Yeltsin

CHAPTER TWELVE Boris Agonistes

If there is an enduring truism about Boris Yeltsin, it is that he had a colorful personality—a juicy or succulent personality (sochnaya lichnost’) is another idiom one hears Russians use. It was the stuff of countless news stories in his years in power and suffuses the Yeltsin legend.

Human personalities are elusive. The out-of-the-ordinary individual may outdo the ordinary in erecting “identity shields” to mask what is beneath the skin.¹ Yeltsin’s carapace as national leader was unusually impenetrable. It differed in degree if not in kind from the reserve he maintained in Sverdlovsk, where he had found himself on familiar and stable terrain. Yeltsin seemed to bring to the metropole a fear of giving himself away, as Sergei Filatov, his chief of staff for three years, says—an unease “that someone would half-open a nook of his personal, secret life or read his inmost thoughts.” Vyacheslav Kostikov, his spokesman from 1992 to 1995, gives up in his memoir on jamming him into a master formula or sobriquet: “In reality, no one knows Yeltsin, and he does nothing to bring clarity to his selfportrait.” A member of the Kremlin press pool remembers Yeltsin as “the substantiation of power on two legs”; what went on inside his head flummoxed her to the end.²

The swashbuckler Man on the Tank from 1991 remains the culminating image of Yeltsin for the ages. Going from maverick to master, he began to project other, competing images. And some of them—lashing out at former parliamentary colleagues in 1992 and 1993, brandishing the notorious conductor’s baton in Berlin in 1994, looking wan after heart attacks in 1995—spoke of disquiet and even anguish. But these were not the only juices that flowed, which makes it important to eschew clichés and pop psychology and establish, as best one can, the actual balance among them. If the private man had not been predictive of the public man, one might not care. Here we can rest easy. As milestone events of Yeltsin’s first presidential term go to show, his interior landscape, inscrutable as it was, was highly relevant to his choices and to the fingerprints he left as leader.

Events were overtaking two of Yeltsin’s life scripts as the curtain lifted on the post-communist era. He had long since sloughed off his sense of political duty to the Soviet Union. His residual sense of filial duty ended on March 21, 1993, with the death of his mother from heart failure. Klavdiya Vasil’evna was eighty-five and had been staying with the Moscow Yeltsins for some months. The evening before, as the raucous conflict with the Supreme Soviet heated up, she took in the television news with them, bussed her son, and said to him, “That’s my boy, Borya,” as she went back to her bedroom. This was the last he heard from her. She was given an Orthodox burial at Kuntsevo Cemetery, with several priests and a choir. Yeltsin held a clod of frozen earth in his hand for some minutes before tossing it on the casket.³

The rebellion scenario now read like diaries stored in a dusty attic. In the August coup, Oleg Poptsov had marveled at his capability for overturning the status quo: “The framework of power has to be adjusted to him. A person with a cunning, deep-set capacity for mutiny, he can smash this framework in a single minute.”⁴ The framework of power had been not only adjusted to Yeltsin but harnessed to him. There was no one left to rebel against.

Yeltsin never discarded his testing script, with its tinges of strength and competency. At his desk, he used trite policy details as tests. A topnotch speed reader—aided by a pencil, he ran his eye along the diagonal of the page, from upper left to lower right—he would memorize factoids and passages from official documents and retrieve them in discussions weeks or months later, tickled when he could recite the exact page number. Away from the office, exercise and sport remained the main devices. For old times’ sake, Yeltsin might still do a walrus swim in a frigid river or lake. Aleksandr Korzhakov reports one on the Moskva River on a March day in the early 1990s, with ice floes bobbing. Whenever possible, Yeltsin capped a steam bath with a plunge into a snowbank or freezing water; he would submerse himself in the water, ticking off the seconds, for two full minutes, longer than most men half his age could stand the temperature and the oxygen deprivation.⁵ With volleyball behind him, Yeltsin had taken up tennis, the racket sport that also has a serve-and-volley structure, while working at Gosstroi. He played it in pairs and had a booming serve, although he was lumbering on his feet and rallied poorly with his mutilated left hand. Shamil Tarpishchev, the professional captain of the Russian national team, was his personal coach, and found him no more genial in the face of a loss than his Sverdlovsk volleyball mates had. One time Tarpishchev thought it would be amusing to offer to play doubles against Yeltsin and Korzhakov by pairing with Yeltsin’s grandson Boris, and to neutralize his advantage by handcuffing himself to young Boris. The manacled Tarpishchev and Boris, Jr., won the first set. “I looked over and the president was exerting himself and glowering at Borya and me. We threw the second set and got out of there.”⁶

As in almost any leadership career, success was still the script of the most import to Yeltsin. Richard Nixon, who met with him in 1991, 1992, and 1993, saw in Yeltsin “a relentless inner drive that propelled him to the top,” rather like Nixon, who was also raised poor, made it almost to the top in the United States, was set back, and clawed his way back up Everest.⁷ If getting to be “first” motivated Yeltsin in the good old days, staying first motivated him now, and that was no easier a task, for one had to pedal like mad in this environment just to stand still. And building a better way of life, as he was to say in his retirement speech, was proving to be “excruciatingly difficult” and “exceptionally complicated,” and that realization was never out of his mind. He had always been hard on himself. As his daughter Tatyana said in an interview, “Even when he had made some kind of speech and I would say, ‘Papa, that went fantastically,’ or he had pulled off some kind of deal very well, he would say, ‘No, nonetheless I could have done it better.’… Even when something came out very well, he was always dissatisfied to some extent.”⁸ Now he seemed to be such more often and more thoroughly. In one of his several televised dialogues with the president in 1993, the filmmaker El’dar Ryazanov inquired if he was satisfied with his work. Yeltsin’s stygian response prefigured his 1999 valedictory: “I am rarely satisfied with my work…. I am satisfied with my work 5 to 10 percent of the time and 90 percent of the time I am dissatisfied. I am constantly dissatisfied with my work, and that is a frightful thing.”⁹

At the middle of the heaving sea that was Boris Yeltsin’s life in his presidential years there sat an atoll of domestic tranquility. As he had except at UPI and in his first year as an engineer, he based himself in, and drew succor from, a traditional household—“a patriarchal Urals family” arrayed around “a supreme authority, the grandfather.”¹⁰ Yelena Okulova and her husband and children (a boy, Ivan, was born in the late 1990s) had an apartment midtown and then in the Krylatskoye block, a floor below the in-laws’ piedà-terre. Yeltsin’s second daughter, Tatyana, and her family resided in Boris and Naina’s home, dividing their time between Moscow and Barvikha-4. She went from the military institute to a position in the Dawn of the Urals Bank, a small firm based in Perm, in 1994, and then onto maternity leave when her second son, Gleb, was born in August 1995. (Tatyana’s first son, Boris, studied at Winchester, an English boarding school, from 1996 to 1998.) The Dyachenkos and Okulovs had dachas of their own. Callers at the Yeltsin home often remarked on the prevalence of females, children, bicycles, and toys.

