Just when Kremlin turmoil seemed to be subsiding after President Boris Yeltsin's successful heart surgery, a new tempest swirled Friday around his powerful chief of staff and an alleged cover-up.
A power struggle has gripped Russian politics during Yeltsin's illness. The president's office dismissed the latest allegations as an attempt to "stir up the public," while a leading Communist said it showed how much "everything here is fragile and corrupt."At issue were transcripts published Friday in the popular Mos-kov-sky Komsomolets daily, purportedly of a June conversation between Yeltsin's top aides at the height of his re-election campaign.
The transcript alleges that the aides agreed to hush up the arrests of two campaign workers accused of carrying $500,000 out of government headquarters, just three days after the first-round presidential vote.
The two campaign aides were released hours after their arrest and have not been charged with any wrongdoing. Critics of the president suggested last summer that the money was intended to be placed in an illegal slush fund.
Anatoly Chubais, then a top campaign aide and now Yeltsin's chief of staff, denied the two were carrying any money and called the arrests a KGB-style provocation by political rivals.
In the published transcript, however, a man identified as Chubais acknowledges his assistants were carrying money and arranges for the chief prosecutor to squelch any investigation.
In a rare television interview Friday, Chubais flatly denied such a conversation took place and accused a rival, Alexander Kor-zha-kov, of being behind it.
Yeltsin had dismissed Kor-zha-kov, his personal security chief, and two other Kremlin hard-liners a day after the campaign workers' arrests, which they had ordered.
Chubais, who appeared to be behind Korzhakov's firing, claimed the three hard-liners were plotting a palace coup to cancel the elec-tions.
He told the Interfax news agency that the publication was "part of an orchestrated campaign to discredit the president's authority after Boris Yeltsin's successful operation."
Yeltsin's spokesman, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, added that the controversy "evokes a feeling of disgust. They are trying to stir up the public."
However, Yeltsin's hard-line foes in the State Duma, parliament's lower house, voted 267-3 to urge Yeltsin to ask the prosecutor general to speed up an investigation into the campaign aides' arrest.
Deputy speaker Sergei Baburin said the transcript, if genuine, implies "criminal actions" by top state officials.