Yeltsin: A Life

INTRODUCTION

1 The lunch with a few ministers and aides began at 11:30. But the television in the dining room did not work, and so at noon the group briefly repaired to the nearby office of Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko to watch the speech. The legal transfer of powers to Putin as acting president took effect at that very minute.

2 The Russian Orthodox Church still uses the Julian calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. It currently lags thirteen days behind the more accurate Gregorian calendar in use in the West since 1582 A.D., and so Russian Christmas falls on January 7. The Soviet government introduced the Gregorian calendar for secular purposes in 1918.

3 This was the ruling party’s name as of 1952, before which it was the All-Russian Communist Party and the Bolshevik Party.

4 “Boris Yel’tsin: glavnoye delo svoyei zhizni ya sdelal” (Boris Yeltsin: I have done with the main business of my life), Nezavisimaya gazeta, January 6, 2000.

5 Ibid.

6 Sergei Roy, review of Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), in Moscow Times, January 22, 2000. Aron’s book, elegantly written and uniformly praiseful, is the most informative on Yeltsin’s life by a Westerner. Several of the better books were put out by journalists at the turn of the 1990s: John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991); and Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992). George W. Breslauer’s fine scholarly monograph Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) compares how Yeltsin and Gorbachev “built authority” in the 1980s and 1990s, with Gorbachev’s predecessors as Soviet general secretary as the benchmark, and offers insights into Yeltsin’s “patriarchal” aspect. Further enlightenment comes from Gwendolyn Elizabeth Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT: Democratization, Suverenizatsiia, and Boris Yeltsin in the Breakup of the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995); and Jerrold M. Post, “Boris Yeltsin: Against the Grain,” Problems of Post-Communism 43 (January–February 1996), 58–62. Stewart observed Yeltsin as a photojournalist, and Post is a psychiatrist who has profiled foreign leaders for the U.S. government.

7 Sergei Markedonov, “Boris Yel’tsin: eskiz istoricheskogo portreta” (Boris Yeltsin: outline of a historical portrait), http://polit.ru/author/2006/02/01/eltsyn_75.

8 A recent tour of the genre describes the English as historically more “biography-obsessed” than Americans, but adds that the celebrity culture of the United States partly compensates (James Atlas, “My Subject Myself,” New York Times Book Review, October 9, 2005). See also Lewis J. Edinger, “Political Science and Political Biography: Reflections on the Study of Leadership,” Journal of Politics 26 (May 1964), 423–39. Russia scores far below both Britain and America in acceptance of biography.

9 The best-known biographical project in the country is the series “Lives of Outstanding People,” put out by the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house in Moscow. Its almost 1,200 titles cover cultural as well as political and military figures, in Russia and abroad. There was no Yeltsin title in the series until writer and editor Boris Minayev’s volume in 2010. The collective memoir by nine former aides, Yu. M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), is the best book about Yeltsin in power in any language. But the points of view of individual contributors are not identified, and it just scratches the surface of Yeltsin’s personality and decision-making processes. The journalist and editor Vitalii Tret’yakov, who was one of the first to comment on the Yeltsin phenomenon, and to do so favorably, wrote most of an unfavorable biography of him in 1998–99. Tiring, he said, of “the banality of the theme and of the main hero of the book,” he did not finish it. Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka” (Sverdlovsk upstart), part 1, Politicheskii klass, February 2006, 36. Selections from the manuscript, which takes Yeltsin to 1989 only, were published in the February through August issues of this magazine.

10 “Authors are wary of tackling [the issue] precisely because Yeltsin has played a huge and overpowering role in the birth of the new Russia.” Peter Rutland, “The Boris Yeltsin of History,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 6 (Fall 1998), 692.

11 A search of books for sale at www.amazon.com, using the person’s name and “biography” as keywords, on November 15, 2007, turned up 2,904 titles about Washington, 2,202 about Lincoln, 1,009 about Churchill, and 975 about Hitler.

12 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 420. This book appeared in English as Midnight Diaries. Unless specially noted, I will quote the Russian originals of Yeltsin’s memoirs and cite them by their Russian titles—translating those titles, in the body of the text, into English. Englishand Russian-language texts of all three books are now available at the Yeltsin Foundation website: http://yeltsin.ru/yeltsin/books.

13 Oleg Poptsov, Khronika vremën “Tsarya Borisa” (Chronicle of the times of “Tsar Boris”) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1995), 218.

14 Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 260.

15 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:281.

16 Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 48.

17 Boris Nikol’skii, Kremlëvskiye mirazhi (Kremlin mirages) (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2001), 124.

18 Stephen Hanson, “The Dilemmas of Russia’s Anti-Revolutionary Revolution,” Current History 100 (October 2001), 331.

19 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 285. Clinton made the remark to U.S. officials traveling with him to meet Yeltsin in Moscow in the summer of 1998.

20 Sergei Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno (Top nonsecret) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 418–19.

21 Aleksandr Yakovlev, Sumerki (Dusk) (Moscow: Materik, 2003), 644 (italics added).

22 Talbott, Russia Hand, 185. Foreigners were not the only ones to spy these incongruities. A presidential press secretary was led to conclude Yeltsin was “warring against himself” (Vyacheslav Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom: zapiski press-sekretarya [Romance with a president: notes of a press secretary] [Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997], 313). See also the general discussion in Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999).

23 Here I follow Clayton Roberts, who defines a historical interpretation as “an abbreviation of a complete explanation” and “an assertion that some variable or number of variables are the most important causal agencies in a particular historical development.” Roberts, The Logic of Historical Explanation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 242, 245.

24 I have the dubious honor of being one of the first to do so, in Timothy J. Colton, “Moscow Politics and the Yeltsin Affair,” Harriman Institute Forum 1 (June 1988), 1–8.

25 Indicative of the latter is the claim by Solovyov and Klepikova, written in the last months of 1991 (Boris Yeltsin, 23): “Boris Yeltsin’s historical mission has been completed. The titanic role he played was a destructive one; we are not sure he has enough strength for constructive activity.”

26 As characterized, critically, by Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, “A Normal Country,” Foreign Affairs 83 (March–April 2004), 20.

27 Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 349.

28 Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 32. For a forceful summary, see Dusko Doder, “Russia’s Potemkin Leader,” The Nation, January 29, 2001. A noxious specimen of what can only be called hate journalism, published after Yeltsin’s death in 2007, is Matt Taibbi, “The Low Post: Death of a Drunk,” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/14272792.

29 I speak of a positive assessment beyond the empathy that usually goes with the writing of a life: “No honest biographer—as opposed to the propagandist or the avowed debunker—can long remain in company and consort with a subject and avoid at least a touch of empathy. Empathy… is the biographer’s spark of creation.” Frank E. Vandiver, “Biography as an Agent of Humanism,” in James F. Veninga, ed., The Biographer’s Gift: Life Histories and Humanism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983), 16–17.

30 Viktor Shenderovich, Kukly (Puppets) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 35–36.

31 Frank Vandiver’s term, from “Biography as an Agent of Humanism,” 16.

CHAPTER ONE

1 A. K. Matveyev, Geograficheskiye nazvaniya Urala (Geographic names of the Urals) (Sverdlovsk: Sredne-Ural’skoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 1980), 49–50. It has also been suggested that the name comes from budka, the term for a sentry box such as European settlers in the area would have set up, and slang for toilet stall. There is an eponymous Butka Lake southeast of the village of Butka and a Butka River (a creek, really) that flows into the Belyakovka from the right. But the lake is not connected to either river, and the conflux of the Butka and Belyakovka rivers is about twelve miles downstream of the village on the Belyakovka.

2 I. Butakov, “Butke—300 let” (Butka is 300 years old), Ural’skii rabochii, November 3, 1976.

3 See A. A. Kondrashenkov, Krest’yane Zaural’ya v XVII–XVIII vekakh (The peasants of the Trans-Urals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) (Chelyabinsk: Yuzhno-Ural’skoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 1966), 30, 53; “Iz istorii Butki” (From Butka’s history), http://rx9cfs.narod.ru/butka/7.html; and “Rodnomy selu Yel’tsina ispolnilos’ 325 let” (Yeltsin’s native village is 325 years old), http://txt.newsru.com/russia/03nov2001/butka.html.

4 See on this point Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). Eighty percent of rural dwellers in the Urals on the eve of emancipation were state peasants. There were urban serfs in the Urals, attached to mines and factories.

5 Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko, Kama i Ural (ocherki i vpechatleniya) (The Kama and the Urals [Essays and impressions]) (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya A. S. Suvorina, 1890), 551.

6 V. P. Semënov-Tyan-Shyanskii, Rossiya: polnoye geograficheskoye opisaniye nashego otechestva (Russia: a complete geographic description of our fatherland), 11 vols. (St. Petersburg: Devrien, 1899–1914), 5:170.

7 Michael Cherniavsky, “The Old Believers and the New Religion,” Slavic Review 25 (March 1966), 24. See also Roy R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995); and Georg Bernhard Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Most Old Believers lived deep in the interior, but there were also concentrations, particularly of merchants, in the big cities. One-third of the population of Yekaterinburg in the mid-eighteenth century was Old Believer. The rural sectarians tended to be more radical in their beliefs than the urban, who were usually willing to say prayers for the tsar.

8 The Russian historian Rudol’f Pikhoya, quoted in Pilar Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya: Boris Yel’tsin, provintsial v Kremle” (The impossible Russia: Boris Yeltsin, a provincial in the Kremlin), Ural, April 1994, 15. This valuable study was first published in Spanish as La Rusia Imposible: Boris Yeltsin, un provinciano en el Kremlin (Madrid: El Paìs, S.A./Aguilar, S.A., 1994).

9 Ocherki istorii staroobryadchestva Urala i sopredel’nykh territorii (Essays on the history of the Old Believers of the Urals and abutting territories) (Yekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2000), 85. The 1897 census (which I consulted in the original) counted 23,762 Old Believers in Shadrinsk district, or 8 percent of the population. Experts have generally felt that official statistics underestimated the number of Old Believers.

10 The census of 1897 said 780 of the 825 lawful residents of Butka were Orthodox. Most of the remaining forty-five would have been Old Believers, and undoubtedly quite a few of the 780 had mixed beliefs. Seventeen residents of Basmanovo and 105 in Talitsa were unaccounted for in the same way. In Butkinskoozërskaya village, at the terminus of the Butka River, the census recorded 162 of 914 persons as Old Believers.

11 Irina Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi, yemu vidnei” (Boris is a big shot, he knows better), Moskovskii komsomolets, January 31, 2007, reports that approximately 1,000 people bearing the name live in today’s Sverdlovsk and Perm provinces.

12 Students of twentieth-century cinema will recognize the name from the characters Aleksei and Fëdor Basmanov in Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet film classic, Ivan the Terrible, released in parts in 1944 and 1958. Aleksei is a lieutenant of Tsar Ivan. His only son, Fëdor, is the bloodthirsty founder of the Oprichnina, Ivan’s palace guard.

13 D. A. Panov, Opyt pokolennoi rospisi roda Yel’tsinykh (An experiment in doing a genealogy of the Yeltsin clan) (Perm: Assotsiatsiya genealogov-lyubitelei, 1992), and Panov’s work at http://www.vgd.ru/Ye, give years of birth and death for all male heads of the Yeltsin family prior to Yekim, and only a year of birth for him. At that point, the well runs dry because of changes in record keeping under the Soviet regime.

14 Ivan Yeltsin (1794–1825) was a nephew of Savva. He returned to Basmanovo from the army and fathered two children. After his death, his widow, Marfa, had seven more sons and daughters by another man.

15 For Boris Yeltsin’s grandparents on both sides, I rely on a personal communication from his daughter Tatyana Yumasheva dated March 4, 2005, which collated information from family sources, and on interviews with Stanislav Glebov, a distant cousin, in Butka and Serafima Gomzikova, Boris’s first cousin, in Basmanovo (both on September 11, 2005). Yumasheva appears in the pages of this book mostly as Tatyana Dyachenko, her married name when her father was president. The family has no record of Anna Dmitreyevna’s maiden name. Dmitrii Panov was unable to find even her given name and patronymic for his genealogy. Ignatii is sometimes referred to as Ignat Yeltsin.

16 Pilar Bonet and Rudol’f Pikhoya have speculated about Yeltsin’s Old Believer roots. Klavdiya Yeltsina, his mother, spoke of them before her death in 1993: Alya Tanachëva, a Sverdlovsk political activist who befriended her, interview with the author (June 22, 2004). Surviving members of the family cannot confirm Klavdiya’s assertion and say that, if there were Old Believer roots, they were deep in the family’s past.

17 Klavdiya Yeltsina in the 1950s, as recalled by Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007).

18 Yumasheva communication; police file on Nikolai Yeltsin compiled before his arrest in 1934, as given in A. L. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani (The Yeltsins in Kazan) (Kazan: Aibat, 2004), 28–29.

19 Excerpted in Igor Neverov, “Otets prezidenta” (The president’s father), fragment of an unpublished manuscript by Neverov, Nikomu ne otdam svoyu biografiyu (We won’t give anyone our biography), 1998; copy provided to the author in September 2005 by the Museum of History and Art, Berezniki, Russia.

20 Or so local residents told a foreign correspondent in the 1990s: Matt Taibbi, “Butka: Boris Yeltsin, Revisited,” http://exile.ru/105/yeltsin. Nikolai and Taisiya Bersenëva romanced before her marriage and resumed the relationship after five years.

21 Izabella Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov ot Belogo doma” (Thousands of kilometers from the White House), Vechernyaya Moskva, October 2, 1991.

22 Yumasheva communication. The phrase about the Yeltsins’ golden hands is in Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov,” and was repeated in my interview with Serafima Gomzikova. Klavdiya’s ancestors up to her parents’ generation can be located at www.vgd.ru/S.

23 For a claim that Boris Yeltsin was born in Basmanovo and not Butka, see Natal’ya Zenova, “Mesto rozhdeniya prezidenta izmenit’ nel’zya” (You cannot change a president’s place of birth), Obshchaya gazeta, April 30, 1997. Yeltsin hotly denied it and said he had “all the documentation” to prove he was born in Butka. Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2002).

24 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 18. This volume was published in English as Against the Grain. A relative said sixty years afterward (Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 15) that the story about the font is apocryphal and Yeltsin was baptized at home, the Butka church having been closed. Yeltsin’s report that the church was being made to serve the surrounding villages, and that baptisms were being held there only one day a month, suggests the closing of places of worship was under way. His description educes a long-standing Russian image of the intoxicated rural clergyman, going back at least as far as Vasilii Perov’s 1861 painting Easter Procession in a Village.

25 Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi,” reports incorrectly that Yeltsin’s birthplace was demolished some time ago. Stanislav Glebov gave me the address in 2005, and several residents of the street confirmed that this was the place. The household took in Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin, their four sons, the wives of the three oldest sons, and, it seems, three grandchildren. Ignatii’s daughter, Mariya, had married one Yakov Gomzikov in the early 1920s and remained in Basmanovo.

