Yeltsin Fires Key Aide in Bribery Scandal Over Book

It’s known in the former Communist world as “the sausage principle” of self-preservation: Each time a leadership comes under scrutiny for corruption, it slices off the rotten ends and claims that there’s still something worth saving in the middle.

As the Kremlin leadership maneuvered around yet another bribery accusation Friday, President Boris N. Yeltsin fired a deputy chief of staff while leaving in place his most senior and valued aides despite their having been touched by the same privatization scandal.

But the allegations against reformist First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly B. Chubais, privatization chief Maxim V. Boiko and three others have given Russia’s Communist and nationalist opposition ammunition in their battle against market economic reforms. The Duma, the Communist-dominated lower house of parliament, passed a resolution late Friday calling for a freeze on further sell-offs of state property.

The latest scandal to rock the Kremlin involves $450,000 in advances from a small publishing house paid to Chubais--the most powerful person in the country after Yeltsin--and the others for a book recounting Russia’s privatization of state property since the breakup of the Soviet Union six years ago. The publishing house is a subsidiary of the financial empire of millionaire banker Vladimir O. Potanin, a close friend of Chubais and head of the Uneximbank consortium that won several controversial state property auctions this year.

Investigative journalist Alexander Minkin of the Novaya Gazeta weekly called the book deal a thinly veiled bribery scheme by Uneximbank to secure continued favors from the government and an attempt to launder the Kremlin’s dirty money.

Officials in the publishing industry contend that the planned book would gross no more than $10,000, Minkin said, suggesting that the $90,000 advances to each of the five authors were offered with strings attached.

Yeltsin fired his deputy chief of staff, Alexander I. Kazakov, one of the five would-be authors of “The History of Russian Privatization.” Last week, the president sacked billionaire banker Boris A. Berezovsky as deputy national security chief for allegedly mixing his government and personal interests and creating an unseemly image of the leadership with his allegations that Chubais was rigging state share sell-offs to favor Potanin.

A little more than a month ago, Russian prosecutors opened a criminal case against Boiko’s predecessor as privatization chief, Alfred Kokh, after he was found to have accepted $100,000 in a separate book contract with another publisher with connections to Uneximbank.

The firing of Kazakov, the least visible and likely the most expendable of the five officials, was directly related to the book scandal and intended to show the president’s displeasure with aides involved in questionable dealings, said Alexander N. Shokhin, a parliamentary leader.

Shokhin noted that further dismissals might be forthcoming because of the scandal, but he appealed to Yeltsin to keep in mind that those involved make up the brain trust of Russia’s economic transition.

Such appeals have done little to lower the heat on Chubais, who was already one of the most unpopular figures in the Kremlin. As architect of the privatization process that has enriched a few powerful bankers like Berezovsky and Potanin while doing little to spread the state’s wealth among the many, Chubais is distrusted by the Russian masses despite earning high marks from Western analysts for his savvy direction of the economic transition.

Chubais conceded Friday that the book fees were “too high” and the public reproaches were justified. That rare concession of wrongdoing, coupled with mild reprimands from his superiors, indicated that the jury was still out on whether the chief economic power broker in Russia will keep his job.

A weary-looking Chubais, in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on an official visit, told journalists that he would accept whatever judgment Yeltsin made about his fitness for office.

“It is the ethical side that worries and troubles me most,” said Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, who has been accused in Western and Russian media reports of having become rich to the tune of $5 billion during his tenure as head of the government’s gas monopoly, Gazprom.

Chernomyrdin said neither he nor Yeltsin had been aware of the book contract, distancing themselves from the scandal that threatens to discredit their top economic strategists. In addition to Chubais, Boiko, Kokh and Kazakov, Federal Bankruptcy Commission Chairman Pyotr P. Mostovoi has been named in the book deal.