While Boris Nikolayevich may have been the patriarch, the stabilizer in the family unit was its warmhearted, retiring, and boundlessly patient matriarch. Now a homemaker full-time, she devoted herself to a demanding spouse. Naina Iosifovna, an aide of hers, Natal’ya Konstantinova, observed in a memoir, “carries her husband like a crystal vase,” seeing him through toil and trouble.¹¹ She overcame the claustrophobia about vehicles and airplane cabins that she had been subject to in Sverdlovsk. In 1993, after eight years in the capital, she declared that she did not yet feel “at home” there and spent long hours on the telephone with friends and kin in Yekaterinburg and Orenburg. “Life here has not treated us kindly,” she said to Ryazanov. “They have poured so much filth on us. In my entire life before, I never had even one drop of this.”¹² Her widowed mother, Mariya Girina, lived in Yekaterinburg; she was buried in Shirokorechenskoye Cemetery next to Yeltsin’s father in 1994. Naina attended religious services with greater regularity in the 1990s and hung several painted icons on the walls of Barvikha-4. Without fanfare, she took up small-scale philanthropy. She sponsored maternity homes, pediatric hospitals, and orphanages and arranged food and medical aid for elderly female stars of the Soviet stage and screen who had fallen upon hard times. Boris did not make a habit of discussing politics with her, but they consulted on the personal fallout of political matters and she had a voice on staff she saw daily (such as drivers, cooks, and photographers). “Without her,” he confided mawkishly but truthfully, “I would never have borne up under so many political storms… not in 1987, not in 1991, not later.”¹³

Boris and Naina Yeltsin “generally do not worry about material things,” as Konstantinova wrote.¹⁴ Although it would be absurd to say he was against the good life, Yeltsin did not go into post-communist politics, and did not stay in it, for mercenary purposes. Had he so wished, he could have left the government and ridden the new free-enterprise economy to riches. He continued to be partial to plain Russian food. In Paris on an official visit in February 1992, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev invited him to dine in one of the city’s three-star restaurants, where he could try out nouvelle cuisine concoctions. Leaving Kozyrev to go out on the town, Yeltsin stayed behind at the embassy and had the kitchen cook him meat patties and potatoes.¹⁵

President Yeltsin handed Naina his pay envelope every Friday, as he had in Sverdlovsk, and she gave him back an allowance. He was at a loss about consumer prices, did not recognize ruble notes by denomination, did not have credit cards, and needed to be shown how to swipe a debit card at one of the automated teller machines that were cropping up in Moscow.¹⁶ His ruble salary was worth five hundred to a thousand dollars a month, varying with the exchange rate. Extra income came from several hundred thousand dollars in book royalties, mostly from his second memoir volume, Notes of a President, published in Russian and many foreign languages in 1994. Upon retirement, the couple owned, he said in Presidential Marathon, a 1995 BMW automobile (7-series), home furnishings, and personal articles (he listed guns, tennis rackets, costume jewelry, and electronics); they held no stocks, bonds, or foreign bank accounts.¹⁷

If Yeltsin came into any bonanza, it was in the real estate market. The presidential manse at Barvikha-4 (and Gorki-9, where the family lived in the second term) was under what is today the Federal Protection Service or FSO, known up to 1991 as the Ninth Directorate of the KGB. The house was never Yeltsin’s personal property, his to sell for monetary benefit or to transmit to heirs. On two lesser holdings, the English edition of Presidential Marathon mistranslates Yeltsin. “I own some real estate jointly with my wife,” it says, referring to the Krylatskoye flat and a 4,900-square-foot dacha on ten acres in Odintsovo district, a few miles from Barvikha-4.¹⁸ In this context, the verb vladeyu means “dispose of,” “have occupancy of,” or “have exclusive use of.” Neither the apartment nor the Yeltsin dacha, which is in the Gorki-10 compound, was owned by Boris and Naina. Both were on the books of the Presidential Business Department, another arm of the government. Under Russian legislation dating to 1991, the Yeltsins could have privatized the Krylatskoye unit by filling out a few forms but, unlike some neighbors, did not. The Gorki-10 getaway was built in 1995–96 by troops from the protection service, on the grounds that it needed to be a secure site. Yeltsin paid for the materials himself out of book revenues and, ignorant about prices, was so mortified by the cost that he considered giving up on the project. Only in 2006–7, making use of a Putin–period law on vacation homes, did he privatize the Gorki-10 dacha. It must be worth some millions of dollars, and represents Yeltsin’s main financial gain—a second-order, delayed (he took ownership just before his death), and legal effect.¹⁹

With the signal exception of his drinking, Yeltsin as president retained the tastes and mannerisms of his stiff-necked Urals ancestors. He did not use tobacco and would not abide it around him. On one presidential visit to Germany, seated at a dinner next to Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s wife, Hannelore, he removed a cigarette from her fingers and stubbed it out in an ashtray.²⁰ Unlike Gorbachev, who cursed like a trooper, Yeltsin did not use profanity and forbade it in his hearing: He first came to question his selection of Aleksandr Rutskoi as vice president in 1991 when Rutskoi and his wife, Lyudmila, used expletives at the post-election victory party.²¹ Yeltsin threw no tantrums and almost never raised his voice. He spoke to officials, again in contrast to Gorbachev, in given name and patronymic, not given name only or diminutive, and in the decorous second person plural. This applied even to his sidekick Korzhakov, whom he hailed as Aleksandr Vasil’evich unless they had been speaking one-on-one for a time, when he might say Aleksandr or, infrequently, Sasha.²² Yeltsin still had his shoes buffed to a gossamer sheen and in gaps in the conversation would scan them for scuffs. The wardrobe was updated some: He switched from Russian to more debonair foreign-tailored suits and footwear and brought in tuxedos and black ties for formal Kremlin affairs, for the first time since Lenin.²³

In addressing the core features of Yeltsin’s personality, we must address the incongruities raised in the Introduction to this volume. In human relations, many contemporaries saw in him a mating of antipodes: He was at once too forward and too mistrustful, too brash and too wary. And his mood presented sharp contrasts over time. Some moments found him the epitome of energy and activism; at others, he was unexpressive and withdrawn. These divergences were a joint product of the mercurial setting and of Yeltsin’s idiosyncrasies.

He had always kept an affective distance from almost all professional and political collaborators. The trait was probably handed down from the Urals village. A Butka acquaintance who had known Nikolai Yeltsin told a journalist, “Boris Nikolayevich… had an attitude that if he developed a friendship with someone, that would mean that he couldn’t demand as much from them. So he kept everyone at an arm’s length. He was just like his father.”²⁴ The dog-eat-dog medium of the CPSU apparatus reinforced this attitude. As Sverdlovsk party boss, Yeltsin did not camouflage it. At his elk and duck shoots, “He relaxed in the outdoors and permitted himself to greet [people] in hail-fellow-well-met fashion. All the same, he always kept his detachment.”²⁵ About his years in the obkom and after that the Moscow party committee, Yeltsin said, “Number ones as a rule have no close friends. There arises a complex of insularity, and your caution in communicating with others grows. All of this in time made its appearance in me—unreachability, a nervousness about socializing with new acquaintances.”²⁶ Another person might have responded by reaching out to like spirits and not to recoil from them. Not Yeltsin: In him, being number one bred Chekhovian solitude. And it did so with greater intensity once he was leader of all Russia, in conditions of uncertainty and flux.

