickety democratic system. But while Putin and Yeltsin could declare a state of emergency, disband the Duma or cancel elections, Kremlin aides insist that Yeltsin appreciates the importance of a peaceful transfer of power.

August is the cruelest month in Russian politics, a month that recalls low points like the 1991 coup attempt and last year's economic collapse. But this August, Yeltsin's final one in the Kremlin, has been particularly unkind. The Swiss are still probing, while Islamic separatists drag Russia yet again into the Caucasus quagmire and regional chieftains from St. Petersburg to Tatarstan hunger for a bigger slice of the federal powers. Yeltsin's final year was supposed to be dedicated to dignified business: handing over the Kremlin to an heir sworn to reforming Russia. He may yet succeed in that improbable mission. But last week even allies were starting to believe that Yeltsin, cut off from the world outside and growing increasingly fearful for his own future, is holding his whole country hostage. He has named an heir, but he needs a savior.