Yeltsin’s Daughter Viewed as Power Behind Throne

For more than a decade, Tatyana Dyachenko worked at the famous Salyut design bureau, plotting trajectories for the communications satellites and the Mir space station. In 1994, she took a post at an obscure bank that specialized in trading in gems and precious metals. But these jobs were merely preparation for her true calling: helping her father govern Russia.

Today, the reclusive 39-year-old mathematician is widely viewed as the power behind the Kremlin throne. Officially, she is on the government payroll as the “image-maker” of her ailing father, President Boris N. Yeltsin. The part she plays, however, is much broader.

Of all Yeltsin’s aides and advisors, Dyachenko alone has unlimited access to him. She has an office in the Kremlin--and lives with the president at his country estate outside Moscow. In a nation where men have long dominated political life, she serves as the president’s eyes and ears, and as an intermediary for top officials seeking presidential action. When Yeltsin is ill or tired--which is much of the time--she is said to act in his name.

“She is the one who is running the country,” said Vyacheslav A. Nikonov, a political consultant who worked with Dyachenko on Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection campaign. “An amateur advisor to the president is running the country. She makes many decisions without consulting him.”

Dyachenko, described by those who know her as modest and charming, rarely appears in public and almost never grants interviews. She has maintained a strict silence in the face of mounting accusations that the Yeltsin family has stashed millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts and acquired property abroad.

Her rise from working mom to unofficial regent mirrors Russia’s deterioration over the last eight years as it has reverted from a budding democracy to a land of corruption and poverty.

Today, former Kremlin aides paint a grim picture of an isolated, detached president who devotes only a few minutes a day to government affairs. The pro-democracy advocates of his early presidency are long gone, and he seldom meets with outsiders. His tiny circle of advisors, these former aides say, is more concerned with personal business interests than with matters of public policy.

In recent months, the Dyachenko name has surfaced in two major international investigations into alleged corruption in Russia.

In Switzerland, prosecutors are looking into allegations that Tatyana Dyachenko charged thousands of dollars in purchases on a credit card given to her by the Swiss firm Mabetex, which received $300 million in construction contracts from the Kremlin.

In Washington, a top Bank of New York executive testified at a congressional hearing last month that her husband, Leonid Dyachenko, had two accounts in the bank’s Cayman Islands branch. The wealthy businessman has not been accused of wrongdoing, but his accounts are among dozens under scrutiny by U.S. investigators looking into possible Russian money-laundering through the bank.

The Kremlin denies any wrongdoing on the part of the president’s family members. Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, issued her own denial recently on national television. “We have no villas abroad, no castles, no yachts,” she said. As for her younger daughter, Russia’s first lady said: “I am so hurt by all the lies they tell about her.”

Yeltsin has made no secret of the fact that, of his two daughters, Dyachenko is his favorite, according to former aides. He trusts her more than anyone else, and she has a way of telling Yeltsin things that no one else could get away with--particularly when it has come to getting the hard-drinking president to put away the bottle.

Dyachenko is the central figure in “The Family,” the small circle of presidential advisors who are said to exercise inordinate influence over Yeltsin, 68. Its other principal members are said to be former Yeltsin Chief of Staff Valentin Yumashev and financiers Boris A. Berezovsky, Roman A. Abramovich and Alexander L. Mamut.

Under The Family’s guidance, the country has seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis, with no apparent long-term plan for solving its vast economic and social problems. Over the last 20 months, the country has had five prime ministers, a disastrous financial meltdown and frequent political scandals. The government has started a new war in the separatist republic of Chechnya that is likely to end in disaster--like the last one. Despite Dyachenko’s image-making efforts, public trust in Yeltsin hovers at 2% in opinion polls.

“Several years ago, you couldn’t imagine in a bad dream that a simple girl from a provincial town would be running state affairs, making important decisions and sacking prime ministers one after another,” said Pavel I. Voshchanov, a former Yeltsin press secretary. “Our legislators don’t do anything about it--not that they can or want to. All this creates a strong sense of doom, a feeling that our democracy died before actually being born.”