Yeltsin did open himself up to close connections with the odd foreigner. One was Robert S. Strauss, the last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and the first to Russia. “He neither liked nor trusted most people,” Strauss recalled years later, “but he did me.” Strauss could only explain it in terms of fellowship—each saw the “twinkle” in the other—and by the facts that they were of the same generation and Strauss did not want anything of him.²⁷ Yeltsin’s making friends with Helmut Kohl, the first world leader he called on in 1991, and with President Jiang Zemin of China, would be other examples. All three are of Yeltsin’s age group or older (Strauss was born in 1918, Kohl in 1930, and Jiang in 1926).²⁸

Symptomatic of the very different pattern with Russians, where the tie was severed when suspicions set in, was the relationship with Gennadii Burbulis (born in 1945), the ex-academic from Sverdlovsk who had Yeltsin’s ear at the beginning of his administration. After they got to know one another in the Soviet parliament, Burbulis was right-hand man to Yeltsin in the Russian congress, ran his 1991 election campaign, was the first choice to establish his presidential office (an invitation he foolhardily declined), advised on the recruitment of Yegor Gaidar, and was given the titles of first deputy premier and state secretary. Before 1992 was rung out, as we have seen, Burbulis and Yeltsin were estranged. There was an interpersonal dynamic as well as a political one:

Yeltsin’s one intimate friendship of any duration with a public figure was with Aleksandr Korzhakov, the beefy security officer whom he made head of the Kremlin’s praetorian guard. Through the first half of the 1990s, they were inseparable: They commuted, worked, broke bread, played games, and vacationed in one another’s company. On a visit to the republic of Sakha, Yeltsin accidentally nicked Korzhakov with a knife he had received as a gift; at Yeltsin’s suggestion, Korzhakov reciprocated and they mingled their blood. They repeated the rite several years later in Moscow.³⁰ In 1994, hearing from Yeltsin his fears about surgery for a deviated septum in his nose—a condition Korzhakov also had—Korzhakov volunteered to have his operation first, “as a guinea pig.” He did, and Yeltsin repeated the procedure later that year.³¹ Korzhakov had his in-town apartment in the Krylatskoye building, on the sixth floor next door to the Yeltsins, and was apportioned a dacha plot in Gorki-10, again next to Yeltsin. When travel forced Yeltsin to miss the wedding of Korzhakov’s daughter Galina in 1994, the family repeated it upon his return. In 1995 Korzhakov was godfather to Yeltsin’s fourth grandchild, Gleb Dyachenko.

In Notes of a President, published in 1994, Yeltsin wrote that Korzhakov’s position “forces him to be next to me twenty-four hours a day.”³² But it was his disposition, and its fit with Yeltsin’s, that won the president over. They were, in Russian argot, tovarishchi, comrades, of the nonpolitical variety, who had achieved sympathy and trust. They shared plebeian origins—Korzhakov, born in 1950, was the son of a Moscow textile worker and lived until age seven in a flyblown barracks—although Yeltsin was considerably better educated. Comradeship, political as well as nonpolitical, was mostly a manly phenomenon in the Soviet Union, going back to the Bolsheviks, and so it was with Yeltsin and Korzhakov.³³ Korzhakov was Yeltsin’s drinking companion, safety blanket, and confessor. Yeltsin in his book remembered unwinding at the Korzhakov cottage when he was out of favor with the Politburo. “We did not stay in the house but bivouacked beside it, angled for fish, went for a dip in the creek.” As head of state, he still relied on Korzhakov: “Korzhakov never leaves my side, and when we are traveling we sit up at night unless we are asleep. He is a very decent, shrewd, strong, and courageous person, although outwardly he seems quite simple.”³⁴ While Naina Yeltsina always had her doubts about Korzhakov, she considered him “almost a member of our family.” She once asked his wife, Irina, over a meal if he would ever give away confidences. Irina said the Korzhakovs loved the Yeltsins so much that they would take their secrets to the grave, and Korzhakov repeated these words.³⁵

However, Yeltsin wearied of Korzhakov and Korzhakov of him: Twenty-four hours a day of togetherness was too much. The age difference mattered more as Yeltsin’s health declined, and Korzhakov alarmed Yeltsin by expanding his Kremlin role into all-round aide-de-camp and gatekeeper. The blood brothers parted over Korzhakov’s affiliation with the clique of high-level conservatives who favored postponement of the 1996 presidential election and who scuffled with liberals for control of the electoral campaign. A funding scandal on June 20, 1996, in between the two rounds of the voting, was the final insult. Yeltsin was to fire Korzhakov for insubordination, saying he and his group “took much for themselves and gave little.” The jilted retainer, who was not offered another job, made the separation irreparable by publishing a vengeful memoir, Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn to Dusk, brimming with unflattering stories and photos of Yeltsin with tousled hair, in baggy swim trunks, or with glass, fishing rod, or rifle in hand. Yeltsin thenceforth considered Korzhakov a traitor to him, and with some reason: For bodyguards, like clergy, valets, and physicians, circumspection is the golden rule. Yeltsin was never to exchange a word with him again. To Korzhakov, Yeltsin was the traitor. In a letter on June 22, 1996, he said the people would hold the dismissal against Yeltsin: “They take everything at face value and are coming to the judgment, ‘He betrayed his own and now he will betray us.’” Korzhakov quotes Irina as saying she saw “the smile of Judas” on Yeltsin’s face when he spoke on television about the firing.³⁶

Students of human nature more astute than Burbulis and Korzhakov were alive to the risks in overfamiliarity with number one or in giving him the sense that he was in someone’s debt. Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russia’s prime minister from 1992 to 1998 (and born in 1938), went to Zavidovo and had some holiday meals with the president, yet knew enough to respect his wish for autonomy: “Even when we were hunting together, I never allowed myself to try to make use of the proximity…. I saw that anyone who did, haha, would end up [paying the price].”³⁷

More polar to the Yeltsin presidency than his hot-and-cold relations with people is the question of phasing and consistency over time. In the organization of his everyday docket, he was as ever a stickler for promptness. Family members teased by getting him to guess the time of day without checking his watch—and usually he could do it down to the minute, he says. Yeltsin valued protocol officer Vladimir Shevchenko for his good judgment and for being “fanatically punctual,” and said to Aleksandr Rutskoi that one reason for picking him as running mate was his military devotion to schedule.³⁸ A subordinate a minute late for an appointment would find Yeltsin tapping his foot irascibly. At Russian-American summits, he was irked by the tardy Bill Clinton. The only times Yeltsin was late for organized events were when he wanted to indicate displeasure. An example would be the 1991 negotiations at Novo-Ogarëvo, before and after the August coup, at which he often arrived after Gorbachev had called the meeting to order.

Fastidiousness about the hands of the clock makes it all the more noticeable that in the sweep of the process of national reconstruction Yeltsin displayed his marked political arrhythmia. In the event-packed first term, he often wove puzzlingly between assertive activism and sluggish quiescence.

Where did this cadence come from? A plethora of answers rooted in external factors—none of them particularly believable—have been floated. Several acquaintances have seen a similarity to Russia’s national mascot, the brown bear, which hibernates in winter and prowls the forest in the warm weather.³⁹ Gaidar saw Yeltsin as a latter-day Il’ya Muromets, the knighterrant of Slavic folk poems.⁴⁰ Lame since his youth, Il’ya is restored to health by two psalm-singing pilgrims and gallops off to smite evil serpents and barbarian hordes. Every Russian schoolchild knows the tale; it is commemorated in paintings, in a symphony by Reinhold Glière, in the name of the country’s first bomber aircraft (built in World War I by Igor Sikorsky), and in Aleksandr Ptushko’s film from the 1950s, the first widescreen movie made in the USSR. In a more real-life vein, Mikhail Gorbachev has pointed to Yeltsin’s career in the Soviet construction industry, with its ethos of “storming” and “hurry up and finish” after intervals of idleness.⁴¹

These zoological, folkloric, and occupational analogies do not hit the bull’s-eye. Yes, Yeltsin might have been said to be ursine in visual aspect and gait, but any parallel across species can be no more than lightheartedly allegorical, and his highs and lows did not issue forth in the seasonality of a hibernating mammal. The mythic Il’ya Muromets roused himself from his pallet only once, at the age of thirty-three, and never revisited it. Soviet civil engineers, unlike Yeltsin as president, functioned in an orderly temporal framework laid down by the monthly, quarterly, and yearly planning calendars. And, since Russian politicians with this professional past differed in their styles and predilections, labor in construction could not have been determinant.⁴²

