Alexander Korzhakov

Alexander Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin’s security chief, appears in the account of the 1996 presidential crisis as both a gatekeeper to an increasingly isolated president and an advocate of keeping power without a vote. His proximity gives him influence at a moment when Yeltsin’s political fortunes are collapsing and the country is turning back toward the Communists.

Position beside Yeltsin

Korzhakov is described as a paramilitary boss who is among the few people with access to Yeltsin, then holed up in the Kremlin with his family and security chief. Yeltsin is drinking heavily through what the narrative calls serious depressive episodes. Korzhakov’s closeness to him is therefore more than a matter of formal security: it places him beside the president during a period of acute political and personal instability.

The account also calls Korzhakov venal. It does not detail his private life or explain the full extent of his authority, but it shows him acting as an influential intermediary: he helps determine when the president is psychologically receptive to arguments from the military hawks.

War as political leverage

After the disastrous effects of shock therapy and early privatizations have plunged Russia into chaos, Yeltsin’s popularity is waning. The hawks persuade him that a limited, successful war against Chechnya could weaken the nationalists and revive his standing. Korzhakov is nearby to tell them when the right psychological moment has arrived. The passage thus places him at the hinge between Yeltsin’s vulnerability and the military’s case for intervention, without presenting him as the sole author of the decision.

The war that follows bears little resemblance to the promised lightning victory. At the start of the siege of Grozny in December 1994, the city is subjected to 4,000 detonations an hour; Russian conscripts become trapped in a conflict compared with the Afghanistan war endured by their fathers and older brothers. These consequences sharpen the gap between the political calculation Korzhakov helps facilitate and the ruinous reality of the campaign.

Elections and the survival of power

By 1996, the Communist Party has become a serious alternative to Yeltsin. Five years after he declared it illegal, public anger at democracy, the market, and the injustice accompanying them has made a mass Communist vote seem possible. Yeltsin considers canceling the election. In the sauna, Korzhakov tells him, “Boris Nicolayevich, democracy is good, but without elections it’s more of a sure thing.”

The remark condenses Korzhakov’s political role: he treats the election not as the necessary expression of democratic rule but as a danger to the incumbent that might be removed. In this episode, he stands close to the president at the moment when electoral uncertainty, personal crisis, and coercive power converge.