DYACHENKO, TATIANA BORISOVNA

(b. 1960), adviser to her father, President Boris Yeltsin.

Tatiana Dyachenko became an adviser to her father, President Boris Yeltsin, in the last few years of his rule. Trained as a mathematician and computer scientist, she worked in a design bureau of the space industry until 1994. She then worked for the bank Zarya Urala (Ural Dawn).

In the early 1990s her father's ghostwriter Valentin Yumashev introduced her to the Mafia-connected businessman Boris Berezovsky. The latter courted her with attention and lavish presents, and handed her father three million dollars that he claimed were royalties on Yeltsin's second volume of memoirs. This episode launched the rise of the businessmen oligarchs who became highly influential in Yeltsin's administration.

In February 1996, with a popular approval rating in single digits as he began his ultimately successful run for reelection, Yeltsin appointed Dyachenko to his campaign staff. Here she worked closely with key oligarchs and the campaign director Anatoly Chubais. That summer, she facilitated her father's ouster of his hitherto most trusted aide, Alexander Korzhakov, and then the ascent of Chubais to head the Presidential Administration.

In June 1997 Yeltsin formally appointed her one of his advisers, responsible for public relations. In 1998 she was named a director of Russia's leading TV channel, Public Russian Television (ORT), controlled by Berezovsky.

In 1999, as Yeltsin's power ebbed, Dyachenko's lifestyle fell under scrutiny with the unfolding of various top-level scandals. For example, the Swiss firm Mabetex was revealed to have paid major kickbacks to Kremlin figures, with Dyachenko and other Yeltsin relatives allegedly having spent large sums by credit card free of charge.

After her father's resignation in December 1999, Dyachenko continued to be an influential coordinator of her father's political and business clan and an unpaid adviser to the head of Vladimir Putin's Presidential Administration Alexander Voloshin.

Dyachenko has three children, one by each of her three husbands.

See also: yeltsin, boris nikolayevich

bibliography

Klebnikov, Paul. (2000). Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia. New York: Harcourt.

Yeltsin, Boris. (2000). Midnight Diaries. New York: Public Affairs.

Peter Reddaway