Others, meanwhile, have looked to Yeltsin’s psyche for a totally internal explanation—less than compellingly, in my view. Gorbachev, while citing Yeltsin’s background in the construction industry, has also belabored him for an innate preference for confrontation. “In his human qualities,” Gorbachev claims in his memoirs, “he was better suited to an epoch of Sturm und Drang” than to “normal work.” “He contains a volcanic mixture and is capable only of destruction.”⁴³ Gorbachev and some Moscow pundits have also insinuated that Yeltsin stirred tumult so as to rouse himself to action and look the hero while he was at it. The charge that Yeltsin was a purely destructive factor is a red herring, inconsistent with many chapters in his life. Yeltsin denied that he manufactured artificial emergencies: The obstacles to easy accomplishment “have always found me,” and not he them.⁴⁴

The Moscow psychologist Oleg Davydov finds Yeltsin’s rebuttal flawed because it deals only with the conscious incitement of crisis and not with the subconscious. Yeltsin’s bent for getting into tight spots was subliminal, Davydov thinks, and was matched by an almost mystical belief in his ability to escape unscathed. Yeltsin, he said, governed himself from adolescence onward by means of a distinctive “three-step”: He bumbles into peril by acting preemptively; the misstep sets off a crisis; through an exercise of will, and with a pinch of good fortune, he saves the day. As a homely early case, Davydov cites Yeltsin’s and his school chums’ quest for the headwaters of the Yaiva River after ninth grade; the start of economic shock therapy is a politicized case from the 1990s.⁴⁵ Davydov’s thesis is way too rigid and is circular as well: Yeltsin’s motivation is inferred from his behavior, and then used to account for that same behavior. What can be said is that, whether or not danger sought him out, it not uncommonly found in Yeltsin a willing accessory.

There is no shortage of other conjectures about the alternating moods of Yeltsin. One or two journalists have said he had the mental affliction cyclothymia, a class of bipolar or manic-depression disorder. Patients with this condition experience swings from elated to somber.⁴⁶ However, no clinician who examined Yeltsin, or any other, has ever indicated such a diagnosis. Normal onset of cyclothymia is in the teens or early twenties, for which Yeltsin’s biography provides zero evidence, and the moods of patients oscillate furiously, in a matter of days, which his are not known to have done. Yeltsin’s temper when on the knife’s edge is typically described as selfcontrolled and collected, not euphoric. A good specimen would be the events of September–October 1993, in the heat of the battle with the Congress of Deputies. A general who was present at one of his garrison visits before September 21 found him energetic, focused, and “going deep into every word” the officers said. Speaking on the telephone to President Clinton right after his edict, Yeltsin was “pumped and combative” yet on task. The evening of October 3, as street battles raged in Moscow, he was not equal to addressing the population on television. By the early morning hours of October 4, though, as he awaited his climactic predawn meeting with the army command, he had the sang-froid to take to a sofa in his office suite for a two-hour snooze.⁴⁷

Yeltsin’s red-letter actions as leader were most often taken in spasms of effort and in crises he had a part in stimulating. His pugnacity was a given, and had been since Berezniki. “I am not the type,” he had exclaimed at the Higher Komsomol School in 1988, “to take the easier or more pleasing course, to go by the satiny paved road rather than the rough footpath” (see Chapter 7). The novelty here was that the Moscow pressure cooker and the pluralism and quicksilver quality of transitional politics supplied him with incomparably more make-or-break situations in which it could be activated.

Yeltsin and people who knew him in the 1990s often linked his flair for rising to the occasion with his athletic experience, even though he and they well knew that governing a country is infinitely more complicated than batting a ball about with a small number of players and fixed rules. One might see it as a crossbreed of Yeltsin’s success and testing scripts—improving his record while proving himself. Yeltsin was likeliest to see a political challenge as in scale to his talents when its magnitude was great and the chips were down. He took for granted that he could meet the challenge and others would not.

Yeltsin’s tennis teacher and friend until 1996, Shamil Tarpishchev, recalls that on the court his understudy “rallied his nervous system” and went all-out only at the breakpoint in a game, when the server risks losing his serve and the opposing player or team stands to go back on offense. “He was the same in politics,” Tarpishchev notes. “The direr the situation, the more he concentrated.”⁴⁸ About his decision to go outside and face the crowd and the tanks on August 19, 1991, Yeltsin once observed, “I sorted everything out. I am an athlete and I know very well how it happens. All of a sudden, you are jarred and feel that the game is on, that you can boldly take the initiative into your hands.”⁴⁹ He approached in the same frame of mind shock therapy in 1992, the 1993 conflict with parliament, Chechnya in 1994, and eventually his re-election campaign in 1996. El’dar Ryazanov interrogated him, weeks after the bombardment of the White House, about his métier being do-or-die situations. “Yes,” Yeltsin responded, “I know myself too well not to agree with this…. I constantly have to keep myself in fighting trim…. Even in sport, when I played volleyball in my student years… you would not see much of me in the main part of the game…. But if the match is on the line I am able to work miracles.”⁵⁰ In suspenseful situations, Yeltsin’s habit was to ratchet up the sense of crisis, and ergo the demand for decisive action to defuse it, by playing wait-and-see as long as he could. It was in his nature, as his former aides put it well, “to bide his time as things percolated, until the situation presented a danger to him and his power”—until the match was on the line.⁵¹ Procrastinating up to the split second his intuition whispered was the right one, it was then into the breach, the adrenalin surging.

“Am I a strong or a weak person?” Yeltsin asked in Notes of a President. “In exigent situations, I am usually strong. In routine situations, I am sometimes limp.” There are also “times when I do not look like the Yeltsin people have grown used to seeing,” including times when “I fly off the handle in stupid ways, like a child.”⁵²

Yeltsinesque torpor was of two basal types, although the line smudged some. The first, and the easier to grasp, was the emotional blowback from failure. Several of the traumas that actuated such feelings during perestroika have been discussed in earlier chapters: the overload of governing the capital city, the secret speech, the attacks on him during his political resurrection. The psychodrama continued after 1991. In writing of it in Notes, he started with economic shock therapy:

Yeltsin reacted in pain to the general flow of negative news and to specific events. In the spring of 1992, he was despondent for weeks over the unexpectedly high rate of inflation and the nonarrival of recovery in production. Bad tidings in the economy were a constant during his first term, but the degree of awfulness varied, with “Black Tuesday”—October 11, 1994, when the ruble lost one-quarter of its value in a single day—taking the cake. As an afterclap of Black Tuesday, the Duma initiated but did not approve a vote of no-confidence in the government.

The constitutional turbulence of 1992–93 afforded a series of precipitating events. The blows of Ruslan Khasbulatov and the deputies at the congress in December 1992 produced, Yeltsin recalls, “a relapse of the psychological wretchedness” that had plagued him when he was demoted by Gorbachev.⁵⁴ He was wretched enough to think of ending it all. On December 9, 1992, the day the congress refused to accede to Gaidar as prime minister, he came home to Barvikha-4 “in a complete trance” and locked himself in the steambath. There he was lost in “very bad” thoughts (Yeltsin’s phrase, from Notes) until Korzhakov broke into the bath and took him to his wife. “I was just in time,” Korzhakov asserts, “to stop him from taking the ultimate step”—connecting the dots, that step would have been killing himself through scalding and suffocation in the steam. Korzhakov, who depicted the rescue in his anti-Yeltsin memoir, is a hostile witness. It is instructive, though, that Yeltsin’s wording implies he was in truth suicidal and that he did not contest Korzhakov’s account in Presidential Marathon in 2000. This affair is thus a far cry from the feigned suicide attempt of November 9, 1987.⁵⁵ A week after locking himself in the steambath, Yeltsin was in a blue funk while on a visit to China and broke the trip off with a complaint of numbness in his extremities. Korzhakov blithely mentioned to him that Franklin Roosevelt ran the U.S. government from a wheelchair.⁵⁶