26 Leonid Brezhnev, Vospominaniya (Memoirs) (Moscow: Politizdat, 1983), 27. There were more than 1,300 peasant uprisings and mass protests in the Soviet Union in 1929 and the early 1930s. Fifty-two occurred in the Urals in only the first three months of 1930. I. S. Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala s drevneishikh vremën do nashikh dnei (History of the Urals from ancient times to our day) (Yekaterinburg: Sokrat, 2003), 346.

27 T. I. Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka na Urale, 1930–1936 (The banishment of the kulaks in the Urals, 1930–36) (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995), 33; Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 348.

28 The bell tower fell to the ground at one point. After communism, in 1993, the church was reconsecrated; a temporary tower was built in the yard and five bells purchased. Boris Yeltsin as president (personally or via a government grant, it is not clear) made a contribution to restoration (Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi”). A gutting and reconstruction funded by local businessmen began in 2005. The church in Basmanovo, dating from 1860, was torn down in the 1930s and never replaced. The location is still a debris-strewn vacant lot. Orthodox services are held in the village in a home chapel.

29 On cannibalism, Pëtr Porotnikov, a regional official who grew up in Butka, interview with the author (September 10, 2004). See the reference to the phenomenon in Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 347.

30 Raskulachivaniye (dekulakization) was a pre-existing Russian word adapted to a new purpose. Derived from kulak, whose original meaning was “fist,” it denoted the relaxing of the fingers in a clenched fist. In the context of Stalinist class warfare, it signified the draining away of the wealth of the village elite, the heartless kulaks.

31 References to Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 18–19, 20, 26, 144.

32 Andrei Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin: svet i teni (Boris Yeltsin: light and shadows), 2 vols. (Sverdlovsk: Klip, 1991), 1:5–6.

33 See John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991), 32–33; Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 116–18; Timothy J. Colton, “Boris Yeltsin: Russia’s All-Thumbs Democrat,” in Colton and Robert C. Tucker, eds., Patterns in Post-Soviet Leadership (Boulder: Westview, 1995), 50–51, 71; Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 49–51; and Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), chap. 1, which has rather more up-to-date information than the others about Nikolai Yeltsin. Mikheyev mistakenly refers (51) to Yeltsin’s childhood as “difficult but devoid of atrocities and destruction.”

34 For background, see Golfo Alexopolous, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). In the cities, the disenfranchised were denied ration cards, which did not apply in the countryside.

35 A. I. Bedel’ and T. I. Slavko, eds., Sud’ba raskulachennykh spetspereselentsev na Urale, 1930–1936 gg. (The fate of the dekulakized special migrants in the Urals, 1930–36) (Yekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1994), 14.

36 Gomzikova interview. Serafima Gomzikova, who was a young girl in 1930, recalled the scene. Her parents’ house was confiscated and local communists demanded that her father divorce her mother, Mariya (Ignatii’s only daughter), which he refused to do. If Anna Yeltsina’s name has been left out of previous accounts, the very existence of Mariya, who died in the 1950s, has not registered. Serafima is her surviving daughter.

37 Statistics in Viktor Danilov et al., eds., Tragediya sovetskoi derevni: kollektivizatsiya i raskulachivaniye; dokumenty i materialy, 1927–1939 (The tragedy of the Soviet village: collectivization and dekulakization; documents and materials, 1927–39), 5 vols. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), 2:745; and Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 73. The peak number, about 484,000, was reached in early 1932; by a year from then, it was down to 366,000, mostly because of deaths (33,000) and flight (97,000). For perspective, see James R. Harris, “The Growth of the Gulag: Forced Labor in the Urals Region, 1929–31,” Russian Review 56 (April 1997), 265–80; Judith Pallot, “Russia’s Penal Peripheries: Space, Place, and Penalty in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (March 2005), 98–112; and Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). As Viola shows, the regional administration was originally against central efforts to make the Urals the prime locale for deportees from all over the Soviet Union.

38 The Basmanovo council’s report on the family to the police in Kazan, in connection with the case against Ignatii’s son Nikolai, said Yeltsin senior was “on the run” (v begakh). The report was sent in February 1934. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 29.

39 The age limit is noted in Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 64.

40 Family details taken from Yumasheva communication. The severity of the restrictions suggests some unusual police animus toward the Yeltsins. Second-category kulaks were supposed to get shipment of thirty poods (about a half-ton) of baggage per family member. Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 80.

41 Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 340.

42 Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 94–95.

43 The town took its name when founded in the 1890s from Nadezhda (Hope) Polovtsova, the owner of the local iron mine and the wife of a personal aide to the tsar. From 1934 to 1937, it was called Kabakovsk, after Ivan Kabakov, the first secretary of the Communist Party committee of Sverdlovsk province—the job to be held by Boris Yeltsin from 1976 to 1985. When Kabakov was purged in 1937, Kabakovsk reverted to Nadezhdinsk. In 1939 it was named after Anatolii Serov, a Soviet aviator and hero of the Spanish Civil War.

44 No one can be sure today, but the likely trigger for Ignatii’s blindness was a stroke. His son Nikolai, Boris’s father, was to die of stroke in the 1970s.

45 Yumasheva communication. Taibbi, in his unpublished “Butka,” is the only analyst to have suggested that Yeltsin’s maternal grandfather was sent to the north. He tracked down no other details.

46 Second Yeltsin interview. The only way to reach Serov, just 130 miles northeast of Berezniki as the crow flies, was a laborious U-shaped train route, taking two days of travel.

47 About 70,000 banished peasants in the Urals were called up into the army during the war and qualified for release that way. Others were allowed to leave in dribs and drabs before the war. By January 1946 the number of peasant exiles in the Urals was down to 138,000 and by January 1954 it was less than 10,000. By that last date, though, the total number of banished people in all categories in the Soviet Union as a whole was still very high—2,720,000. Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 145–46.

48 Details again from Yumasheva communication.

49 Neverov, “Otets prezidenta.”

50 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 18–19, describes Nikolai as present for his baptism. He could not possibly have remembered who attended, but it is a fair guess that Klavdiya would have let it be known if Nikolai had missed the event. A Spanish journalist heard from Yeltsin relations in 1991 that Nikolai around this time worked on the construction of the Butka-Talitsa road (Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 16), but the project went on from 1934 to 1936, so the timing seems off. It is possible that another one of the brothers worked on the road.

51 Klavdiya Yeltsina told an American visitor in 1991 that the three of them did exactly that (she used the name Serov for their destination). Gwendolyn Elizabeth Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT: Democratization, Suverenizatsiia, and Boris Yeltsin in the Breakup of the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995), 78–79.

52 Eventually known as the Gorbunov Works, the plant was over the years to make reconnaissance planes, Blackjack strategic bombers, and civil airliners. The nearby Kazan Helicopter Works built the Mi-8 helicopter that Boris Yeltsin flew as president of post-Soviet Russia.

53 This was his claim in his 1950s autobiography: Neverov, “Otets prezidenta.”

54 This is by later assertion of Klavdiya Yeltsina (Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:5). The trips ended, she said, when her brother-in-law Ivan left Butka for Berezniki, which was in 1935.

55 Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 26. Litvin dug out Nikolai’s OGPU file from the Kazan archive of the KGB and gave it to Boris Yeltsin, who included excerpts in his second book of memoirs. The file also provided information on the dekulakization of Ignatii. English-language readers can find some details in Boris Yeltsin, The Struggle for Russia, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Times Books, 1994), 94–98, which translates Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 121–25.

56 The secret police arrested 4,721 people in Tatariya in 1931 and shot 252 of them. None of the 887 arrested in 1934 was shot. In the last four months of 1937, some 4,750 individuals were arrested and 2,510 of them shot. Altogether, from 1929 through 1938 more than 20,000 were arrested in the republic and about 4,000 were executed. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 18, 47, 49–50.

57 Ibid., 27.

58 Ibid., 38.

59 This is also the take of Boris Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Yumasheva, who perused the OGPU dossier in 1993. “He was not expressing insolent ideas,” she said of her grandfather. “He never spoke that way. He was simply trying to get them [his crewmen] to work, and they wanted to react for themselves.” Remarks by Yumasheva during second Yeltsin interview.

60 Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 45.

61 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 124.

62 Rimma Akhmirova, “Prezidenta nyanchil tovarishch Sukhov” (Comrade Sukhov took care of the president), Komsomol’skaya pravda, September 4, 1999; and, for Klavdiya’s literacy class, Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT,” 79.

63 The only public reference Yeltsin ever made to kindergarten in Kazan was on his last visit there, in 2006. Vera Postnova, “Yel’tsin nazval Shaimiyeva samymsamym” (Yeltsin called Shaimiyev the best of the best), Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 26, 2006. But family members say he spoke of the kindergarten with them as well.

64 Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 88.

65 Ibid., 55.

66 His autobiographical statement from the 1950s (in Neverov, “Otets prezidenta”) said that in 1936 or 1937 he was discharged from work “and left the third year of the tekhnikum by my own wish.” But the statement did not mention his arrest or time served in Gulag, so this information is of questionable value.

67 Akhmirova, “Prezidenta nyanchil tovarishch Sukhov”; and Yevgenii Ukhov, “Imennaya ‘dvushka’” (An inscribed “two-roomer”), Trud, April 25, 2007.

68 Historical sketch of the city at http://www.berezniki.ru/topic/gorod. The Gulag directorate allocated 4,000 convicts to the Berezniki camp in 1929. The writer Varlam Shalamov, one of the prisoners, said in his memoirs it had 10,000 workers in 1930. Vladimir Mikhailyuk, Ne odin pud soli: Berezniki v sud’be Rossii (Not one pood of salt: Berezniki in the fate of Russia) (Perm: Pushka, 1997), 238–40. The Vishera camp itself began as a branch of the detention camp at Solovki monastery, on an island in the White Sea, set up in 1921. It peaked at 37,800 inmates in 1931 and was closed in July 1934. A lumbering camp was opened at Nyrob, on a branch of the Kama north of Vishera, in 1945 and held 24,800 prisoners as of 1952.

69 The family details here come from Tatyana Yumasheva. On Nikolai Yeltsin’s rehabilitation (and Andrian’s, also posthumously), see Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 60.

70 Yeltsin’s handwritten self-description when he was admitted to the party, in 1961, said he moved with his parents to Kazan in 1935 and to Berezniki in 1937. It is reproduced in Grigorii Kaëta, Boris Yel’tsin: Ural’skii period zhizni (Boris Yeltsin: the Urals period of his life) (Yekaterinburg: TsDOOSO, 1996), 32. Later essays in the archive gave other dates but always referred to Kazan.

71 Valentin Yumashev, who as a journalist helped Yeltsin edit tape recordings into the first volume (and later volumes) of his memoirs, was not aware that the family had lived in Kazan, although he doubts Yeltsin (who became his father-in-law in 2001) made a conscious effort to suppress this fact. In Ispoved’, 19, Yeltsin said the family went straight from Butka to Berezniki when his father heard there was work at the potash combine, and that they took a horse and cart to the train station, disposing of surplus belongings as they went. Either he was being mendacious—and I cannot begin to think why he would—or his memory was playing tricks on him. The family moved to Berezniki from Kazan, not from Butka, and Kazan is a large city with its own station. It is highly unlikely Yeltsin was describing their departure from Butka to Kazan in 1932, when he was twenty-two months old.

72 Sixty years later, Yeltsin still wanted to prove (Zapiski, 123) that his father was not a bad hat in Kazan: “By the way, the [OGPU] file contains no especially pointed statements on my father’s part. His brother and the other ‘participants’ did most of the talking.” In his second interview with me, he stressed that Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin, before being expropriated in 1930, were in accordance with the law because they did not hire wage labor. “They were hard workers. They walked behind the wood plow and the metal plow, they did the work themselves, without hired laborers, they worked on their own in the village, as a family.”

73 Glebov interview.

74 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 124; second Yeltsin interview.

75 As already indicated, the statement (in Neverov, “Otets prezidenta”) had him spending 1930 to 1932 in Nadezhdinsk and 1932 to 1936 in Kazan, carpentering at Works No. 124 and studying in the tekhnikum. It then has him departing for Berezniki in 1937, leaving only one year unaccounted for.

76 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:5.

77 Second Yeltsin interview.

78 This sentence appears only in the English-language edition of the memoir (Yeltsin, Struggle for Russia, 98), not in the Russian original.

79 Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 354, where it is noted that, of the 8 million residents of the Urals, 900,000 were convicted of crimes in the 1930s, many of them of a political nature. Stalinist fears of sedition from without were not entirely based on fantasy. There were in fact attempts by émigrés and others to smuggle anti-Soviet materials into the country, the main effect of which was to intensify police attacks on real and imagined oppositionists.

80 Source: the Perm branch of the Memorial Society. See http://www.pmem.ru/index.php?mode=rpm&exmod=rpm/12, which has a list of the 6,553 known victims.

CHAPTER TWO

1 Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko, Kama i Ural (ocherki i vpechatleniya) (The Kama and the Urals [Essays and impressions]) (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya A. S. Suvorina, 1890), 170–71.

2 Figure on blood diseases from Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 101. Chemical-weapons making and pollution in Berezniki are documented at http://www.pollutedplaces.org/region/e_europe/russia/berez.shtml; http://www.ourplanet.com/imgversn/86/sakan.html; http://neespi.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/NEESPI_SP_chapters/SB_Appendix_Ch_3.pdf; and http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/kfile/russiaenviro.pdf.

3 M. M. Zagorul’ko, ed., Voyennoplennyye v SSSR, 1939–1956: dokumenty i materialy (Prisoners of war in the USSR, 1939–56: documents and materials) (Moscow: Logos, 2000), 104, 112; Obshchestvo “Memorial” and Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, 1923–1940: spravochnik (The USSR’s system of corrective-labor camps, 1923–40: a reference book) (Moscow: Zven’ya: 1998), 275–76, 291–92, 451–52, 456–57, 491–92, 493–94, 514. A detailed map of Gulag in the Perm area is available at http://pmem.ru/rpm/map/Rus06.htm. Gulag inmates in the Urals totaled 330,000 in 1938, excluding the 530,000 exiles in special settlements and not confined to camps. At war’s end, there were about 300,000 German POWs in camps in Sverdlovsk province alone.

4 In Molotov province as a whole in 1940–41, convict crews came to 30 percent of the total industrial labor force. Ol’ga Malova, “Gulag Permskoi oblasti” (The Gulag of Perm oblast), http://perm.psu.ru/school136/1945/antifashist/newspaper/malova.htm. But Gulag labor was concentrated in the Berezniki and Vishera areas, where its proportion was considerably higher.

5 This was so even in the largest Soviet cities. See David L. Hoffman, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

6 Larisa Korzhavkina, Berezniki (Berezniki) (Perm: Permskoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 2002), 76–77.

7 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 20. Yeltsin told an interviewer in the 1990s that a sixth person, a male Kazakh worker, shared the barracks room with them for some time during the war. Den’ v sem’e prezidenta (A day in the president’s family), interviews of the Yeltsin family by El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, April 20, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya). Polya’s name is not given in Yeltsin’s memoirs, but his mother mentioned it to acquaintances later.