Dyachenko met her husband, Leonid, now 36, while both worked at the Salyut design bureau. After they married, he adopted her son, Boris--the offspring of an early, unhappy marriage to a fellow student--who is now 18 and studies in England. They have another son, Gleb, who is 4.

She was first recruited to Yeltsin’s inner circle in 1996 by Yumashev, Berezovsky and then-presidential campaign manager Anatoly B. Chubais, says former Yeltsin bodyguard and drinking buddy Alexander V. Korshakov in his book “Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn Till Dusk.” The trio wanted someone pliable to serve as a messenger between them and the president, said Korshakov, who was fired by Yeltsin in 1996.

“Tanya turned out to be the perfect candidate. She plunged into power with great enjoyment and did not torment herself too much pondering who arranged all that and for what purpose,” he writes.

She became an indispensable part of the reelection campaign, traveling with the president, coaching him, offering encouragement and getting him to wear makeup during television appearances.

“There are some unpleasant things which only I feel comfortable with telling the president about and it will have the maximum effect,” Dyachenko said in a rare 1997 television interview. “I can do it more tactfully, I can choose the right moment, I know better how to say it.”

According to Korshakov, even as far back as the campaign, Dyachenko was more than just an image-maker.

On June 19 of that year, security police arrested two Yeltsin campaign workers leaving the presidential campaign headquarters with a cardboard box containing $500,000 in new bills. At the time, Korshakov said, there were reports that millions of dollars were being siphoned from the campaign into foreign bank accounts.

Within hours, however, Dyachenko called the head of Kremlin security and demanded that the pair be released, saying that Yeltsin’s campaign would be ruined if they were charged. Soon after, the two were let go.

In 1997, Dyachenko recruited a leading liberal and reform crusader, Boris Y. Nemtsov, to become first deputy prime minister. He lasted 18 months. In his new book, “A Provincial in Moscow,” Nemtsov says: “Tatyana Dyachenko is Yeltsin in a skirt. She is a rather soft and pleasant person, but political expediency is more important to her than human relations.”

During her June 1997 television interview--her last major public appearance--Dyachenko dressed modestly and appeared cheerful, smiling and laughing frequently. She played down her role as a central figure in the Kremlin and said her father had asked her to join his staff as a matter of his own convenience.

“I realize very well that the president appointed me his advisor not because I am so clever and talented,” she said. “He is the president of a great country. Probably there are other people who are more professional and smarter, but the president is more comfortable with this decision.”

With Yeltsin’s presidency scheduled to come to an end Aug. 9, former aides and political foes allege that The Family is trying to amass as much wealth as it can while it still has the chance.

“Behind the Kremlin walls, no one is involved in matters of state any longer,” said Voshchanov, the former press secretary. “They have more important business to take care of--’business’ being the operative term here. They are dividing property, increasing their capital, organizing credits and securing contracts for each other. The Kremlin is now one gigantic commercial enterprise.”

In Russia, there is no tradition of democratic succession, no system of providing a pension for the retired head of state. On the contrary, relatives of dead and deposed leaders often have been held accountable for the sins of the past. In this century, the family of Czar Nicholas II was executed; the son of dictator Josef Stalin and the son-in-law of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev were both imprisoned.

For The Family, the best chance of perpetuating its existence is to ensure the election of a friendly presidential candidate in voting scheduled for June. Whatever the outcome of the vote, Russia’s eight-year experiment with capitalism has given Dyachenko the kind of power rarely exercised by women behind the walls of the Kremlin.

“She saw gigantic possibilities and has used them to the fullest,” Voshchanov said. “She realized all of a sudden that ‘no’ doesn’t exist for her, that everything has become possible: real estate, money, a beautiful life, clothes, everybody’s attention, school abroad for her kids. There is nothing she can’t do or wish.”