Yeltsin recovered from this low-water mark, but as parliament moved toward impeachment in the spring of 1993 he “fell into a depression,” Korzhakov reports, and began to lose the thread of conversations. His mother’s death, a week before the March 28 vote on the resolution, intensified the gloom. Security Minister Viktor Barannikov had made him a birthday present of an imported handgun and a carton of ammunition, which Yeltsin stashed in an office cabinet. Alerted by an informant, Korzhakov had one of the Kremlin chefs boil the cartridges in water to disable them. Days before the roll was called, Yeltsin, with Korzhakov and two other officials looking on, took out the pistol, cocked it, and threatened to shoot himself. He let himself be talked out of pulling the trigger, unaware that the bullets had been doctored. Korzhakov says he eventually removed the firing pin.⁵⁷

Chechnya brought further torture the next year. The president “was greatly afflicted by the tragedy” of the storming of Grozny, which began on December 31, 1994. For several days he cut himself off from the telephone and refused to receive even Korzhakov.⁵⁸ A secondary effect of the intervention was the breakdown in relations with political liberals who had once been at his side. When Yelena Bonner criticized Yeltsin for his praise of Defense Minister Grachëv, Naina Yeltsina, with whom she had maintained social contact since Andrei Sakharov’s death, phoned to give her a tearful talking to, and the two stopped speaking.⁵⁹ A schism broke out in the pro-reform Russia’s Choice movement, where Yegor Gaidar came out against the war while Boris Fëdorov, the former finance minister, left the organization in search of a more “patriotic” one. Yeltsin had arrived at “almost complete political isolation” because of the war and other issues. “I could no longer feel the support of those with whom I had begun my political career.”⁶⁰ The hostage-taking at Budënnovsk, introducing Russia at large to terrorism, sent him into a tailspin in June 1995. He announced to a meeting of the advisory Security Council on June 30 that he planned to resign the presidency, since he had initiated an unsuccessful war. Council members asked him not to, and he withdrew the threat. “I don’t think this was playacting on Yeltsin’s part,” writes Yevgenii Primakov, who attended as director of Russian foreign intelligence. “He suffered over everything connected with Chechnya.”⁶¹

Yeltsin was in good company. Among modern leaders whose biographies were studied by the psychiatrist Arnold M. Ludwig, the lifetime rate for episodes of depression or melancholia lasting several weeks or more is 14 percent (as compared to 6 percent in the population of the United States), and under a more catholic definition would be about 30 percent. Ludwig found visionary statesmen who try to reshape society, and politicians whose power is crumbling, to be most susceptible to the problem.⁶²

Yeltsin, however, was also prone to a second type of withdrawal that is not well captured by the usual typology. It came, ironically, in the backwash of heady victory as opposed to jarring defeat.

Late Soviet occurrences of this complex—his flight from Moscow after the 1989 and 1990 elections and the 1991 putsch—have been discussed in earlier chapters. The pattern reared its head again in the first several months of 1992, when Yeltsin left Gaidar and the cabinet to prosecute economic reform with little guidance from him. In 1993, after the successful referendum of April 25, Yeltsin was dilatory in following up and took a long summer holiday at Valdai. After he did take decisive steps against the parliament in September–October, he honored a promise to pay a visit to Tokyo, worked on the constitution for several weeks, and then was hard for most of his ministers and staffers to reach until after the December election and plebiscite. The pressure of those months “was so powerful that I still do not understand how my organism got through it, how it coped,” Yeltsin recollects.⁶³

With his presidentialist constitution, and hence his supremacy in Russian politics, in the bag, one might have predicted that Yeltsin would be in a glowing frame of mind in 1994. His mood, though, was indolent for the first half of the year. Write his former aides, “The presidential timetable for that year logs Yeltsin’s numerous and often lengthy absences, attesting to the fact that he was going through a protracted crisis.” He took two weeks in Sochi in March and did not travel publicly in the provinces until his visit to Kazan at the end of May. His annual list of presidential objectives was finalized only in late April, when he initialed it but declined to set priorities among them. A staff memorandum attributed falling approval ratings to “the president’s passivity and lack of clarity over goals and policy.”⁶⁴

These events are harder to make sense of than the straightforwardly dysphoric episodes in the first category. Why would Yeltsin’s very triumphs, the thrashing of his political rivals, weigh on him? There was, first, an exhaustion factor. When I questioned him about it in 2002, Yeltsin acknowledged it as a form of letdown (spad) or breather (peredyshka), not of depression (depressiya), and as a natural way for him to unwind after the battle.⁶⁵ It is an admissible point. Even revolutionaries and warriors need a vacation every now and then, and Yeltsin after a victory was usually languid and distracted rather than morose. At his hideaways, he would make himself unavailable by telephone and spent much of the time in the fresh air.

Considerations other than fatigue were involved. Draining as his Nietzschean moments were, Yeltsin felt in his element in them. When they had passed, he sagged. He was hardly the only leader to have had that tendency: Witness the Duke of Wellington’s famous statement the day after Waterloo in 1815 that, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.” What’s more, a post-crisis hiatus, as Aleksandr Muzykantskii observed of Yeltsin’s victory in the 1989 USSR election (see Chapter 7), put the onus on potential allies to come to him with proposals for joint action and gave him the opportunity to look them over. Most important, Yeltsin needed an intermission after a victory because it gave him the chance to consider his options. His moratorium after the attempted coup in 1991 was one of the more fruitful ones. The rolling time-outs in 1993 and 1994 were accompanied by reflection on the future.

There were reasons tangible and intangible why winning was less fun after 1991. The battles won were more ambiguous, for one thing. In the transitional setting, even the alpha leader did not have an inexhaustible storehouse of political capital, and advances could come at a terrible price. Progress achieved put him up foursquare against a fresh set of choices, often more troubling than the last. In the summer of 1993, for example, after Yeltsin had won the April referendum, he backed out of meetings with officeholders, literati, and journalists. It was quite plain to press secretary Vyacheslav Kostikov that the president was shunning contact because he lacked the answers to some of the questions he knew were to be flung at him. Kostikov found the indisposition more pronounced in 1994. Even though the new constitution made Yeltsin’s legal position airtight, Kostikov got used to coming across the superpresident seated pensively at a bare desk. Yeltsin, Kostikov felt, “found himself without his internal pivot” as he came to understand that solutions to Russia’s key reform problems would take five, ten, or more years to resolve. The political system he had constructed left him and only him to answer for problems. “It was my impression,” says Kostikov, “that Yeltsin was getting lost as he faced up to the magnitude of the responsibilities he had arrogated to himself in his constitution.”⁶⁶ Meantime, personnel turnover and defections had deprived Yeltsin of the most creative minds from his first months in government. Many decisions could be shunted to the trustworthy Chernomyrdin, but the prime minister was not an ideas man, and Yeltsin knew it. What discommoded him the most, as his ghostwriter Valentin Yumashev has noted, was “not psychological loneliness but intellectual loneliness.” “He had begun to feel, I don’t know what to do and I don’t have people around who can supply me with ideas that I can go forward with.”⁶⁷

One should not imagine that Yeltsin’s depressions and intermissions, in all their multifariousness, went on uninterruptedly from his first to his second inauguration. One by one, he kicked them off. He returned from Sochi to appoint Gaidar and decree shock therapy in 1991; he adjusted the market reforms and accepted Chernomyrdin as his head of government in 1992; he upended the Supreme Soviet and imposed his constitution in 1993; he resumed traveling and politicking and eased Viktor Gerashchenko out of the central bank after Black Tuesday, in 1994, and that same year he picked up the tempo of privatization; he moved crabwise toward negotiations with the Chechen rebels in 1995; in 1996 he decided to run for a second term. The point is not that he failed to accomplish these things but that he did it in a stuttering fashion, which often dragged out the length of time required and intruded on the building of political coalitions to accomplish the task.