8 Klavdiya Pashikhina, interview with the author (September 7, 2005). House, barracks, and fields were located just west and just east of where today’s Berezniki Street meets Five-Year-Plan Street.

9 Details on the house from author’s second interview with Naina Yeltsina (September 18, 2007). She says conversations in the 1950s suggested that the family had lived in a small rented house for a short time before moving into their private home.

10 Igor Neverov, “Otets prezidenta” (The president’s father), fragment of an unpublished manuscript by Neverov, “Nikomu ne otdam svoyu biografiyu” (We won’t give anyone our biography), 1998 (copy given to the author in September 2005 by the Museum of History and Art, Berezniki); and Naina Yeltsina, personal communication to the author, July 29, 2007. Mrs. Yeltsin checked the particulars with Boris Yeltsin’s brother and sister.

11 Igor Neverov, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 1.

12 Tatyana Yumasheva, personal communication to the author, March 4, 2005. In Butka Nikolai was to supplement his pension by working part-time for a Talitsabased building organization. One of his projects was to supervise construction of a new village school.

13 The quotation and the description of Klavdiya’s hidden icon are from Muzhskoi razgovor (Male conversation), interview of Yeltsin by El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, November 7, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya). Other details from the author’s interviews.

14 Yeltsin said shamefacedly in 1993 (Muzhskoi razgovor) that he chided his mother for praying in the 1960s, after he joined the Communist Party, but she ignored him.

15 Izabella Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov ot Belogo doma” (Thousands of kilometers from the White House), Vechernyaya Moskva, October 2, 1991.

16 Details from ibid., and my interviews with Sergei Molchanov (September 8, 2005) and Klavdiya Pashikhina.

17 Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2002).

18 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 20, 26.

19 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya khotel, chtoby lyudi byli svobodny” (Boris Yeltsin: I wanted people to be free), Izvestiya, February 1, 2006.

20 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 20. The drinking was a delicate subject in the family. One relative who knew Nikolai well in Butka in the 1960s said in an interview that he hid bottles of vodka from his wife in the cellar of their house.

21 “In a way they were a match: if the father was a sadist, then the son showed an early masochistic bent.” Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 120; also 128–29, where it is claimed he showed the same attitude at college in Sverdlovsk. Cf. Oleg Davydov, “Prezidentskii kolovorot” (Presidential brace), in A. N. Starkov, ed., Rossiiskaya elita: psikhologicheskiye portrety (The Russian elite: psychological portraits) (Moscow: Ladomir, 2000), 81–92, for an Oedipal interpretation.

22 Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov.”

23 Oksana Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody Borisa Yel’tsina” (The school years of Boris Yeltsin), http://www.aif.ru/online/sv/1181/11_01.

24 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 20. This picture is supported by workmates. See in particular Neverov, “Otets prezidenta,” which mentions Nikolai trying to invent a machine for unloading railroad freight cars.

25 Yeltsina communication.

26 Zhdanov does mention (Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody Borisa Yel’tsina”) a friendship at School No. 95 with one Svetlana Zhemchuzhnikova, an evacuee from Leningrad, “very pretty” and somewhat of a tomboy. When she broke her leg in an accident, Boris talked his pals into visiting her at home.

27 Stalin made most Soviet schools single-sex schools during and after the war; they reverted to coeducation in 1954.

28 See Michael Ellman and S. Maksudov, “Soviets Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note,” Europe-Asia Studies 46 (July 1994), 671–80; and more generally on gender roles Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

29 Quotation from Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 155.

30 I use scripts in the sense that some biographers use phrases such as inner myths and private self-concepts. See James E. Veninga, “Biography: Self and Sacred Canopy,” in Veninga, ed., The Biographer’s Gift: Life Histories and Humanism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983), 59–79; and Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographia (New York: Norton, 1984), 159–73.

31 Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.” Details about the schools come from my interviews with Sergei Molchanov and with Viktor Tsipushtanov (September 8, 2005).

32 Indicative are the food supplies allocated to the town of Solikamsk, just up the Kama, for the year 1938. For each resident, they provided 1.1 kilograms of meat (less than 2½ pounds), 2.4 kilos of sausage, 3.9 kilos of fish, one jar of preserves, 100 grams of cheese, and 2.6 kilos of macaroni. The worst years were 1932–33, when rationing was in effect and the Urals norms for urban laborers were a pound of bread or bread surrogate, a pound of potatoes, and a glass of milk per day. I. S. Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala s drevneishikh vremën do nashikh dnei (History of the Urals from ancient times to our day) (Yekaterinburg: Sokrat, 2003), 341.

33 Andrei Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin: svet i teni (Boris Yeltsin: light and shadows), 2 vols. (Sverdlovsk: Klip, 1991), 1:8. Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana does not find the story of the siblings being sent to the restaurant a credible one, and surmises that Goryun misunderstood Klavdiya Yeltsina in their interview. Tatyana heard many stories about hardship from her grandparents but never this one. Asking neighbors for help would have been much more acceptable conduct. Tatyana Yumasheva, second interview with the author (September 11, 2006). Since Valentina Yeltsina was born only in 1944, she could not have been active in the search for food during the war years.

34 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 21. The hay mowing was one of many behavioral ties to village life. Fifty years later, as president of Russia, Yeltsin still owned two scythes (Den’ v sem’e prezidenta).

35 Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov.”

36 See Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: Norton, 1969), 125. I learned about Nikolai’s mistreatment of his wife from a number of interviews. Tatyana Yumasheva, his granddaughter, confirmed it in my second interview with her.

37 Second Yeltsin interview.

38 Irina Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi, yemu vidnei” (Boris is a big shot, he knows better), Moskovskii komsomolets, January 31, 2007. Moskovskii komsomolets has over the years made it a specialty to present unflattering and often untrue information about Boris Yeltsin and his family. In this case, the sentiment expressed by Boris Andrianovich seems to have been accurately reported.

39 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:6.

40 Neverov, “Otets prezidenta,” says Nikolai’s personnel file contained references to twenty-eight official punishments he had meted out to workers under his supervision—for poor bricklaying, negligence, and falsifying records. But, “He was always orderly and smart in his appearance, and I cannot remember him ever raising his voice or losing his temper.” Neverov says, without providing details, that he and Nikolai were both disciplined in January 1961 for exceeding the wage fund.

41 Second Yeltsin interview.

42 Yeltsin’s participation in approved youth activities was strongly borne out in my interview with Sergei Molchanov: “Yeltsin was in the active group.” He took part in Komsomol meetings, asked questions, and made comments.

43 Quotation from Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 24. Materials in the museum of the Pushkin School, to which Yeltsin transferred in 1945, show that thirteen of twenty-three who finished the school in June 1941 (including two girls) went straight to the army from their graduation ball. Three teachers also shipped out.

44 Quotation from second Yeltsin interview. His interest and the notebooks are reported in Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:7, from a conversation with Mikhail Yeltsin. None of this ever made Boris Yeltsin a great expert on the history of the revolution. When an American journalist tried in the late 1980s to engage him in conversation about the Mensheviks and other non-Bolshevik factions, Yeltsin was not familiar with the groups and the names of their leaders. Jonathan Sanders, interview with the author (January 21, 2004).

45 Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 374 (italics added).

46 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002). Aleksei Tolstoy (1883–1945), a distant cousin of Leo Tolstoy, published his novel in three parts between 1929 and 1945. Yeltsin may also have been familiar with the 1910 silent-film classic Peter the Great, directed by Vasilii Goncharov, which was often shown in Soviet cinemas with the Petrov movie. His admiration for Peter put him at odds with the Old Believer tradition, in which Russia’s first emperor was seen as the Antichrist.

47 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 21.

48 Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.”

49 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:8.

50 Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov.”

51 In “Istoriya shkoly No. 1” (History of School No. 1), typescript, museum of Pushkin School, 9.

52 Unpublished bulletin for class reunion by Tatyana Babiyan, in the school museum.

53 Facts and figures from the school museum and the Berezniki Museum of the History of Education.

54 Quotation from Molchanov interview. Khonina is the only teacher Yeltsin gave by name in Ispoved’ (23), where he called her a “marvelous” mentor.

55 School records, including Yeltsin’s school-leaving certificate (attestat zrelosti). Soviet schools at the time assigned daily and weekly grades in each subject, which were then aggregated into quarterly and full-year grades. Khonina’s log for 1947–48, ninth grade for Yeltsin, contains a fair number of one-day and one-week 3s, but none lower than that. The log for 1948–49 was destroyed in a basement flood at the school. Yeltsin (Ispoved’, 25–26) misremembered his last year’s grades, saying he received only two 4s and got 5s in the rest.

56 Tsipushtanov interview.

57 Molchanov interview. The railway school, as was not uncommon in the Soviet provinces, had no athletics. “The teacher would lead out the class single file into the corridor for ‘free calisthenics.’ You would wave your hands, and that was the whole sports program.” Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.”

58 Ol’ga Yevtyukhova and Yelena Zaitseva, “Rovesniki moi” (They were the same age as me), 1999 essay in the Pushkin School museum.

59 “Istoriya shkoly No. 1,” 9.

60 Aleksandr Abramov, the current Pushkin headmaster, showed me the 1948 directive in my interview with him (September 8, 2005). The class photograph and notes about future occupations are in the archive of the Berezniki Museum of History and Art.

61 Second Yeltsin interview.

62 Marietta Chudakova, interview with the author (April 14, 2003).

63 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 21–26. His book dates most of these incidents, but not the one with the grenades, where the source is Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:8.

64 Second Yeltsin interview; Molchanov interview. The bath was of the “black” variety, in which smoke from the fire escapes the steam room through a hole in the ceiling. (In a Russian “white” steambath, such as Boris Yeltsin built in his family’s yard, smoke exits through a stovepipe.) In Ispoved’, 24, Yeltsin mentions long rural hikes and a climb up the Denezhkin Stone, a scenic Urals massif north of Berezniki.

65 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 22.

66 Alya Tanachëva, interview with the author (June 22, 2004).

67 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 22–23.

68 Ibid., 25. When he fought the school’s decision on tenth-grade registration, he repeated the cycle: “The path was already familiar.” He was by then known to some city officials because of his success as an athlete.

69 Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.”

70 Interviews with Abramov (jump out of the window) and Pashikhina (needles on the teacher’s chair).

71 Molchanov interview. Molchanov was an unusually reliable source, since, he said, he never read Yeltsin’s published account. In his memoirs, Yeltsin’s memories of his years at the Pushkin School are generally clearer than those of School No. 95. His studies at Pushkin were less remote in time and the school is still a going concern, whereas School No. 95 was converted into a trade school in 1964 and shut down in 1971 (a fragment of the building remains). Yeltsin, by this time Communist Party boss of Sverdlovsk province, sent a sculpture of semiprecious Urals stone for the fiftieth anniversary of the Pushkin School in 1982. He had planned to attend the celebration but could not because his opposite number in Perm, Boris Konoplëv, would not make the time to accompany him, as protocol required. His gift for the sixtieth anniversary in 1992, on display in the school museum in 2005, was a book inscribed “With thanks for the foundation.” In the 1990s Yeltsin had discretionary funds from the president’s office donated to the schools for repairs and renovations. His foundation also provided assistance to the school after his retirement.

72 His school-leaving certificate dates his entry to the school in 1945, without giving the month.

73 Zhdanov remembers nothing about pupils being required to collect scraps for the teacher’s pig or about Yeltsin attacking her at a public ceremony. When he read these things in Yeltsin’s memoirs, “I even wanted to phone him up and ask, ‘Where did you come up with that?’” Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.” Conversion of the three secondary schools in town into single-sex schools was completed only in 1946, but in 1945, when Yeltsin transferred, the Pushkin School was already the only one to admit boys.

74 Interviews with Stanislav Glebov (September 11, 2005) and Abramov. Yarns pop up every now and then about Yeltsin doing some dastardly deed around this time. One of the silliest is to the effect that in the hand-grenade incident he threw the weapon at a group of his friends and killed two of them. It can be found in Yurii Mukhin’s screed Kod Yel’tsina (The Yeltsin code) (Moscow: Yauza, 2005), 51.

75 The family’s pain is undeniable. Gorbachev did not speak about it publicly until 1990. Both of his grandfathers were arrested in the 1930s, his paternal grandfather (who joined the kolkhoz only in 1935) spent a year in Siberia, and several relatives died in the collectivization-induced famine. Grandfather Gopkalo, arrested in 1937, was released in 1938 and restored as a party member and as head of the kolkhoz. Raisa Gorbacheva’s maternal grandfather was shot in 1937. See Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:31–58.

76 The essay is not mentioned in Gorbachev’s memoirs but came out in a discussion in the Politburo in 1986. Gorbachev told his colleagues (including Yeltsin) that he preferred to have someone else meet with Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who had defected to the West in 1967, returned to the USSR in 1984, and now sought permission to leave again (which she eventually received). Offended by letters in which she criticized her father, Gorbachev said, “If you ask me, it is necessary to place a high value on Stalin, Stalingrad, et cetera. I myself am from such a family. My uncle wrecked his health [building the kolkhoz]. My mother and her four sisters were from an impoverished family. I received a medal for a composition on the theme, ‘Stalin Is Our Glory, Stalin Is the Delight of Our Youth.’” Politburo transcript for March 20, 1986, in Volkogonov Archive (Project on Cold War Studies, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University), 41. “Stalin Is Our Glory, Stalin Is the Delight of Our Youth” was the title of a prewar song by Matvei Blanter and Aleksei Surkov.

77 Interviewed by a journalist in 2000 (see http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/gor0int-1), Gorbachev recalled that “the party’s slogans appealed to me, they made quite an impression on me. It was very seductive, very attractive, and I took it all on faith.”

78 Molchanov interview.

79 Arnold M. Ludwig, King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 448. Thirty-two percent of the leaders in Ludwig’s sample were outgoing in the group and 29 percent were solitary. Again, Yeltsin manifested both of these traits at different times. Yeltsin’s avid readership of books was shared by 39 percent of Ludwig’s subjects, but his athletic skills by only 15 percent, his very close relationship with his mother by 11 percent, and his at times hostile relationship with his father by 21 percent.

80 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 155.

81 Quotations from Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 26; and Tanachëva interview.

CHAPTER THREE

1 A mining institute opened in Molotov (Perm) in 1953 and was upgraded to a polytechnic in 1960. According to a passage in Yeltsin’s first memoir book not printed in the Russian edition, he saw the new campus of Moscow State University on the Lenin Hills while on his first visit to Moscow in the summer of 1953, shortly after Gulag laborers completed it. He was taken by the magnificence of the buildings and regretted that he had not applied for admission in 1949. But then he thought to himself he probably would have failed the entrance test and, as the Russian proverb goes, “Better a sparrow in the hand than a blue titmouse in the sky.” Nikolai Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin: raznyye zhizni (Boris Yeltsin: various lives), 2 vols. (Moscow: OLMA, 2001), 1:27–28 (quoting from the Norwegian-language edition of Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu).

