Yeltsin’s Daughter, Now in Charge of His Image, Gets Kremlin Office

MOSCOW — A year after her practical advice helped win him a second term, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has rewarded his 37-year-old daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, with an official job as presidential image-maker.

Yeltsin spokesman Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky told reporters Monday that Dyachenko will be responsible for the president’s image, but he gave no details. Dyachenko was also vague about the details of the job, telling independent NTV television she will have a Kremlin office and will help her father “in any capacity.”

Behind the scenes, Dyachenko has been helping Yeltsin make himself more attractive to his people since February 1996, when he began his reelection campaign as an unpopular conservative. He finished, with her guidance, as a reinvented liberal reformer who trounced his Communist rival at the polls.

The idea of giving her a formal position has been touted several times but always dropped for fear of irritating the public. Even Monday, the tart commentary on Russian television’s evening news left no doubt Dyachenko will face opposition: “Unlike many other foreign countries, we have a very unambiguously negative view of nepotism, especially at the very top.”

Yeltsin first invited Dyachenko to join his election team after she told him the campaign, at that stage led by conservative First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg N. Soskovets, was “going nowhere.”

Dyachenko spent the next five months as a traveling trouble-shooter who changed her father’s speech writers, persuaded his bodyguards to remove thuggish sunglasses and put the president in touch with new liberal allies.

Under a new campaign manager, liberal Anatoly B. Chubais--now a first deputy prime minister--Yeltsin’s popularity rating rose from a pitiful 6% in February to about 60% by July. Chubais has said since that she should be made “common-sense” advisor in the Kremlin.

Dyachenko denied she is the only person with the nerve to tell her father unpleasant truths. “That’s not true. He now has a very competent, energetic team around him,” she said. “My help will just maximize the effect.”