The parsing of Yeltsin’s psychodynamics would be incomplete without reference to the substance with which his name is most often linked—alcohol. Until the second half of the 1980s, drinking had a subsidiary function in his life. For the next ten years, until he had to give it up, it loomed larger and took a toll politically, physically, and reputationally.

Although doctors noted at the time that Yeltsin’s consumption increased when he moved to Moscow, and although there were some signs of it interfering with decision making, until 1991 he kept it under control. A Democratic Russia activist who saw him fifty to sixty times between 1989 and the end of 1992 never observed him affected by alcohol. Jack Matlock, the second-to-last U.S. ambassador to the USSR, saw him have drinks but never too many; his successor, Robert Strauss, reports the same. Aleksandr Korzhakov, whose exceedingly unfavorable memoir about Yeltsin, published in 1997, has served as a main source about Yeltsin’s drinking, says that when Yeltsin was chairman of the Russian parliament and under constant watch by the KGB, in 1990–91, he drank relatively little. At Yeltsin’s sixtieth birthday party in February 1991, at a children’s camp near Moscow, he sipped champagne with merrymakers and was the last to retire from the campfire.⁶⁸

But the rules changed once the Kremlin was his. Korzhakov saw to it that the trunk of the presidential limousine held a satchel containing drinks, shot glasses, and appetizers, renewed daily. Yeltsin’s levels of use, family members testify, went up steadily from 1991 through 1994. His mother’s death removed a watchful parent who had always looked askance at personal excess.⁶⁹ Yeltsin switched in 1993 from brandy to Gzhel’ka and grass-flavored Tarkhun vodka; he also liked a cocktail of champagne laced with cognac. Vodka, removed by Gorbachev and Yegor Ligachëv from the Kremlin menu in 1985, was reintroduced in 1993. Yeltsin’s afternoon tennis matches would often lead to the sauna and then to a meal rife with toasts. Nips were common at his private luncheons, and Yeltsin squirreled away a rainy-day supply in his office suite.

Foreign partners had to work around Yeltsin’s habit. When Bill Clinton got him on the telephone several days after Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993, Yeltsin’s speech was slurred and “he seemed barely listening to what Clinton had to say,” after which Clinton chuckled that he was “a candidate for tough love, if ever I heard one.” Clinton was to have about fifty phone conversations with Yeltsin over the seven years. To be on the safe side, his aides placed most calls before the dinner hour in Moscow.⁷⁰ At his first summit meeting with Clinton in Vancouver on April 3–4, 1993, Yeltsin tossed back drinks on the warm-up day, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other American officials began the unbecoming practice of keeping a tally.⁷¹ First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, often seated next to Yeltsin at official banquets, found him “delightful company” and that, “as is often apparent, he enjoys a drink or two.” On the Clintons’ first official visit to Moscow, Yeltsin provided a running commentary on the food and drink, “informing me in all seriousness that red wine protected Russian sailors on nuclear-powered submarines from the ill effects of strontium 90.”⁷²

Domestic players were more aware of the syndrome. On April 22, 1993, three days before the national referendum on approval of his policies, Yeltsin made a scheduled appearance at a large rally and rock singalong next to St. Basil’s Cathedral. He was far from sober, and Yelena Bonner took the microphone away.⁷³ Yeltsin did not drink alone, a saving grace that may have kept him from worse problems. But drinking with confederates in the first half of the 1990s often closed him off from them, rather than open him up. He would sometimes fall silent, in his “sleeping crocodile” pose, as some called it, while continuing to watch the company. At one such event, a minister of the government offered a lewd bottoms-up. Warned that Yeltsin would not stand for such talk, he made a comment about the chief not hearing. The next morning, Yeltsin signed a decree dismissing the minister, who never reclaimed so high a post.⁷⁴

Yeltsin’s overindulgence was elevated from an open secret to a public issue in 1994. On August 31 he was in Berlin to represent the country at ceremonies with Chancellor Kohl to mark the departure of Russian forces from the former East Germany. He had gotten a head start the night before by bending elbows at the hotel with Defense Minister Pavel Grachëv. On that day, in baking heat, he imbibed enthusiastically. After lunch, on the square in front of the High Renaissance city Rathaus, where a brass band from the local police was serenading the troops with march music, Yeltsin motioned for the stick from the conductor. Bent at the waist, he woozily stabbed the air with it for several minutes as the band played on gallantly. Minutes later, he took up a microphone to lead the assembled Russians through unmelodious couplets from the folk song “Kalinka-Malinka” (Juniper-Raspberry), concluding with a whoop, a thumb-up sign, and kisses blown to the tittering crowd.⁷⁵

Yeltsin’s political advisers, a gaggle of whom were there, considered resignation and decided against it. Kostikov inserted vocal articles about the pratfall in Berlin into his daily media reviews. Yeltsin knit his brows upon seeing the material but did not comment. They then tried to convince Korzhakov to level with Yeltsin. He declined, saying he had tried to reason with Yeltsin in the past, but suggested they write the president a letter, something assistant Viktor Ilyushin, who had worked with him since the 1970s, at first opposed as counterproductive. The supercautious Ilyushin came around, and Kostikov cobbled together a collective letter. It was signed by seven people: Kostikov; Ilyushin, who gave it a final edit; Korzhakov and his colleague from the security services, Mikhail Barsukov; Vladimir Shevchenko, the long-suffering chief of presidential protocol; speechwriter Lyudmila Pikhoya; and Dmitrii Ryurikov, Yeltsin’s foreign-policy assistant. Korzhakov delivered the missive by hand on September 10, on a presidential flight to Sochi. The document—wags in the press, which got wind of it, named it “The Letter of the Aides to Their Sultan,” after a nineteenth-century painting by Il’ya Repin—took the president to task for his hermetic tendencies; his complacency and “tsarist” airs; his aversion to planning, which left too many decisions to hang on “irrational factors, chance, and even caprice”; and his separation from past and prospective allies. The authors did not trace all or most of Yeltsin’s problems to alcohol. But, using code to spare his feelings, they stated clearly that in their estimation his dependency—“the well-known Russian vice”—was dragging him down. The signals he had sent in Berlin were “impossible to ignore and difficult to correct.” He needed, they said, “to reassess once and for all your attitude toward your health and your harmful habits,” halt “unexpected disappearances and periods of rehabilitation,” and find ways of decompressing other than “athletics followed by a banquet.” No ruler of Russia before or since has seen the likes of it.⁷⁶

Yeltsin sulked. He would not shake hands with the messengers for weeks, excluded several of them from a trip to London and Washington, and did not speak to Pikhoya for six months. Kostikov in November was to be handed the honeyed exile of the Russian ambassadorship to the Vatican. Walking the beach in Sochi in mid-September, Yeltsin meditated on his behavior and, he says, made a resolution “to revive [his] strength” and set limits.⁷⁷ So the message was in a way received, although the incidents, including documented ones abroad, did not stop.⁷⁸

Yeltsin had progressed from convivial social drinking to drinking with abandon as a balm for a battered ego—to lighten the weight of the world in a period of extreme personal tension. Only in Presidential Marathon, the memoir volume published after his retirement, did Yeltsin begin to concede what had happened: “At a certain time, I sensed that alcohol is a means that rapidly relieves stress.” In Berlin he had been beset by the emotion of the moment and by the onerousness of his office. “The load eased after several glasses, and then, in that light-headed condition, it was possible for me to conduct an orchestra.” Yeltsin wrote it up with a self-pitying slap at those who harped on the theme: “If it was not the blasted alcohol, it would have been something else, they would found some other vulnerable point.”⁷⁹