2 Perm was founded in the same year as Yekaterinburg, 1723, but was the only large Russian city other than St. Petersburg to be laid out rectilinearly. It had more cultural and educational institutions than Yekaterinburg and was made capital of the Urals region in 1781. During the revolution and civil war, Perm was more supportive of the White forces.

3 James R. Harris, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

4 Leonid Brezhnev, Vospominaniya (Memoirs) (Moscow: Politizdat, 1983), 29.

5 A partial list of evacuated plants may be found at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/harrison/vpk/history/part1/list.txt.

6 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “A Closed City and Its Secret Archives: Notes on a Journey to the Urals,” Journal of Modern History 62 (December 1990), 776.

7 The American Jewish Handbook for 1980 was to estimate the Jewish population of Sverdlovsk that year to be 40,000. The 1989 census officially recorded 14,300 persons of Jewish nationality in Sverdlovsk oblast, fifth place in the Russian republic of the USSR. (Jewish was listed as nationality—that is, ethnicity—on Soviet passports.) Due mostly to emigration, the number declined to 6,900 in 2002, when it was fourth in the country.

8 The institute began as part of the new Urals State University in 1920 and for most of the time from 1925 to 1948 was called the Urals Industrial Institute. Its construction division, formed in 1929, functioned as a separate institute from 1934 to 1948. UPI was to be renamed Urals State Technical University (UGTU) in 1992 and now has 23,000 students.

9 Stroitel’nyi fakul’tet UGTU–UPI: istoriya, sovremennost’ (The construction division of UGTU–UPI: history and current situation) (Yekaterinburg: Real-Media, 2004), 12–20.

10 Yakov Ol’kov, interview with the author (September 12, 2004). In Sverdlovsk Germans built a firemen’s school, the central stadium, and housing, paved roads, and refaced city hall. The last prisoners were returned in 1955.

11 The claim about reading German with a dictionary is in “Lichnyi listok po uchëtu kadrov” (Personal certificate for the register of cadres) for Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, dated June 16, 1975; in TsDOOSO (Documentation Center for the Public Organizations of Sverdlovsk Oblast, Yekaterinburg), fund (fond) 4, register (opis’) 116, file (delo) 283, 4. The Documentation Center is the official title of the Sverdlovsk archive of the CPSU. According to a usually reliable source, a Russian journalist who covered him as president in the 1990s, Yeltsin was unable to distinguish the languages at that time. See Boris Grishchenko, Postoronnyi v Kremle: reportazhi iz “osoboi zony” (A stranger in the Kremlin: reportage from “the special zone”) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2004), 159–60.

12 Lidiya Solomoniya, interview with the author (September 11, 2004); Aleksandr Yuzefovich, Komanda molodosti nashei: zapiski stroitelya (Team of our youth: notes of a builder) (Perm: Fond podderzhki pervogo Prezidenta Rossii, 1997), 35, 49. Yakov Sverdlov, who died in 1919, was Jewish, but officials never got around to changing the name of the city in the late Stalin period. It persisted until September 1991, when Sverdlovsk reverted to the original Yekaterinburg; the province is still called Sverdlovsk oblast. In July 1957 three Sverdlovskers, already expelled from the party, were arrested for distributing anti-Semitic letters; they were released in 1964. One of their proposals was that the city be renamed. See V. A. Kozlov and S. V. Mironenko, eds., 58-10: nadzornyye proizvodstva Prokuratury SSSR po delam ob antisovetskoi agitatsii i propagande (Mart 1953–1991), annotirovannyi katalog (Article 58, section 10: the supervisory files of the USSR Procuracy about cases of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda [March 1953–1991], an annotated catalogue) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiya,” 1999), 345.

13 Kozlov and Mironenko, 58-10, 41. Okulov was arrested on March 5, 1953, as Stalin lay dying in Moscow.

14 A. Ye. Pavlova, a Yeltsin classmate, is quoted in a recent book of reminiscences: “We were inculcated with faith in Stalin. We deified him from afar. When he spoke on the radio, we would run to listen—on our own, no one had to force us to do it. And, when he died, we cried out loud. It seemed to us that all was lost and nothing good would happen in future.” Vladimir Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii” (Boris Yeltsin and UPI), http://www.ural-yeltsin.ru/knigi/knigi_elcina/document427.

15 Details from Andrei Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin: svet i teni (Boris Yeltsin: light and shadows), 2 vols. (Sverdlovsk: Klip, 1991), 1:8–10; Irina Bobrova, “Yel’tsiny tozhe plachut” (The Yeltsins also cry), Moskovskii komsomolets, February 18, 2000; and Ol’kov and Solomoniya interviews.

16 Anatolii Yuzhaninov, quoted in Anna Veligzhanina, “Pervaya lyubov’ Borisa Yel’tsina” (Boris Yeltsin’s first love), Komsomol’skaya pravda, April 26, 2007. Yerina and Ustinov moved back to Berezniki and soon divorced.

17 Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.”

18 Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007); Bobrova, “Yel’tsiny tozhe plachut.” Naina was born in the village of Titovka, outside Orenburg, but grew up in the city. She also spent some of her childhood in Kazakhstan, the nearest republic in Central Asia.

19 Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.”

20 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 252. The dance lessons are described in Natal’ya Konstantinova, Zhenskii vzglyad na kremlëvskuyu zhizn’ (A woman’s view of Kremlin life) (Moscow: Geleos, 1999), 105.

21 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:9.

22 Interview with Ol’kov, who also described Yeltsin participating in polite petitions to the rectorate about students’ workload. On the petitions, see also Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 127–28.

23 “Otduvalsya v dekanate za Borisa tozhe” (I answered at the dean’s office for Boris, too), http://gazeta.ru/politics/yeltsin/1621092.shtml.

24 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 29; Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.” Rogitskii headed the department until 1965. The official history of the construction division (Stroitel’nyi fakul’tet UGTU–UPI, 21) describes him as a gifted engineer and a humane teacher, but also absent-minded.

25 On the UPI Komsomol committee, Galina Stepanova of the Sverdlovsk/ Yekaterinburg Communist Party archive, interview with the author (September 7, 2004). In his second interview with me (February 9, 2002), Yeltsin volunteered that he avoided participation: “In general I was a leader, a guide. But not in the Pioneers and Komsomol. I was little concerned with that.”

26 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 23.

27 Ol’kov interview. Even in Berezniki, Yeltsin had the best spike on his school team.

28 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 29–30; Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.”

29 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 29.

30 The principal’s order discharging Yeltsin is dated March 27, 1952; he applied for re-admission on August 30; the request was granted in mid-September. See Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 17.

31 Ol’kov interview.

32 Ibid.; Stroitel’nyi fakul’tet UGTU–UPI, 21.

33 Ol’kov interview.

34 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 27. In 2006, while on a visit to Kazan, Yeltsin referred to one such incident. He said it happened in Kazan and he told the police he was going to see his aunt; he spent some time in the brig. Anna Akhmadeyeva, “Boris Yel’tsin priznalsya v lyubvi k Kazani” (Boris Yeltsin professed his love for Kazan), http://www.viperson.ru/wind.php?ID=276299&soch=1.

35 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 29. The Norwegian version of the memoir recounts further risky ventures in Moscow, including a party with female students and a brawl with criminals. See Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:27–30.

36 Aleksandr Kil’chevskii, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 1. Yeltsin in retirement referred to a similar-sounding incident with the team in Kazan. He said he “fell in love with some paintings” at an exhibition, missed the train, and then got to Tbilisi in a freight train. Akhmadeyeva, “Boris Yel’tsin.”

37 Quotation from Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 29 (italics added). Coach Kil’chevskii, though, interviewed by Kiselëv almost forty years later, still remembered Yeltsin’s summer outing with deep disapproval.

38 N. A. Vilesova, quoted in Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.”

39 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 30. The certificate for the diploma project, dating his defense on June 20, 1955, was on exhibit in the school’s museum when I was there in 2005, and the description shows it was a design for a bucket line. Next to the document in the display case was a wood abacus of the kind a UPI student in the 1950s would have used to do the math.

40 Three schemes that Yeltsin drew for the bucket line towers are stored in the institute’s archive (copy shared with the author by Sergei Skrobov of Yekaterinburg). One of them is an ink sketch of a lattice steel pylon, 325 feet high, that bears some likeness to a tower for a television transmitter. It is possible that while dictating his memoirs Yeltsin was forgetful of the original project, saw a copy of the sketch, and mistook it for a television tower.

41 Local mountaineers began to scale the tower’s exterior wall with their climbing gear, which could take hours or even days. Several people staged parachute jumps from the platform. After two accidental deaths and one suicide, city workers in 1998 cut off the outside ladder and welded the entrance door shut. See http://tau.ur.ru/tower/etower.asp.

42 See, for example, Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:36; and Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka” (Sverdlovsk upstart), part 2, Politicheskii klass, March 2006, 85.

43 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 35.

44 Blair A. Ruble, “From Khrushchëby to Korobki,” in William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble, eds., Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 232–70.

45 Second Yeltsina interview. Yeltsin’s career moves are conveniently summarized in handwriting in his “Lichnyi listok,” 4.

46 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 269.

47 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 74. Yeltsin was so sure their second child would be a boy that he had already purchased a blue blanket and a toy truck. “Yelena Yel’tsina chut’ ne zadushila sestru v koryte” (Yelena Yeltsina almost smothered her sister in the trough), http://www.allrus.info/obj/main.php?ID=217454&arc_new=1.

48 Second Yeltsina interview and author’s third interview with Tatyana Yumasheva (January 25, 2007).

49 Most details about housing are taken from ibid. The point about the shared washing machine is from an interview with Lyudmila Chinyakova in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 2.

50 Interview on Ekho Moskvy radio, March 1, 1997, http://echo.msk.ru/guests/1775. In several other interviews, Naina said she always knotted Boris’s necktie and that he never learned how to do it himself. This was an overstatement. Boris may have preferred to let his wife knot his tie at breakfast, but he knew how to do so himself.

51 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 74. The story of the school diaries, attributed to Naina Yeltsina, is in Vladimir Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy” (Entourage), part 3, Rabochaya tribuna, March 28, 1995.

52 “Naina Yel’tsina: Boris Nikolayevich na menya vorchit, a mne nravitsya…” (Naina Yeltsina: Boris Nikolayevich grumbles, but that is fine with me), Komsomol’skaya pravda, February 2, 2006; and “Naina Yel’tsina: ya nikogda ne vmeshivalas’ v dela svoyego muzha” (Naina Yeltsina: I never interfered in my husband’s business), Izvestiya, June 28, 1996.

53 Third Yumasheva interview.

54 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 251.

55 Al’bert Tsioma, a Butka neighbor of the neighbors, interview with the author (September 11, 2005). Butka’s population got to about 3,500 in the 1970s and about 4,000 today. Basmanovo leveled out at less than 2,000.

56 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 40–41.

57 Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2002).

58 A good control group would be the 115 regional CPSU leaders selected full or candidate members of the party Central Committee with Yeltsin in 1981. Their average age of admission to the CPSU was 24.5. Specialists in ideological and control functions had joined earlier (at an average age of 22.5), but even among those whose careers were mostly in the economic realm, like Yeltsin, the average was 25.6. Only four of the 115 were admitted at an older age than he—two who were thirty-one and two who were thirty-two. Calculated from biographies in the 1981 yearbook of the Bol’shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya (Great Soviet encyclopedia).

59 “In 1956 the party authorities were shaken by the bold statements by students in a number of Sverdlovsk institutions, demanding ‘freedom to criticize,’ ‘free speech,’ and democracy. Harsh measures were taken against them.” Several were put on trial and sent off to labor camps or psychiatric prisons. A Sverdlovsk group favoring an anti-communist revolution, headed by factory technician L. G. Shefer, was broken up in April 1963. A. D. Kirillov and N. N. Popov, Ural: vek dvadtsatyi (The Urals: the twentieth century) (Yekaterinburg: Ural’skii rabochii, 2000), 175–76; Kozlov and Mironenko, 58-10, 631.

60 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:6.

61 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 43.

62 Leon Aron, who interviewed some coworkers, goes into informative detail on such practices (Yeltsin, chap. 2). See also Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT,” 87–95.

63 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:11.

64 Svetlana Zinov’eva, quoted in Vadim Lipatnikov, “Boris Yel’tsin i DSK” (Boris Yeltsin and the DSK), http://www.ural-yeltsin.ru/knigi/knigi_elcina/document639.

65 On the model brigade, see Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:11; Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 42–43; and Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:40. Aron (Yeltsin, 36–37) views the incident in a more favorable light.

66 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 43.

67 Aron, Yeltsin, 40.

68 The fullest account is in Yakov Ryabov, Moi XX vek: zapiski byvshego sekretarya TsK KPSS (My 20th century: notes of a former secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU) (Moscow: Russkii biograficheskii institut, 2000), 33. The reprimand is at TsDOOSO, fund 161, register 39, file 9, 22–24.

69 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 32.

70 See Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:11.

71 Third Yumasheva interview. It must be said that for all of Yeltsin’s life some people saw him in such terms as well.

72 Andrei Karaulov, Vokrug Kremlya: kniga politicheskikh dialogov (Around the Kremlin: a book of political dialogues) (Moscow: Novosti, 1990), 98.

73 Yakov Ryabov, interview in files of Central Committee Interview Project, University of Glasgow (transcript supplied by Stephen White). He recalled discussing the need to replace Nikolayev with Brezhnev and Ivan Kapitonov of the Secretariat, but did not mention Kirilenko.

74 Oleg Podberëzin, formerly a Sverdlovsk party worker, interview with the author (September 9, 2004). Ryabov had been appointed party secretary of the turbine works in 1958 and of a district of Sverdlovsk city in 1960. He was active in Komsomol affairs from 1946 to the mid-1950s.

75 TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 116, file 283, 14.

76 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 44. As documented in the archive, he was “elected” to the Chkalov district soviet in 1963, the Sverdlovsk city soviet in 1965, and the city committee of the party in 1966. Once on the obkom staff, he joined the soviet and party committee of the oblast.

77 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 34–35.

78 Ibid., 35.

79 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 44.

80 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 253.

81 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 41.

82 Oleg Lobov, interview with the author (May 29, 2002).

83 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 35.

84 Aron, Yeltsin, 43–44.

85 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 38.

86 Details on motivations here from Ryabov interview (University of Glasgow).

87 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 40.

88 In ibid., 40–41, Ryabov reprints a five-point summary from his diary of a conversation in June 1976 in which he let into Yeltsin for sharply worded instructions, superciliousness, disrespect for fellow communists (“including members of the bureau of the obkom”), and taking criticism as an insult. Every time they had such a conversation, Ryabov says, Yeltsin protested that his rudeness was only out of zeal to get the job done and promised to be more correct in future. “This way Boris won me over and calmed me.”

