RUSSIA - The Yumashev, Dyachenko & Malashenko Triangle

Now three figures control the Kremlin: Chief of staff Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin's younger daughter Tatiana Dyachenko, and Boris Malashenko - with Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov having dropped out (see Downstream Trends). Yumashev, a former journalist and ghost-writer of Yeltsin's memoirs, has become a close friend of the ruling family. Tatiana is the liaison between the family and the official Kremlin staff. Malashenko, Yeltsin's most trusted image-maker, is president and co-founder of Russia's most influential TV channel. Boris Berezovsky acts as an "unpaid advisor" to all three of them. 'The Financial Times' on April 15, 1998 reported political analyst Sergei Markov as describing Berezovsky, a former mathematician turned billionaire, as "a modern-day Rasputin, secretively manipulating the president and his entourage".

Below the top three come Sergei Yastrzhembsky, the suave Kremlin spokesman and foreign policy advisor brought in by Chubais, family friend and presidential advisor Victoria Mitina, and Yeltsin's top economic advisor Alexander Livshits. Livshits, 52, previously served as deputy PM and finance minister. He is a liberal economist and close to Chubais. He was a lecturer in market economy before perestroika appeared. In 1990 he published a book on market reforms. In 1992 he joined the presidential team and in 1994 became chief of Yeltsin's economic advisors. As a team player, he knew how to rein in his own monetary instincts during the 1996 presidential election campaign and made himself an advocate of Yeltsin's good intentions, which included handouts and promises of social security provisions. His dream, he said in an interview in 1995, was of the day Russia no longer needed to concentrate its worries on reforms but had an efficient economic machine which ran normally and naturally. He says it is his job as an advisor to tell Yeltsin the truth even when the president does not want to hear it.