Drinking in moderation and on his own time might have been good for Yeltsin’s mental health and equanimity. Drinking immoderately and on the government’s time was a self-inflicted wound that brought no good to anyone. While he must bear responsibility, it is only fair to observe that others tolerated and even condoned his behavior. Naina Yeltsina did her best to restrain her husband and chided associates who did not. She and her daughters blamed Aleksandr Korzhakov for feeding the alcohol habit so as to maintain his personal access to the president. By 1995 Naina was avoiding social contact with Korzhakov for this reason.⁸⁰ Korzhakov denies the charge, and is half-right in doing so. As the authors of The Yeltsin Epoch point out, he “knew how to ‘regulate the process’” and could be either an enabler or a restrainer. And Korzhakov was but one of those around Yeltsin who saw benefit to them in lifting a glass with the president. For the Berlin incident, the inciter was Pavel Grachëv: “Every shot of vodka taken with Yeltsin was like a star on his general’s epaulets.”⁸¹

The “letter to the sultan” was better late than never. But Yeltsin and Russia would have been better served if more people had taken a stand, earlier, and put their positions on the line if that was what it took. Even the Berlin signatories did not have the temerity to speak to him about their handiwork. Yeltsin asked Pikhoya why she signed the letter but had not once brought up the issue in person. “There are situations,” she said sotto voce, “where it is easier to write than to speak.”⁸² This was one of them. “I was not going to make excuses for myself in front of my assistants,” Yeltsin says of the epistle. “I doubt whether any of them would have been able to help me. The distance between us was too great.”⁸³ The author of that distance was Boris Yeltsin, whose personality cowed those who might have helped.

Yeltsin was not the first modern statesman to have a soft spot for Bacchus. One study of modern rulers estimates 15 percent of them abused alcohol at one time or another, or about the same proportion as in the American population.⁸⁴ Kemal Atatürk of Turkey and Winston Churchill, to mention two great leaders, ingested potables in quantities that would put Yeltsin to shame.⁸⁵ No sensible historian would reduce Atatürk’s or Churchill’s career to his drinking escapades. None should do that to Yeltsin’s, either.

Yeltsin opponents and haters sometimes tried to link his alcohol use to political outcomes. Gorbachev complained to his staff in November 1991 that Gennadii Burbulis and Yeltsin’s entourage were plying Yeltsin with liquor to get him to concur in their separatist designs and that there was a danger he would be a “blind pawn” of others.⁸⁶ There is no credible evidence of this ever being the case. Foreign partners found Boris Yeltsin’s drinking to be irrelevant, other than in distracting him and lengthening the communications and negotiations. At the Vancouver meeting with President Clinton in 1993, Yeltsin’s conduct on the first evening “didn’t seem to impair his performance the next morning. The summit was a success.”⁸⁷ In domestic politics, none of Yeltsin’s crucial actions in his first term, before he swore off drinking, happened because of alcohol or under the influence of alcohol.

But drinking was detrimental to the Yeltsin presidency through more roundabout routes. In the early 1990s, the Russians forgave it, seeing it as secondary to his crusade to improve their lives, and in some cases thinking it connoted soulfulness and the release of inhibitions. When his quiet revolution went sour, it was taken as validation of egocentrism and transmogrified into a political liability.⁸⁸ It sparked rumors of misbehavior even when there was none, something he resented but was helpless to counter. It disrupted his schedule and his accessibility to interlocutors. In July 1993 Ruslan Khasbulatov arranged for President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan to visit to mediate the affray between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet. A meeting was arranged for the ABTs guesthouse. Yeltsin was not adequate to the task and Nazarbayev had to leave without seeing him. Khasbulatov blamed “the forces behind” Yeltsin for wrecking the plan.⁸⁹ Lower-ranking political tasks, such as press briefings, were shortchanged as the tennis/steambath/dining cycle waxed in importance. But the greatest harm was that done to Yeltsin’s health.

His medical issues, and his tendency not to look after them, dated back decades. The tonsil infection and rheumatic fever at UPI, when Yeltsin refused the bed rest prescribed, foretold a tendency to slight doctor’s orders, on the assumption that exercise and self-command would see him through. “I take risks with my health,” he said in one of his books, “because I rely heavily on my body’s [strength]. I do not always take special care of myself.”⁹⁰ In June 1992 he had his first comprehensive physical examination since 1987. A bulletin signed by a consilium of five doctors pronounced his health good and noted “the staying power of the patient.”⁹¹ Yeltsin’s complaints over the next several years were mostly minor, in particular, backache (for which he had an arthroscopic procedure in September 1993), sciatic inflammation of nerves in the legs, and the nasal condition. But his haggard visage and no-shows fueled often scurrilous speculation. The movie director El’dar Ryazanov, who interviewed him in April 1993 and in two sessions in November, found him changed over the seven months. Courtly in April, Yeltsin was perspiring, puffy-eyed, and “programmed” in November and lugged “an enormous burden of guilt” over political developments. Midway through the first November session, he had to interrupt it for a catnap, informing Ryazanov that he was now in the habit of sleeping in the daytime.⁹² By 1994 Moscow insiders were using the alias Dedushka— Grandpa, or the Old Man—in chitchat about him.

It emerged that the principal problem was cardiovascular illness. Yeltsin is known to have experienced angina pectoris, ascribable to ischemic deterioration of blood flow to the heart, in September–October 1991, January 1992, and September 1994. On the last occasion, on September 30, 1994, he ruffled diplomatic feathers when he was a no-show for a meeting with the Irish prime minister, Albert Reynolds, at an airport layover in Shannon. After Berlin, one month before, the world press ascribed it to drinking, which had indeed triggered the incident. First Deputy Premier Oleg Soskovets greeted Reynolds in Yeltsin’s place. Yeltsin apologized to Reynolds on October 6, saying he had overslept. He was sensitive to those who made fun of his excuse.⁹³ In 1995 his symptoms reached life-threatening dimensions in a rapid-fire sequence of three heart attacks in six months: the first two (on July 10 and October 26) reported in the Russian media, the third (in late December) unreported.⁹⁴ He was laid up after each in the TsKB, the government’s premier hospital, in southwest Moscow, spending a total of six weeks there and seven in the sanatorium at Barvikha. At the TsKB in October–November, he for the first time did government business out of a hospital bed for a considerable period. From now on, there would be an ambulance in his motorcade.

Aging, the wear and tear of a lifetime, the high-fat diet common in Russia and the former Soviet Union, and the acute pressures of governing in a decade of troubles made Yeltsin an excellent candidate for the disease. His burning of the candle at both ends made him even more vulnerable. Although he cut back his alcohol intake after Berlin, he was not consistently abstinent. The day of his first coronary, says Korzhakov, he had marked Mikhail Barsukov’s appointment as chief of the Federal Security Service, part of the post-Budënnovsk purge, by sharing two liters of sugary Cointreau liqueur with Barsukov.⁹⁵ Yevgenii Chazov, the former health minister and head of Russia’s best cardiology hospital, and a consultant on the Yeltsin case, says the patient’s willfulness helped bring on the next crisis. “He decided to show that all the prattle about the state of his health was groundless and took to his previous way of life. He went to Sochi, played tennis, and did some drinking. Of course, it all ended sadly.” The October attack came right after Yeltsin deplaned in Moscow from a trip to the United States. Only following it did he behave more carefully, writes Chazov, although he would not agree to the diagnostic angiogram urged by the Kremlin doctors. The circumstances of the December coronary seem to have been similar to those of the first two.⁹⁶ In 1996, as he ran to defend his presidential position against the communists, he was more careful.⁹⁷