89 Ryabov interview (University of Glasgow).

90 I heard about Ponomarëv’s attempt from a then member of the bureau who wishes to go unnamed. Confirmation of the Bobykin-Yeltsin rivalry may be found in the memoir by Viktor Manyukhin, a contemporary of Yeltsin’s in the Sverdlovsk party apparatus: Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 34–35. Some bureau members certainly preferred Yeltsin. Ryabov (interview, University of Glasgow) identifies Korovin, secretary N. M. Dudkin, the commander of the local military district, and the tradeunion chief as in favor and says that even in 1975 “several secretaries” preferred that Yeltsin be made second secretary, over Korovin’s head.

91 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 54–55; Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 48–49. Yeltsin mentions Ryabov attending some of the meetings, but breathes not a word of his sponsorship.

92 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 49–50.

CHAPTER FOUR

1 “Law-and-order prefects” and “developmental prefects” (below) are taken from Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party Organs in Industrial Decision-Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 5.

2 The instructions, signed by Yeltsin in November 1981 and stamped “Top Secret,” are in TsDOOSO (Documentation Center for the Public Organizations of Sverdlovsk Oblast, Yekaterinburg), fund 4, register 100, file 119, 135–36. On Yeltsin and Kornilov, see Viktor Manyukhin, Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 71–73.

3 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 60.

4 That figure, coming to 32.5 percent of industrial employment in the oblast, was inferred from classified data for 1985. It does not include personnel in R&D or defense-related tasks done in plants subordinated to civilian ministries (Uralmash, for example). Brenda Horrigan, “How Many People Worked in the Soviet Defense Industry?” RFE/RL Research Report 1 (August 21, 1992), 33–39.

5 On Compound No. 19, see Anthony Rimmington, “From Military to Industrial Complex? The Conversion of Biological Weapons Facilities in the Russian Federation,” Contemporary Security Policy 17 (April 1996), 81–112; Jeanne Guillemin, Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Ken Alibek, with Stephen Handelman, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World (New York: Random House, 1999), chap. 7. Some analysts have charged the United States with making as much use of Japanese technology as the Soviets did. See Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover-Up, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2002).

6 A. D. Kirillov and N. N. Popov, Ural: vek dvadtsatyi (The Urals: the twentieth century) (Yekaterinburg: Ural’skii rabochii, 2000), 180.

7 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 55.

8 Bobykin was transferred to a Central Committee department in 1978. He returned to Sverdlovsk as obkom first secretary in June 1988, when Yeltsin was in political disfavor, and was removed in February 1990.

9 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 32.

10 Grigorii Kaëta, who at this point was an official in the obkom’s propaganda department, interview with the author (September 9, 2004). Mekhrentsev, a war veteran, had been a party member since 1946. He was a deputy in the Supreme Soviet and had been awarded two Orders of Lenin and a USSR State Prize. He died in January 1985 at the age of sixty and rated an obituary in Pravda. Yeltsin was one of the officials who signed it, as a mark of respect. Mekhrentsev’s replacement as chairman of the province’s government was Oleg Lobov.

11 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 37–39.

12 This last phenomenon is reported in Kaleriya Shadrina, “Yel’tsin byl krut: soratniki perezhidali yego gnev v spetsbol’nitse” (Yeltsin was gruff: his brothers-in-arms thought about his anger in the special hospital), Komsomol’skaya pravda, November 25, 1997.

13 Pilar Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya: Boris Yel’tsin, provintsial v Kremle” (The impossible Russia: Boris Yeltsin, a provincial in the Kremlin), Ural, April 1994, 100. This incident seems to have happened in 1984.

14 Rossel, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 1. Rossel was appointed head of a more important building organization in 1981 and deputy head of the construction directorate for the oblast in 1983.

15 The case was initially a disappearance, with no one knowing what had become of Titov. His body was found outside of town several months later, with the pistol next to it. The KGB eventually ruled the death a suicide and a personal affair with no political aspect. Source: interviews with former obkom officials.

16 Viktor Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000).

17 Interview with Ryabov, Central Committee Interview Project, University of Glasgow (transcript supplied by Stephen White). Ryabov went so far as to say in this interview that Yeltsin “was fully under my influence” in the late 1970s.

18 What Ryabov said in Nizhnii Tagil, after being asked about Brezhnev, was that the Politburo and Secretariat were quite capable of “covering for an ailing leader.” The incident is described in Yakov Ryabov, Moi XX vek: zapiski byvshego sekretarya TsK KPSS (My 20th century: notes of a former secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU) (Moscow: Russkii biograficheskii institut, 2000), 129–30. He mentioned Kornilov’s likely role only in the University of Glasgow interview. In 1971 Ryabov had pushed for serial production of the T-72 main battle tank in Nizhnii Tagil; Ustinov preferred a model made in Kharkov, Ukraine. Brezhnev eventually settled the matter in Ryabov’s and Sverdlovsk’s favor.

19 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 175.

20 Alibek, Biohazard, 79. Stalin appointed Ustinov, born in 1908, as minister (people’s commissar) of the armaments industry in 1941, and he had been in high positions ever since.

21 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ne skryvayu trudnostei i khochu, chtoby narod eto ponimal” (Boris Yeltsin: I do not conceal the difficulties and want the people to understand that), Komsomol’skaya pravda, May 27, 1992.

22 Some Western Kremlinologists interpreted Ryabov’s demotion as a reflection of a decrease in the Moscow standing of Kirilenko. I see no direct connection, but Ryabov’s account makes it clear that the incident made Kirilenko nervous. “I sat there with Kirilenko and could feel his perplexity and feeling of helplessness. I quietened him down and stated that I would not stir up a scandal in the Politburo and would make a worthy statement. He thanked me and we said good-bye until the session of the Politburo.” Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 130.

23 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 51–52.

24 Andrei Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin: svet i teni (Boris Yeltsin: light and shadows), 2 vols. (Sverdlovsk: Klip, 1991), 1:14. There is no independent confirmation of Yeltsin’s opposition to the Brezhnev museum. Brezhnev’s daughter, Galina, was born in Sverdlovsk, and in 1999 his grandson Andrei ran unsuccessfully for governor of the province.

25 There is careful analysis in Aron, Yeltsin, 58, 73–75.

26 Nikolai Tselishchev, a Sverdlovsk propaganda official at the time, interview with the author (June 23, 2004); Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 133–34.

27 Aron, Yeltsin, 45–46.

28 Press reports say the apartment sold for $200,000 in 2003 and has a net living area (not counting halls, kitchen, and bathroom) of about 1,800 square feet. I visited a unit of identical layout in the building in June 2004. By way of comparison, the median size of a single-family, detached house in the United States was 1,858 square feet in 2005, and of a house built between 2000 and 2005 it was 2,258 square feet.

29 The tower, promoted by Ryabov and sanctioned by Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin, was completed in 1980, but construction defects kept it from opening for two years. Yeltsin had supervised the first stages of the project. As first secretary, he was able to blame others for its problems.

30 Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 45–47, profiles Hospital No. 2, which went from 100 staff members in 1970 to 750 in 1979. The listening devices are described in Irina Bobrova, “Yel’tsiny tozhe plachut” (The Yeltsins also cry), Moskovskii komsomolets, February 18, 2000.

31 On obkom promotion of volleyball courts, see Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 82. Of the four former participants in the officials’ volleyball games with whom I spoke, none was critical. I was shown around the area and the now moldering Dacha No. 1 in September 2004.

32 Oleg Lobov, interview with the author (May 29, 2002).

33 Yeltsin later told associates he had seen the gun in a shop while heading an official delegation to Prague, but did not have the money to pay for it. Morshchakov took up a collection from the delegates, bought the weapon, and presented it to him as they boarded the return flight to the USSR. See the account by Aleksandr Korzhakov in Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), 65.

34 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 177. Manyukhin claims Yeltsin demanded the right of first shot at the elk, but Yeltsin writes of the hunters waiting in a row for the quarry to spring, at spots paced off from the nearest hunter, with the man closest to the animal getting the shot. Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 347.

35 Vladimir Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy” (Entourage), part 8, Rabochaya tribuna, April 5, 1995.

36 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 66–67.

37 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 45.

38 Source: a witness to the episode who prefers to remain anonymous. Yeltsin refers in his memoirs to a visit by another KGB deputy chairman, Vladimir Pirozhkov.

39 Summaries of these cases are in V. A. Kozlov and S. V. Mironenko, eds., 58-10: nadzornyye proizvodstva Prokuratury SSSR po delam ob antisovetskoi agitatsii i propagande (Mart 1953–1991), annotirovannyi katalog (Article 58, section 10: the supervisory files of the USSR Procuracy about cases of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda [March 1953–1991], an annotated catalogue) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiya,” 1999), 720–21, 769–70, 792, 782. The Andropov memorandum may be found at http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/pdfs/sovter74/kgb70-10.pdf.

40 The victims were sprayed with gunfire and bayoneted. Some had to be finished off with a shot to the head because precious stones sewn into their clothing deflected the blows. Yakov Yurovskii, the chief executioner and a party member since 1905, was guilt-stricken after the killings. The story is told in Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv, The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

41 The Andropov memo and Politburo resolution, as well as Yeltsin’s speculation that the timing was connected with the anniversary of the coronation, are in Yel’tsin, Marafon, 330–31. Yeltsin does not explain why the demolition did not occur in 1975, and Ryabov makes no mention of any aspect of it in his memoirs.

42 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 124–25.

43 The restrictions on plays and films are found at TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 107, file 118, 96. This was in addition to the filtering done by the Moscow authorities. The play, Dear Yelena Sergeyevna, by Lyudmila Razumovskaya, is about secondary-school graduates who, at their mathematics teacher’s birthday party, beseech her to change their grades and threaten to rape one of their number in the process. The play was censured by the Central Committee Secretariat in April 1983. It was made into a successful Soviet film by director El’dar Ryazanov in 1988. Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 103, describes the measures on photocopiers.

44 Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 84.

45 Valentin Luk’yanin, interview with the author (September 9, 2004). The Nikonov text had been cleared by the local censor assigned to the magazine. This scandal, together with an earlier case where the errant writer was Konstantin Lagunov, is thoroughly discussed in Aron, Yeltsin, 118–25.

46 Matt Taibbi, “Butka: Boris Yeltsin, Revisited,” http://exile.ru/105/yeltsin.

47 Quotation from Bobrova, “Yel’tsiny tozhe plachut.” Boris Yeltsin is said to have ordered Mikhail to tear down a toolshed on his out-of-town garden plot because it exceeded the state norm by a tiny amount. But after their mother’s death he did set Mikhail up in a studio apartment in the VIP complex by the Town Pond.

48 Irina Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi, yemu vidnei” (Boris is a big shot, he knows better), Moskovskii komsomolets, January 31, 2007, says on the basis of inquiries in Berezniki that one of the sources of tension between Valentina and her husband, Oleg, was his belief that her brother could help them out in life. “Oleg Yakovlevich constantly reproached his wife for the fact that she felt shy about asking [Boris] for material assistance.”

49 Details from Bobrova, “Yel’tsiny tozhe plachut”; Natal’ya Konstantinova, Zhenskii vzglyad na kremlëvskuyu zhizn’ (A woman’s view of Kremlin life) (Moscow: Geleos, 1999), 171–83; and various interviews.

50 Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 84–85; Gwendolyn Elizabeth Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT: Democratization, Suverenizatsiia, and Boris Yeltsin in the Breakup of the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995), 95.

51 Shadrina, “Yel’tsin byl krut.”

52 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 220. In a 1996 campaign document, Yeltsin is quoted as saying the prediction was made by an astrologer and for the year 1983. Prezident Yel’tsin: 100 voprosov i otvetov (President Yeltsin: 100 questions and answers) (Moscow: Obshcherossiiskoye dvizheniye obshchestvennoi podderzhki B. N. Yel’tsina, 1996), 78.

53 Galina Stepanova, party archivist, interview with the author (September 7, 2004).

54 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 207.

55 Quotation from Tat’yana D’yachenko, “Yesli by papa ne stal prezidentom…” (If papa had not become president), Ogonëk, October 23, 2000. Other details from Yel’tsin, Marafon, 337; Bobrova, “Yel’tsiny tozhe plachut”; and interviews. For background on blat, see Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchanges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). There is nothing about his daughters’ failed first marriages in Yeltsin’s memoirs. It was a painful subject, although Yeltsin welcomed his new sons-in-law and embraced the children from the second marriages. Tatyana married for a third time in 2001.

56 When the boy was born, Boris Nikolayevich pressed Khairullin to have him bear the Yeltsin surname. Khairullin has said in press interviews that he agreed with reluctance but on the understanding that a second child would have his family name.

57 Andrei Karaulov, Vokrug Kremlya: kniga politicheskikh dialogov (Around the Kremlin: a book of political dialogues) (Moscow: Novosti, 1990), 103.

58 Naina Yeltsina, personal communication to the author (July 29, 2007).

59 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 331.

60 The idiom “compliant activism” was struck to describe aspects of grassroots politics in the Brezhnev era. See Donna Bahry, “Politics, Generations, and Change in the USSR,” in James R. Millar, ed., Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 76–84.

61 TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 101, file 105, 73. At the same time, Yeltsin took a firm line against forms of private enterprise that contravened Soviet laws and mores. For example, he condemned the informal sale of radio receivers and spare parts, which might allow citizens to listen to foreign broadcasters like the BBC or Voice of America (with the local favorite, Willis Conover’s jazz hour).

62 Aron, Yeltsin, 66.

63 B. N. Yel’tsin, Srednii Ural: rubezhi sozidaniya (The middle Urals: milestones of creation) (Sverdlovsk: Sredne-Ural’skoye knizhnoye izdatel’stsvo, 1981), 83, mentions Uralmash, the Kalinin Works, and others making washing machines, kitchen dishware, lightbulbs, vacuum cleaners, and baby carriages. The obkom drew 600 factories into a plan to increase output of consumer goods in the province by 50 percent in the 1981–85 five-year plan.

64 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 251.

65 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 30, 85.

66 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002); and Yurii Petrov, second interview (February 1, 2002). According to Naina Yeltsina (second interview with the author, September 18, 2007), Boris already owned a considerable number of books when they married in 1955, and they installed a bookshelf before having the chance to acquire any furniture. He did more reading when in construction than when in the party apparatus, but the reading never stopped. Visitors to the Yeltsins in Moscow in the late 1980s were taken with his collection, which sat in the entrance hall to their apartment on the same unpainted plank shelves as in Sverdlovsk.

67 Third Yeltsin interview and comments by Naina Yeltsina during the interview.

68 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 2:20–21. Goryun dates the trip in 1968, after Yeltsin transferred to party work. Yeltsin, in his CPSU membership file (TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 116, file 283, 5, 300), says it was in May 1966, when he was still director of the housing combine. The file shows him taking ten foreign trips before his transfer to Moscow in 1985. Four of these were vacations and six were on business. Six of the ten trips were to Soviet-bloc countries (Bulgaria twice, Czechoslovakia twice, Rumania, and Cuba) and four were to Western countries (France in 1966 and 1974, Sweden and Finland in 1971, and West Germany in 1984). Altogether he had spent three to four weeks in the West.

