Mr Sergei Vadimovich Stepashin (46), the man President Yeltsin wants to be the next prime minister of Russia, possesses the one perfect quality for success within the Yeltsin regime. He does what he is told to do and asks no questions.
Many of his political acts have been unsavoury to say the least. His involvement in the corrupt and brutal war in Chechnya, for which Mr Yeltsin stands arraigned for impeachment, was wholehearted and without the slightest sign of compassion.
In the unlikely event of his nomination as prime minister being ratified by the Duma, Russia's credibility as an opponent of NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia will be diminished almost to nothing.
A man whose complicity in the deaths of up to 30,000 civilians in Chechnya has been clearly and frequently illustrated is hardly the type of person who can complain about NATO's killing of a much smaller number of innocent people.
Mr Stepashin as head of the MVD (Russia's Interior Ministry) pledged the loyalty of his millionstrong police force and his several hundred thousand troops against any threat, political or personal, to Mr Yeltsin.
Born in Port Arthur, China, in 1952, he was a former student at the Interior Ministry's School of Military Policy and the Military Academy and has a diploma in the history of science and law.
Economically he is counted among the young "liberals": democratically his record poses more serious questions. His support in his early days in grassroots politics in St Petersburg for the professional dissident hunter, Mr Viktor Cherkessov, may have been indicative of his true political instincts.
As head of the FSB, the internal successor to the KGB, his record was far from clean. Signposts to his attitudes on human rights and democracy include: the sanctioning of a Soviet-style denunciation of the writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in the KGB house magazine; his willingness to sweep under the carpet the massacre of civilians in the Chechen village of Samashki; and his inability to make any progress in solving the murders of an investigative journalist, Dmitri Kholodov, and the progressive politician, Ms Galina Starovoitova.
As far as his personal efficiency is concerned, it is generally believed that sloppy intelligence from his department, which indicated a swift victory in Chechnya, led to the war in that region.
Later in the campaign he was responsible for the disastrous attempt to free hostages who had been taken prisoner by Chechen rebels in the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk in 1995.
His predecessor, Mr Yevgeny Primakov, was axed, overtly, for "relying too much on the IMF" in his attempts to resolve Russia's financial crisis. His real crime was amassing a degree of popular support which exceeded that of the President.
If political popularity is the main reason for incurring Mr Yeltsin's often inexplicable wrath, then Mr Stepashin, should he become prime minister, will be safe from the Kremlin's ire for the foreseeable future.