Much as he might have wanted it under wraps, Yeltsin, not so different from the Samson Agonistes pushing the grain mill in John Milton’s verse, played out his torments in public view. This was because Russia’s press was freer and livelier in the 1990s than in any other period of the nation’s history. Censorship had been abolished by Soviet legislation in June 1990. Two of the three authors of that law, Yurii Baturin and Mikhail Fedotov, were to hold senior positions after 1991. The constitution of 1993 affirmed the ban on censorship, and in the drafting sessions Yeltsin agreed to language that strengthened it.⁹⁸

The media frankness about Yeltsin’s derelictions and peccadillos was unprecedented for a Russian leader. Yeltsin did not cotton to criticism of his person, or of his policies, and had no shortage of opportunities to throttle it. His refusal to take them is traceable to principle, psychology, and realism. After communism, he accepted the need for a modern country to have an inquisitive and contentious press. “Criticism is a necessary thing,” he declaimed in 1992. “If we do not take part in criticism today, we will fall into the same swamp in which we wallowed for decades.” Suppression of it would also be a confession of pusillanimity: “If a statesman or leader or president goes about squeezing the press, this means he is weak-kneed. A strong leader will not squeeze the press, even if it criticizes him.”⁹⁹ Once in a great while, he had to be reminded this was so. He asked press secretary Kostikov in 1994 if he could not do something about the withering stories carried by Kostikov’s friend Igor Golembiovskii, the editor of Izvestiya. Kostikov replied that he could take care of the problem if Yeltsin arranged to give him “the powers of Suslov”—Mikhail Suslov, the intransigent overseer of ideology in Leonid Brezhnev’s Politburo. Yeltsin left it at that and based his press strategy on carrots more than sticks.¹⁰⁰ His first-term press secretaries, all of them professional journalists, helped him cajole political reporters and commentators; Gorbachev had talked only to the editors-in-chief. Yeltsin could name the anchors on the national television news programs (although he watched only excerpts from the evening news spliced together by staff), the main correspondents for the several Russian wire services, and half of the roughly twenty print journalists in the “Kremlin pool” started by Kostikov in 1994. While formal press conferences were rare, he made himself available to reporters for weekly off-the-record briefings and conversed quietly with them at proforma events, such as the accreditation of ambassadors.

In the television market, the population’s primary source of political information, Yeltsin inherited two state-owned national networks, Ostankino (Channel 1) from the Soviet government, and Russian Television or RTR (Channel 2), created in 1991. He did not shrink from using the personnel weapon, firing Ostankino director Yegor Yakovlev in November 1992 and the chairman of Channel 2, Oleg Poptsov, in February 1996.¹⁰¹ Editorial autonomy on state television was greater than in the Soviet era, by virtue of drift and division in the executive branch as well as legal guarantees and ethical scruples.¹⁰² Yeltsin’s biggest gift to pluralism on television was his agreement to the establishment of a full-service private network, NTV. Headed by Igor Malashenko, a former Central Committee deskman, and owned by Vladimir Gusinskii, one of the first of the oligarchs, it aimed for white-collar, urban viewers and soon distinguished itself by hard-hitting reportage of Moscow political scandals and the war in Chechnya. It went on the air October 10, 1993, the week after the shelling of parliament.¹⁰³

A landmark was NTV’s launch of the hilarious weekly satire Kukly (Puppets) in November 1994. In it, life-sized rubber dolls of politicians acted out skits that were often based on literary or film classics. The puppets did not have fixed roles but rotated through a repertoire. The creators had some doubts about the propriety of deriding the president of the country. It did not take long to resolve them. Like the man-woman Margaret Thatcher in Spitting Image, the British prototype, so Boriska, a gimpy, apple-cheeked double of Boris Yeltsin, was the drawing card in Kukly. Aleksandr Korzhakov, unprompted by Yeltsin, tried several acts of intimidation against NTV in the winter of 1994–95. He and his government ally Oleg Soskovets demanded that Gusinskii scrap Kukly, which he would not do.¹⁰⁴ In June 1995 Procurator General Aleksei Il’yushenko indicted the show for slander. The provocation was a burlesque, “The Lower Depths”—its title taken from Maxim Gorky’s 1902 drama—that showed Yeltsin and Prime Minister Chernomyrdin as besotted vagrants panning for loose change in post–shock therapy Russia, with Korzhakov as a wailing babe in Yeltsin’s arms. The criminal charge was dropped in October 1995 and Kukly went its merry way. Two other episodes—“Feast in the Time of Plague” (about revelers in a miserable land, the title taken from a poem by Pushkin) and a Winnie-the-Pooh piece that showed Yeltsin as the teddy bear with fluff in his head—were quashed by NTV as too salty. One hundred and fifty others were aired unamended. Boriska was in about two-thirds of them.¹⁰⁵

For head writer Viktor Shenderovich, Yeltsin was the caricaturist’s dream. He evoked the coroneted tragic heroes of William Shakespeare and the protagonists of the Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky (1823–60), who were merchants or clerks in patriarchal families, living lives of contradiction and futility. Shenderovich’s favorite was the first sketch he wrote in January 1995. It limned Yeltsin as a Hamlet torn by warring impulses. Boriska, the orotund voice supplied by actor Sergei Bezrukov, was “unsure if he is a tsar or a democratic president,” asking whether to lock up his opposition or promulgate liberal reforms. He was “many-threaded… willful and capricious but conscientious for all that… lonely… never knowing what he is going to do tomorrow.”¹⁰⁶ One of the wickedest of the Kukly spoofs, in early 1996, cast Yeltsin as the director of a surgical clinic. In a play on the word operatsiya, operation, it slammed both the Russian military action in Chechnya and economic shock therapy. Boriska explains to visiting journalists that he was elected head surgeon five years before “by a democratic assembly of the seriously ill.” He and his staff are all ignoramuses, but not to worry. “Lack of expertise and lack of nimbleness,” he says, “can be offset by power of the will and devotedness to the reforms.” “So what is the main thing” at the clinic? the narrator asks. “The main thing is to convince everyone that you are head surgeon. Once you have convinced them, you can cut away at anything you want and have nothing to fear.”¹⁰⁷

Most of the Kukly skits were friendlier to Yeltsin than this—Shenderovich, Malashenko, and Gusinskii all counted themselves supporters of the president—and interlarded praise, disapproval, and puzzlement. Besides the accursed Hamlet, Faust, and Othello (Mayor Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow, with whom Yeltsin had feuded, was the inconstant Desdemona), the latex Yeltsin was God (gazing down smugly at Russia from the empyrean), Robinson Crusoe, a woebegone Don Quixote, Louis XIII, Priam of Troy, the Grand Inquisitor, a sultan closeted with his servants and ambassadors, the winner in a cheesy game show, the custodian of a Soviet communal apartment, a fireman, a Russian motorist bribing his way through a safety check, a Mafioso, a superannuated hospital patient padding around in his pajamas, and Caligula bullying senators to confirm one of his racehorses as consul of Rome—among others.¹⁰⁸

Some of the more memorable Kukly offerings painted Yeltsin as a man molded by his time and place no less than a molder of them. In a 1995 sketch modeled on the children’s fantasies of Grigorii Oster, Boriska looks raffishly in the mirror and says to himself:

The conclusion is that the problem with the times lay not only with the man at the top but with the Russian disarray, which he had internalized and which had helped sweep him to power. Yeltsin may not have laughed at the charade—he watched Kukly only several times and decided it was not for him.¹¹⁰ He did, though, get out of the way of others laughing. In a country where politics were more associated with tears, this was something to be grateful for.