69 Transcript of interview with Mike Wallace for CBS News’s 60 Minutes show of October 6, 2000 (made available by Jonathan Sanders); this piece was not broadcast. In Zapiski, 250–51, Yeltsin mentions Naina bringing him news about shortages from conversations at the office and visits to the food market.

70 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 64.

71 Lidiya Solomoniya, interview with the author (September 11, 2004).

72 Lobov interview.

73 Vladimir Polozhentsev, “Privet, pribaltiitsy!” (Greetings, people from the Baltic), http://podolsk-news.ru/stat/elcin.php. This interview was given in July 1988 but never published. The Russian is idiomatic and not the easiest to translate: brezhnevskaya sistema postoyanno sverbela v mozgu, i vnutri ya vsegda nës kakoi-to vnutrennii uprëk.

74 Karaulov, Vokrug Kremlya, 111.

75 Sergei Ryzhenkov and Galina Lyukhterkhandt-Mikhaleva, Politika i kul’tura v rossiiskoi provintsii: Novgorodskaya, Voronezhskaya, Saratovskaya, Sverdlovskaya oblasti (Politics and culture in the Russian provinces: Novgorod, Voronezh, Saratov, and Sverdlovsk oblasts) (Moscow: Letnii sad, 2001), 160. On the UPI group, see Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 123. After the singer Yulii Kim gave an unauthorized concert at UPI in the late 1970s, a music club at the institute was closed and the teacher who invited him was fired. See also Anita Seth, “Molodëzh’ i politika: vozmozhnosti i predely studencheskoi samodeyatel’nosti na vostoke Rossii (1961–1991 gg.) (Youth and politics: the possibilities and limits of student amateurism in the east of Russia [1961–91]), Kritika 7 (Winter 2006), 153–57.

76 TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 100, file 116, 119.

77 Sverdlovsk’s was the fifth subway to be started in the USSR’s Russian republic. Yeltsin’s conversation with Brezhnev is described in Ispoved’, 54. But Kirilenko played a key role before then in getting the Soviet railways minister, Ivan Pavlovskii, to agree in a single telephone conversation. Although he misnamed the project—calling it the metr (meter) rather than metro (subway)—Uncle Andrei came through for Sverdlovsk. Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 130.

78 Second Petrov interview. Overcentralization was also rampant within the CPSU. Lobov, Yeltsin’s second secretary from 1982 to 1985, had to ask the Central Committee to let him add a cleaning lady to his staff chart (Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 41).

79 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 395.

80 Second Yeltsin interview.

81 Comments by Naina Yeltsina during third Yeltsin interview.

82 Second Petrov interview. On the pursuit of regional autonomy, see James R. Harris, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Yoshiko M. Herrera, Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

83 See on this point Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 54–59.

84 There is film of the ceremony in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 1.

85 Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 78.

86 Rossel, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 1. According to what Yeltsin told Rossel, he and Brezhnev met on work matters on Yeltsin’s birthday—it would 4 have had to be February 1, 1977, his forty-sixth—and an aide informed the general secretary of the birthday. Brezhnev gave him the watch at that point. The funny thing is that Brezhnev had a reputation among foreign diplomats for asking if he could trade their watches for one of his, usually a mass-produced Soviet model.

87 Second Yeltsina interview.

88 Kaëta interview.

89 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 50.

90 Kaëta interview. Beside the public-relations and morale-building side of these forays, Yeltsin could have a soft heart for those in need. Kaëta remembered an episode in the town of Severoural’sk when Yeltsin was approached by a female construction worker with four children, who said she was unable to feed her family on her wages. Yeltsin volunteered in front of the group to give her 100 rubles a month from his own salary. Kaëta doubted the woman ever received any of this cash, but suspected that Yeltsin found some other way to help her out.

91 Plans for the meeting with the students are contained in TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 100, file 275, and the questions and answers are in file 116 (quotation about capitalist competition at 136). Aron, Yeltsin, 87–92, gives a good account of the meeting.

92 Yel’tsin, Srednii Ural, 101–2; Aron, Yeltsin, 78–80.

93 TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 101, file 106, 3.

94 Ibid., register 107, file 118, 39.

95 Ibid., 37–42.

96 Ibid., register 101, file 105, 116.

97 Anatolii Kirillov, interview with the author (June 21, 2004).

98 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 56.

99 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 53.

100 Ibid., 22.

101 Second Yeltsin interview. Compare to Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 53: “We found ourselves working, practically speaking, in almost total self-reliance [samostoyatel’nost’].”

CHAPTER FIVE

1 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 67–69.

2 Yakov Ryabov, Moi XX vek: zapiski byvshego sekretarya TsK KPSS (My 20th century: notes of a former secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU) (Moscow: Russkii biograficheskii institut, 2000), 37–38. Ryabov mentions Yeltsin fielding suggestions to become secretary of the party obkom of Kostroma province and, in Moscow, deputy head of Gosstroi, the State Construction Committee. The second organization is where Yeltsin was to be sent after his break with Gorbachev in 1987.

3 Interview with Yakov Ryabov, Central Committee Interview Project, University of Glasgow (transcript supplied by Stephen White).

4 Calculated from lists at http://www.worldstatesmen.org/RussSFSR_admin.html. We have only years of birth, not exact dates, for most of the secretaries. Five of the 1976 first secretaries had been born in 1931, the same year as Yeltsin.

5 “Vstrecha v VKSh, 12 noyabrya 1988 goda s 14 do 18 chasov” (Meeting in the Higher Komsomol School, November 12, 1988, from 2:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M.), in RGANI (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, Moscow) (microform in Harvard College Library), fund 89, register 8, file 29, 41. Yeltsin said in this presentation that the two met twice, but it was unclear whether that was twice overall or twice during Andropov’s general secretaryship. My suspicion is that it was the former. Assuming they conferred after the anthrax incident in 1979, they likely had one meeting while Andropov was Soviet leader.

6 Ye. K. Ligachëv, Predosterezheniye (Warning) (Moscow: Pravda International, 1998), 410.

7 Arkadii Vol’skii, interview with the author (June 13, 2000); Ligachëv, Predosterezheniye, 410.

8 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:291–92. As he often does, Gorbachev imputes to third parties the gossip about Yeltsin drinking, in this case “the observation” that he left a Supreme Soviet session on somebody’s arm. “Many people were upset—what was it? Well-wishers offered assurances that nothing special had occurred, it was just a little rise in his blood pressure. But [Sverdlovsk] natives smirked: This happens with our first secretary; sometimes he overdoes it a bit.”

9 Aleksandr Budberg, “Proigravshii pobeditel’: Mikhailu Gorbachevu—75” (Losing victor: Mikhail Gorbachev at 75), Moskovskii komsomolets, March 3, 2006.

10 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 67. While Yeltsin says he took “one or two seconds” to say no to Dolgikh, he also relates that he barely slept a wink that night and expected to hear from someone else shortly.

11 Tatyana Yumasheva, first interview with the author (July 15, 2001). When Tatyana first moved to Moscow in 1977, the only family friend her parents had there was one female classmate from UPI, who lived in a communal apartment. Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 337.

12 Yeltsin’s favorite folk song was “Ural’skaya ryabinushka” (Urals Mountain Ash). In his third book of memoirs (Marafon, 183), Yeltsin mentioned his preference as a young man for the lilting compositions of Isaak Dunayevskii (1900–55), Mark Fradkin (1914–90), who was mainly a writer of movie scores, and the much decorated Aleksandra Pakhmutova (1929–), who was said to be Leonid Brezhnev’s favorite songwriter. The English translation of Yeltsin’s memoir, perhaps trying to make him look hipper, drops Pakhmutova from the listing and adds guitar-strumming troubadours Bulat Okudzhava (1924–97) and Yurii Vizbor (1934–84).

13 See Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 56–58. Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka” (Sverdlovsk upstart), part 3, Politicheskii klass, April 2006, 87, points out a “comradely” tradition in the Politburo of addressing one another as ty. Yeltsin was not aware of it and never ascribed this tendency to any member of the inner elite other than Gorbachev.

14 Grigorii Kaëta, a member of the bureau at the time, interview with the author (September 9, 2004).

15 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 71.

16 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 56.

17 The city of Tomsk is 1,100 miles east of Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) and, like it, was closed to foreigners until 1990. This was because of secrecy surrounding the Tomsk-7 chemical combine, the USSR’s largest complex for producing weaponsgrade plutonium.

18 Viktor Manyukhin, Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 54–56.

19 Kaëta interview.

20 Pilar Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya: Boris Yel’tsin, provintsial v Kremle” (The impossible Russia: Boris Yeltsin, a provincial in the Kremlin), Ural, April 1994, 105–6.

21 Stanislav Alekseyev, a party propagandist in Sverdlovsk at the time, interview with the author (June 24, 2004).

22 Manyukhin, Yeltsin’s last second secretary in Sverdlovsk, says (Pryzhok, 56) that Ligachëv at some point told Yeltsin he was going to be made a Central Committee secretary, and that Gorbachev forced the appointment to be made at the department level.

23 Gorbachev writes in Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:292, that, when the Politburo resolution appointing Yeltsin to the construction department was being drafted, the two had “a short conversation” in his office. “It has not stuck in my memory,” he adds snootily.

24 Kaëta interview.

25 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy,1:292.

26 Yelena’s husband, Valerii Okulov, was reassigned to overseas Aeroflot flights, a nice promotion. Following Boris Yeltsin’s demotion in 1987, Okulov was not allowed to fly at all for three years.

27 Politburo transcript for June 29, 1985, in APRF (Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, Moscow), fund 3, register 3194, file 22, 8–9. I do not know why Tikhonov should have been so unimpressed. In the first volume of his memoirs (Ispoved’, 54–55), Yeltsin states that as Sverdlovsk leader he had “normal, businesslike” relations with Tikhonov from 1980 to 1985. It could be that Tikhonov’s ire was directed at Gorbachev as much as at Yeltsin.

28 He was never anyone’s deputy and had no desire to be one now, Yeltsin wrote in Ispoved’, 70. The first assertion is only partly true. He had never carried the precise title of deputy (zamestitel’), but as head engineer of two construction concerns in the early 1960s he reported to the director. And from 1968 to 1975, as head of the construction department of the Sverdlovsk obkom, he answered to the first secretary through one of the secretaries—just as it was with Dolgikh in the Central Committee apparatus from April to July 1985. In ibid., 110, Yeltsin asserts that Dolgikh, finding him “sometimes too emotional,” tried to block his promotion to Central Committee secretary at the Politburo meeting of June 29. The transcript of the meeting, however, shows Dolgikh as supporting the decision. Yeltsin also reports that he and Dolgikh served together amicably after that, which does seem to have been the case. Dolgikh was ousted from the Politburo and Secretariat in September 1988.

29 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy,1:292.

30 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 82–83.

31 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 59–60. On the other hand, Yakov Ryabov spoke to Yeltsin about the Moscow job and found him to be unenthusiastic. Ryabov interview (University of Glasgow).

32 Politburo transcript for December 23, 1985, in Volkogonov Archive (Project on Cold War Studies, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University), 1–3.

33 The Politburo had nineteen full and candidate members as of February 1986. Yeltsin was one of only nine full-time party apparatchiks in the group. He continued to attend the Secretariat’s weekly meetings.

34 See Timothy J. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 384–92, 428–29, 567–72; and Viktor Grishin, Ot Khrushcheva do Gorbacheva: memuary (From Khrushchev to Gorbachev: memoirs) (Moscow: ASPOL, 1996), 292–320.

35 Nikolai Ryzhkov, interview with the author (September 21, 2001). In Ispoved’, 54, Yeltsin says he and Ryzhkov were acquaintances (znakomyye) in Sverdlovsk and that when Ryzhkov was named prime minister he tried “not to abuse” their relationship. Naina Yeltsina was cool toward Ryzhkov and felt his rapid rise had gone to his head.

36 Ryzhkov interview. Most of these details are omitted in his published account: N. I. Ryzhkov, Desyat’ let velikikh potryasenii (Ten years of great shocks) (Moscow: Kniga, Prosveshcheniye, Miloserdiye, 1995), 139. Ryzhkov told me he was sure the Politburo would have ratified the appointment even if he had opposed it.

37 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 83.

38 Yurii Prokof’ev, Do i posle zapreta KPSS: pervyi sekretar’ MGK KPSS vspominayet (Before and after the ban on the CPSU: a first secretary of the Moscow gorkom remembers) (Moscow: Algoritm, 2005), 71.

39 Anatolii Luk’yanov, interview with the author (January 24, 2001).

40 Ye. I. Chazov, Rok (Fate) (Moscow: Geotar-Med, 2001), 86–88.

41 Luk’yanov interview.

42 Aleksei Shcherbinin, a professor at Tomsk State University, interview with the author (February 24, 2006).

43 Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 52. Korzhakov also writes that Yeltsin “worshiped” Gorbachev at the beginning, which is an exaggeration.

44 “Otchët Moskovskogo gorodskogo komiteta KPSS” (Report of the Moscow city committee of the CPSU), Moskovskaya pravda, January 25, 1986.

45 Grishin, Ot Khrushcheva do Gorbacheva, 298–99.

46 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 84.

47 A. S. Chernyayev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym (Six years with Gorbachev) (Moscow: Progress, 1993), 63–64. This valuable memoir is available in English as Anatoly S. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, trans. Robert D. English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).

48 XXVII s”ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soyuza: stenograficheskii otchët (The 27th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: stenographic record) (Moscow: Politizdat, 1986), 140–42. The references to officials’ privileges were purged from the chronicle in the next day’s Pravda but, as quoted here, appeared in the final transcript of the congress.

49 “Vypiska iz vystupleniya t. Yel’tsina B. N. 11 aprelya s. g. pered propagandistami g. Moskvy” (Extract from the statement of comrade B. N. Yeltsin on April 11, 1986, before Moscow propagandists), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Materialy samizdata, July 18, 1986, 3.

50 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 85; Valerii Saikin, interview with the author (June 15, 2001).

51 Prokof’ev, Do i posle zapreta KPSS, 64.

52 Lobbying the center is described in V. I. Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak: iz dnevnika chlena Politbyuro TsK KPSS (But this is how it was: from the diary of a member of the Politburo of the CPSU) (Moscow: Sovet veteranov knigoizdaniya, 1995), 84; and “Kak reshalsya v Moskve prodovol’stvennyi vopros” (How the food question was resolved in Moscow), Izvestiya TsK KPSS, December 1990, 125.

53 On October 23, 1986, for example, the Politburo discussed Soviet bread shortages. Yeltsin observed that bakers—his mother’s occupation in Kazan in the 1930s—were not being trained in Moscow. Andrei Gromyko demanded to know why the Politburo was discussing so picayune a matter and asked rhetorically if it was supposed to answer for the supply of lapti (handwoven bast shoes). Gorbachev expostulated that, if such resolutions were to be adopted, at the urging of Yeltsin or anyone, the Soviet military would have to be engaged, “so as to deal with this at the point of the gun.” V Politbyuro TsK KPSS… (In the Politburo of the CPSU) (Moscow: Gorbachev-Fond, 2006), 92.

54 Saikin interview.

55 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 54–58.

56 Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Fenomen Yel’tsina” (The Yeltsin phenomenon), Moskovskiye novosti, April 16, 1989.

57 “Vypiska iz vystupleniya,” 7–8. George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), detects similarities with the populism of Nikita Khrushchev a generation before. There were some commonalities, but Khrushchev was a much less radical agent of change than either Yeltsin or Gorbachev. The definitive study is William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003).

58 Vladimir Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy” (Entourage), part 2, Rabochaya tribuna, March 25, 1995.

59 According to Jonathan Sanders, the Moscow-based staffer who worked with producer Susan Zirinsky, “I pointed out that we were sending one of our most respected correspondents to do the interview, someone who was a veteran of the Nixon White House and was personally quite interested in him [Yeltsin]. At this point, the ever clever Ms. Zirinsky pulled out a glossy eight-by-ten photo of Diane Sawyer and said this was the star who would be doing the interview. Now, remember what the Soviet anchorwoman looked like in the mid-1980s? Remember how much [Richard] Nixon was respected? And remember how much Boris Nikolayevich understood intuitively about the power of the media? So we did the interview.” Sanders, personal communication to the author (October 9, 2005).

60 “Pribavlyat’ oboroty perestroiki” (Quicken the pace of perestroika), Moskovskaya pravda, April 4, 1987.

61 Colton, Moscow, 576.

62 Gavriil Popov, interview with the author (June 1, 2001).

63 “Vypiska iz vystupleniya,” 5; “Mera perestroiki—konkretnyye dela” (The measure of perestroika is concrete affairs), Moskovskaya pravda, March 30, 1986.

64 Andrei Karaulov, Vokrug Kremlya: kniga politicheskikh dialogov (Around the Kremlin: a book of political dialogues) (Moscow: Novosti, 1990), 96.

65 Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka,” part 3, 86–91. Aleksei Stakhanov was a miner in the Donbass area of Ukraine who in 1935 set a USSR record for digging coal on his shift. The Stakhanovite movement was organized to imitate his fervor. It experienced a revival in 1988, eleven years after Stakhanov’s death.

66 “Vypiska iz vystupleniya,” 3.

67 The resolution was about services in one of Moscow’s municipal districts. Two deputies voted against it and three against proposed amendments. Press reports did not mention Yeltsin’s role, which I learned about in my interview with Arkadii Murashov (September 13, 2000).

68 On the flavor of these hothouse organizations, see Judith B. Sedaitis and Jim Butterfield, eds., Neformaly: Civil Society in the USSR (New York: U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, 1990). A then-deputy of Saikin’s reports that Yeltsin telephoned Gorbachev for advice before meeting the Pamyat group. Prokof’ev, Do i posle zapreta KPSS, 186–88.

69 Speech to Central Committee, January 27, 1987, in RGANI, fund 2, register 5, file 34, 73.

70 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:310, 371 (italics added).

71 Korzhakov writes (Boris Yel’tsin, 61) that during the Georgia visit Yeltsin played with his security detail and staff every day, starting the first morning at five A.M. They then invited the local champions, who for one of their matches engaged a professional athlete. The Muscovites still won.

72 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 270.

73 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 95.

74 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 58.

75 Ibid., 55. Korzhakov, though of proletarian origin, exemplified Muscovite condescension when describing in his book (50) Yeltsin’s musical activities: “Yeltsin was born in the village of Butka, and there it was a prestigious thing to play on the spoons.” In an interview in 1989 (Karaulov, Vokrug Kremlya, 100), Yeltsin was still thin-skinned about Sverdlovsk, saying it was “not on the periphery” and that it had more to teach the rest of Russia than to learn from it.

76 “Vypiska iz vystupleniya,” 5; Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 90; “Deputaty predlagayut, kritikuyut, sovetuyut” (The deputies recommend, criticize, and advise), Moskovskaya pravda, March 15, 1987.

77 Tret’yakov claims to have heard from former subordinates of Yeltsin that some of the questions at encounters like this were planted by organizers and that Yeltsin prepared his answers in advance. Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka,” part 4, Politicheskii klass, May 2006, 103.

78 “Vypiska iz vystupleniya,” 7, 9–10. Yeltsin instituted the changes in the workday immediately after taking office. Prokof’ev, Do i posle zapreta KPSS, 63.

79 Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1962), 155–56.

CHAPTER SIX

1 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 116. Gorbachev, too, reports in his memoirs being unhappy with the unsociability of official Moscow. But he was much better acquainted than Yeltsin with its ways. He spent five years at university in Moscow, and general secretaries and Politburo members often holidayed or took the cure at the mineral-springs resorts of Stavropol Province.

2 Ibid., 69, 115–16, 119. The inconsistencies in Yeltsin’s discussion of his housing and perks are brought out in Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka” (Sverdlovsk upstart), part 3, Politicheskii klass, April 2006, 82–84, 88–90. Tret’yakov maintains that Gorbachev’s former dacha was posher than what Yeltsin had the right to and this created nervousness on his part. There may be some exaggeration in the Yeltsin account. A former chief of Kremlin protocol notes, for example, that candidate members of the Politburo were entitled to two cooks, not three, and that their monthly food allowance was half that of full members. Vladimir Shevchenko, Povsednevnaya zhizn’ Kremlya pri prezidentakh (The everyday life of the Kremlin under the presidents) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2004), 124.

3 Den’ v sem’e prezidenta (A day in the president’s family), interview with El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, April 20, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya).

4 Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka,” part 3, 90.

5 Vladimir Voronin, a city hall functionary at the time, interview with the author (June 15, 2001).

6 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002).

7 Author’s first interview with Aleksandr Yakovlev (June 9, 2000) and interviews with Arkadii Vol’skii (June 13, 2000) and Anatolii Luk’yanov (January 24, 2001). Several individuals who attended the October 1987 plenum of the Central Committee told me Yeltsin mentioned Raisa there, and the claim is made in Aleksandr Yakovlev, Sumerki (Dusk) (Moscow: Materik, 2003), 405. Aside from Yeltsin’s memory, the published transcript and unpublished archival materials, which I have examined, confute this.

8 Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire (New York: Random House, 1995), 223. At a public meeting in May 1990, someone passed Yeltsin a note asking if he thought Soviet television spent too much time on Raisa. He replied that he thought it did. “I spoke to Gorbachev about this. He was insulted.” Vladimir Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy” (Entourage), part 3, Rabochaya tribuna, March 28, 1995.

9 Third Yeltsin interview.

10 Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire, 112, citing a conversation with Afanas’ev.

11 Grishin was already a candidate member of the Politburo when given the Moscow position in June 1967 and had to wait four years, until the 1971 party congress, before getting his full member’s seat. Yeltsin’s expectations are recounted in Viktor Manyukhin, Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 59–60.

12 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:370–71.

13 Oksana Khimich, “Otchim perestroiki” (Stepfather of perestroika), Moskovskii komsomolets, April 22, 2005.

14 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 95–96. His views on the tenacity of opposition to reform evolved rapidly. In April 1986 he discounted as “completely incorrect” the judgment “that the party has somehow cut itself off from the people.” “Vypiska iz vystupleniya t. Yel’tsina B. N. 11 aprelya s. g. pered propagandistami g. Moskvy” (Extract from the statement of comrade B. N. Yeltsin on April 11, 1986, before Moscow propagandists), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Materialy samizdata, July 18, 1986, 7.

15 Politburo transcript for January 19, 1987, in AGF (Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Moscow), KDPP (Kollektsiya “Kak ‘delalas” politika perestroiki” [The collection “How the policy of perestroika ‘was made’”]), 6 vols., 2:21–46; quotations here at 32–35, 44–46.

16 The transcript records a break in the discussion after Yeltsin’s remarks but gives no details. Yeltsin in his memoirs (Ispoved’, 97) described Gorbachev walking out of a Politburo meeting on his account, but misremembered it as occurring in October 1987.

17 In a never-printed interview in July 1988, Yeltsin said there had been an element of competition with Gorbachev in making his Moscow personnel changes. He added that he wished there had been time to do more and that additional district party secretaries were on his list to be removed. Vladimir Polozhentsev, “Privet, pribaltiitsy!” (Greetings, people from the Baltic), http://podolsk-news.ru/stat/elcin.php.

18 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 11, 97–98.

19 V. I. Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak: iz dnevnika chlena Politbyuro TsK KPSS (But this is how it was: from the diary of a member of the Politburo of the CPSU) (Moscow: Sovet veteranov knigoizdaniya, 1995), 123. For more on Gorbachev’s reaction, see Vadim Medvedev, V komande Gorbacheva: vzglyad iznutri (In the Gorbachev team: a view from within) (Moscow: Bylina, 1994), 45–47; and V. I. Boldin, Krusheniye p’edestala: shtrikhi k portretu M. S. Gorbacheva (Smashing the pedestal: strokes of a portrait of M. S. Gorbachev) (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 326. George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 117, surmises that Yeltsin was unhappy that Gorbachev settled for a closing resolution by the January plenum of the Central Committee that was less radical than Yeltsin preferred. It is a good point, but the Politburo records show the men were in conflict before the committee convened.

20 Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak, 123.

21 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 11–12.

22 Politburo transcripts, March 24, 1987 (AGF, KDPP, 2:154–55); April 23, 1987 (ibid., 241–42); April 30, 1987 (ibid., 264); May 14, 1987 (ibid., 305, 317–18); September 28, (ibid., 539).

23 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:368.

24 Politburo transcript, October 15, 1987, in Volkogonov Archive (Project on Cold War Studies, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University). All quotations here are at 138–40.

25 Vladimir Gubarev, “Akademik Gennadii Mesyats: beregite intellekt” (Academician Gennadii Mesyats: conserve your intellect), Gudok, October 12, 2005.

26 Yeltsin, however, did manage to keep Ligachëv’s men at bay most of the time. At the plenum of the city committee that removed Yeltsin from his job in November 1987, one member of the bureau, N. Ye. Kislova, noted that Central Committee workers had not recently dropped in on bureau meetings and that she could not remember an instance of a formal visit by a central CPSU official even at the level of subdepartment head. “Energichno vesti perestroiku” (Energetically carry out perestroika), Pravda, November 13, 1987.

27 Speech to Central Committee, June 25, 1987, in RGANI (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, Moscow) (microform in Harvard College Library), fund 2, register 5, file 58, 33–34.

28 Nikolai Ryzhkov, interview with the author (September 21, 2001).

29 Mikhail Poltoranin, interview with the author (July 11, 2001).

30 Yakovlev, Sumerki, 407. Plans for such a site were discussed at the August meeting of informal organizations, which Yeltsin had authorized. One delegate proposed it be located in the Arbat area, in downtown Moscow. A district-level Communist Party official in attendance opposed the idea: “Why does the Party need a Hyde Park at which it will be permitted to speak out on equal terms with you?” John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 74.

31 Politburo transcript, September 10, 1987 (AGF, KDPP, 2:507–8).

32 Ye. I. Chazov, Rok (Fate) (Moscow: Geotar-Med, 2001), 218–19.

33 Valerii Saikin, interview with the author (June 15, 2001).

34 Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007).

35 All quotations from the letter are taken from Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 8–11 (italics added). An English translation, leaving out some details, is in Boris Yeltsin, Against the Grain: An Autobiography, trans. Michael Glenny (New York: Summit Books, 1990), 178–81.

36 Gorbachev made his claim to the CPSU conference in the summer of 1988, and Yeltsin made his in Ispoved’. The aide who was with Gorbachev during the phone call says Gorbachev told him after putting down the phone that Yeltsin “agreed he would not get nervous before the holidays,” which suggests partial acquiescence in Gorbachev’s preferred timing. A. S. Chernyayev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym (Six years with Gorbachev) (Moscow: Progress, 1993), 175.

37 See Ispoved’, 13–14. Yeltsin did not bring up this point in our 2002 interview about these events.

38 Poltoranin interview.

39 Third Yeltsin interview.

40 At the October plenum, Gorbachev leveled the charge that Yeltsin had used this and similar meetings “to find accomplices” (naiti yedinomyshlennikov), but did not claim that Yeltsin had contacted Central Committee members in between plenums. “Plenum TsK KPSS—oktyabr’ 1987 goda (stenograficheskii otchët)” (The CPSU Central Committee plenum of October 1987 [stenographic record]), Izvestiya TsK KPSS, February 1989, 284. To me, Yeltsin said flatly that he did not speak to potential supporters, in person or by telephone, before the plenum.

41 Third Yeltsin interview.

42 The first interpretation of Gorbachev’s motives is stressed in the eyewitness account by the then-first deputy head of the party’s international department. Karen Brutents, Nesbyvsheyesya: neravnodushnyye zametki o perestroike (It never came true: engaged notes about perestroika) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyye otnosheniya, 2005), 100–101. The second is favored by then-Politburo member Vitalii Vorotnikov, in A bylo eto tak, 169–70. Tret’yakov offers a variation on Brutents’s thesis, that Gorbachev had already decided to discharge Yeltsin and wanted him to fire at party conservatives on the way out the door. See Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka,” part 5, Politicheskii klass, June 2006, 99–100.

43 Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak, 169.

44 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:372.

45 In his diary of events, Anatolii Chernyayev had already likened Yeltsin’s address before the Moscow city conference of the CPSU, in January 1986, to the Khrushchev speech (Chernyayev, Shest’ let, 63). But I think the October 1987 speech fits the bill much better. It had incomparably more impact, and the 1986 speech was not secret.

46 All quotations from Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 131–33.

47 The previous spring, the Moscow gorkom and government, wanting to economize on land and labor, had resolved to trim institutes from 1,041 to 1,002. When Yeltsin addressed the Central Committee, seven institutes had been liquidated and fifty-three new ones created, taking the total to 1,087, or 4 percent more than when the campaign started.

48 The phrase “cult of personality” (kul’t lichnosti) was censored out of the official transcript released in 1989 but is present in Yeltsin’s rendering of the speech in Ispoved’, 132. The official record from 1989 does, though, contain the critique by Gorbachev of Yeltsin’s use of the unprintable phrase.

49 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 133.

50 Third Yeltsin interview.

51 Chernyayev, Shest’ let, 177.

52 I have long thought of Yeltsin’s manner as feline. I am indebted to Jonathan Sanders for suggesting Gorbachev’s as canine.

53 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 22. These words are omitted from the English-language edition of the memoir.

54 Boldin, Krusheniye p’edestala, 328.

55 “Plenum TsK,” 241.

56 Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak, 170, records this aspect of the scene with clarity.

57 Ryzhkov interview.

58 Yakovlev, Sumerki, 406.

59 “Plenum TsK,” 257. Yakovlev’s soft criticism of Yeltsin was for “conservatism”—which he made, he says (Sumerki, 405–6) to throw conservatives off the scent and ease their alarm at the moderate changes Gorbachev was committed to making.

60 “Plenum TsK,” 242–43.

61 In a mirror image of the collective attitude toward him, Yeltsin in his account of the day (Ispoved’, 135–36) refused to give the speakers he knew well credit for any but the most ignoble motives. “We had worked together side by side and, it would seem, eaten a pood of salt together. But each one was thinking of himself and considered this a chance to earn a few points for good behavior.”

62 “Plenum TsK,” 251–52 (Konoplëv), 253–54 (Ryabov). Yeltsin was especially unkind to Ryabov in his memoir, saying he spoke “to lay down some path for himself upward, if not for his future [assignments] then at least for his pension” (Ispoved’, 135). Yeltsin saw Ryabov when he visited France in May 1990. On the Aeroflot flight back to Moscow, he asked Ryabov, in full hearing of others, why he said what he did in 1987. Ryabov answered that he had nothing to be sorry for and was sticking to his opinion. Pilar Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya: Boris Yel’tsin, provintsial v Kremle” (The impossible Russia: Boris Yeltsin, a provincial in the Kremlin), Ural, April 1994, 25.

63 “Plenum TsK,” 254–57 (Ryzhkov), 262–63 (Yakovlev), 273–76 (Solomentsev), 259 (Vorotnikov), 261–62 (Chebrikov).

64 Ibid., 280 (Gorbachev and Yeltsin), 249 (Vladimir Mesyats on immaturity), 265 (Shevardnadze), 245 (Shalayev), 244 (Manyakin), 280 (Gorbachev).

65 Ibid., 279–81. That Gorbachev was open to compromise is the interpretation of Politburo member Vorotnikov (A bylo eto tak, 169) and, without comment on the penalty to be paid, of Gorbachev himself (Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:373).

66 Politburo transcript, October 31, 1987 (AGF, KDPP, 2:648–49).

67 Details here from Aleksandr Kapto, Na perekrëstkakh zhizni: politicheskiye memuary (At life’s crossroads: political memoirs) (Moscow: Sotsial’no-politicheskii zhurnal, 1996), 185–87; Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak, 173–74; and Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:373.

68 “Plenum TsK,” 286.

69 Chernyayev, Shest’ let, 176–78.

70 Third Yeltsin interview.

71 Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire, 116.

72 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 138. The medical evidence is given in Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:374; and Chazov, Rok, 221–23. Both are unfriendly witnesses, but Chazov is no better disposed toward Gorbachev than toward Yeltsin. The reliable Vorotnikov attests (A bylo eto tak, 174–75) that Gorbachev shared the facts of the slashing incident with members of the Politburo on November 9 and that Viktor Chebrikov of the KGB verified them. According to Chazov, Yeltsin offered the doctors the farfetched explanation that he cut himself accidentally when leaning on the scissors. Gorbachev repeats this story and another Yeltsin is said to have told about being knifed by an assailant on the street.

73 Interviews with Aleksandr Korzhakov (January 28, 2002) and Valentina Lantseva (July 9, 2001).

74 Chazov, Rok, 225.

75 Third Yeltsin interview and comments by Naina Yeltsina during it.

76 Although the Leningrad group did not want to come into conflict with the Soviet center, members of it advocated creation of a Russian branch of the Communist Party, and some advocated transfer of the capital of the RSFSR to Leningrad. See David Brandenberger, “Stalin, the Leningrad Affair, and the Limits of Postwar Russocentrism,” Russian Review 63 (April 2004), 241–55.

77 Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 65; Chazov, Rok, 224–25; Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 53.

78 Mikhail Poltoranin, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 2.

79 All quotations from “Energichno vesti perestroiku.”

80 Yurii Belyakov, the second secretary, and Yurii Karabasov, the gorkom’s secretary for ideological matters, also spoke, and were less forgiving than Nizovtseva. All three secretaries stressed the costs to them and to the Moscow organization of Yeltsin’s refusal to consult them before making his attack. Belyakov, whom Yeltsin recruited from Sverdlovsk, did credit him for his hard work and leadership, but this, Belyakov said, made the boss’s change of position even harder to take. And Yeltsin’s name was now being used by “dubious elements,” at home and abroad, to stir up scandal.

81 Comment by Naina Yeltsina during my third interview with Boris Yeltsin: “They all said, ‘Well, the system made us cripples,’ that is, they all considered this [the attack] incorrect.”

82 Poltoranin in Prezident vseya Rusi. Gorbachev’s actions are not mentioned in the official account. He said in his memoirs (Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:375) that some of the speeches at the plenum had left him with a bad taste in his mouth. He also commended Yeltsin for taking the punishment and behaving “like a man.”

83 Poltoranin in Prezident vseya Rusi. Before that, Gorbachev evidently came over and comforted him.

84 Second Yeltsina interview.

85 Poltoranin interview.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 142–43.

2 Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1962), 100–101.

3 A first-mover advantage is that achieved by the first firm to offer a new product or service, or by the first player to enter into some other kind of competition for resources. There is considerable controversy over the magnitude of the advantage in specific contexts. See Herbert Gintis, Game Theory Evolving: A Problem-Centered Introduction to Modeling Strategic Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Martin J. Osborne, An Introduction to Game Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

4 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 53. On the forgeries, petitions, and rallies, see also Andrei Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin: svet i teni (Boris Yeltsin: light and shadows), 2 vols. (Sverdlovsk: Klip, 1991), 2:7; Nikolai Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin: raznyye zhizni (Boris Yeltsin: various lives), 2 vols. (Moscow: OLMA, 2001), 1:336–37; Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 220–22; and Lev Osterman, Intelligentsiya i vlast’ v Rossii, 1985–1996 gg. (The intelligentsia and power in Russia, 1985–96) (Moscow: Monolit, 2000), 31.

5 Mikhail Poltoranin, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 2; and Poltoranin, interview with the author (July 11, 2001).

6 A. S. Chernyayev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym (Six years with Gorbachev) (Moscow: Progress, 1993), 175.

7 This point is made in Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka” (Sverdlovsk upstart), part 7, Politicheskii klass, August 2006, 103.

8 See Yegor Gaidar, Gibel’ imperii: uroki dlya sovremennoi Rossii (Death of an empire: lessons for contemporary Russia) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006), 190–97. Gaidar traces the revenue crunch to Saudi Arabia’s decision in 1981, in exchange for American military backing, to boost its oil output and thereby restrain global prices. As he shows, Soviet specialists were well apprised of this trend.

9 Aleksandr Kapto, Na perekrëstkakh zhizni: politicheskiye memuary (At life’s crossroads: political memoirs) (Moscow: Sotsial’no-politicheskii zhurnal, 1996), 192.

10 Razin, called Russia’s Robin Hood by some, was quartered alive in Red Square in 1671, by order of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. Catherine the Great had Pugachëv beheaded in the same place in 1775. Pugachëv’s uprising began in the southern Urals and got as far as the town of Zlatoust, about 300 miles from Butka.

11 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 140; Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:374–75.

12 Gorbachev recounted his comment to Yeltsin in response to a question from the author during a visit to the Gorbachev Foundation by a Harvard University study group, September 11, 2002.

13 In 1960 the Kremlin transferred Molotov to Vienna as ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency. It recalled him in 1961 and excluded him from the party. His ally, Georgii Malenkov, another former prime minister, was given internal exile as director of a hydroelectric station near Ust-Kamenogorsk, in northern Kazakhstan. “He and his wife were removed from the train twenty-five miles west of Ust-Kamenogorsk (lest he receive a warm greeting there) and driven directly to the tiny settlement of Albaketka, where they lived in a small dark house until the summer of 1958. At that point… Khrushchev dumped him even deeper into exile in the town of Ekibastuz, where police observed every move, shadowed his children when they came to visit, and even stole his party card and then accused him of losing it so as to threaten him with expulsion from the party.” Lazar Kaganovich, a confederate of Molotov and Malenkov, was sent to manage a potash plant in Solikamsk, in Perm oblast just north of Berezniki. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), 369.

14 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002).

15 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy,1:374–75.

16 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 140–41.

17 Georgii Shakhnazarov, interview with the author (January 29, 2001). Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1997), 326, also plays up the overconfidence variable.

18 Mikhail Shneider, quoted in Michael E. Urban, “Boris El’tsin, Democratic Russia, and the Campaign for the Russian Presidency,” Soviet Studies 44 (March–April 1992), 190.

19 Assignment of the KGB to monitor Yeltsin is described in the memoir by Gorbachev’s former chief of staff: V. I. Boldin, Krusheniye p’edestala: shtrikhi k portretu M. S. Gorbacheva (Smashing the pedestal: strokes of a portrait of M. S. Gorbachev) (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 334. I heard of details in interviews.

20 Aleksandr Muzykantskii, interview with the author (May 30, 2001).

21 The only place I have been able to find this memo is in Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), 527–58. It was never sent to Ryzhkov.

22 Quotation from “Vstrecha v VKSh, 12 noyabrya 1988 goda s 14 do 18 chasov” (Meeting in the Higher Komsomol School, November 12, 1988, from 2:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M.), in RGANI (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, Moscow) (microform in Harvard College Library), fund 89, register 8, file 29, 5.

23 Lev Sukhanov, Tri goda s Yel’tsinym: zapiski pervogo pomoshchnika (Three years with Yeltsin: notes of his first assistant) (Riga: Vaga, 1992), 40.

24 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 143; Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 31.

25 Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 152.

26 M. S. Solomentsev, Veryu v Rossiyu (I believe in Russia) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2003), 510.

27 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 151–57; “Vstrecha v VKSh,” 27; Boldin, Krusheniye p’edestala, 335–36. KGB guards tried unsuccessfully to lure Yeltsin into the vestibule behind the stage, with the aim, one supposes, of cutting off his appeal to the audience and perhaps of preventing him from speaking.

28 Quotations from XIX Vsesoyuznaya konferentsiya Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soyuza: stenograficheskii otchët (The 19th conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: stenographic record), 2 vols. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1988), 2:56–61.

29 Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka,” part 6, Politicheskii klass, July 2006, 106.

30 Chernyayev, Shest’ let, 218–19. Zaikov’s involvement is described in Yurii Prokof’ev, Do i posle zapreta KPSS: pervyi sekretar’ MGK KPSS vspominayet (Before and after the ban on the CPSU: a first secretary of the Moscow gorkom remembers) (Moscow: Algoritm, 2005), 209–10. Ligachëv’s statement about Yeltsin being wrong was omitted from the official transcript of the conference.

31 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 57.

32 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 166–67. On the letters and telegrams, see also the testimony of a journalist who saw stacks of them in a side office at Gosstroi: Vladimir Polozhentsev, “Privet, pribaltiitsy!” (Greetings, people from the Baltic), http://podolsk-news.ru/stat/elcin.php.

33 Ivan Sukhomlin in Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni, 136–37.

34 Memorial was founded in 1987. The Nineteenth Conference had agreed to the idea of the monument, but Memorial soon broadened its agenda to human rights in general. Yeltsin attended one meeting of the board and communicated with Memorial leaders. Nanci Adler, Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993), 54–67; and personal communication to the author (November 13, 2006).

35 Jonathan Sanders, interview with the author (January 21, 2004).

36 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 71–73.

37 “Vstrecha v VKSh,” 66–67.

38 Aleksei Yemel’yanov in L. N. Dobrokhotov, ed., Gorbachev–Yel’tsin: 1,500 dnei politicheskogo protivostoyaniya (Gorbachev–Yeltsin: 1,500 days of political conflict) (Moscow: TERRA, 1992), 338.

39 See on this process Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 291–96.

40 “Vstrecha v VKSh,” 56.

41 Pavel Voshchanov, “Ne zabudem o cheloveke” (Let us not forget about the person), Komsomol’skaya pravda, December 31, 1988.

42 Naina Yeltsina, first interview with the author (February 9, 2002).

43 “Vstrecha v VKSh,” 56.

44 See the perceptive discussion in Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka,” part 5, Politicheskii klass, June 2006, 104–5. So as not to provoke Gorbachev, Yeltsin avoided using the Russian word for oppositionist, oppozitsioner. At dinner with the American ambassador as late as June of 1989, “there was not the slightest hint that Yeltsin thought of himself in competition with Gorbachev.” Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire (New York: Random House, 1995), 223.

45 Georgii Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh (With leaders and without them) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 365.

46 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 68.

47 “Vstrecha v VKSh,” 28–29.

48 The archival transcript of the January plenum duly records Yeltsin’s historic abstention. In March dozens of negative votes were cast as Gorbachev led the members through the list of official nominees, one at a time. The number but not the identities of the nays was noted in each case. Yeltsin said in public that he was one of the seventy-eight in March to vote against sending Ligachëv to the congress, which was by far the largest number of nay votes. Since Yeltsin’s disgrace in October 1987, the Central Committee had convened in February, May, July, and November of 1988, and on each occasion he added his vote to the unanimous support for motions from the leadership.

49 Boldin, Krusheniye p’edestala, 339.

50 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 16–17. Valentin Yumashev, then a young journalist who had made the acquaintance of Yeltsin and his family, recalls that Yeltsin in the autumn of 1988 never displayed any doubt that he would run for the congress. Yumashev, first interview with the author (February 4, 2002).

51 Muzykantskii interview.

52 David Remnick, “Boris Yeltsin, Adding Punch to Soviet Politics,” The Washington Post, February 18, 1989.

53 Author’s interviews with Valerii Bortsov (June 11, 2001) and Valentina Lantseva (July 9, 2001).

54 On this important group, see Marc Garcelon, “The Estate of Change: The Specialist Rebellion and the Democratic Movement in Moscow, 1989–1991,” Theory and Society 26 (February 1997), 55–56.

55 Bill Keller, “Soviet Maverick Is Charging Dirty Tricks in Election Drive,” New York Times, March 19, 1989.

56 Yeltsin had addressed Ipat’ev House, and admitted to his role in the destruction of the landmark, at the Higher Komsomol School in November 1988. He said more in the first volume of his memoirs, published in 1990.

57 Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Fenomen Yel’tsina” (The Yeltsin phenomenon), Moskovskiye novosti, April 16, 1989.

58 Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 70–71; Brendan Kiernan and Joseph Aistrup, “The 1989 Elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow,” Soviet Studies 43 (November–December 1991), 1051–52; Sergei Stankevich, interview with the author (May 29, 2001).

59 V. A. Kolosov, N. V. Petrov, and L. V. Smirnyagin, Vesna 89: geografiya i anatomiya parlamentskikh vyborov (Spring of 1989: the geography and anatomy of the parliamentary elections) (Moscow: Progress, 1990), 225.

60 Ibid., 218–20.

61 Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire, 210.

62 All quotations from Tret’yakov, “Fenomen Yel’tsina” (italics added).

63 Muzykantskii interview. In Yeltsin’s absence, reformist candidates distributed materials playing up their links with him.

64 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 170; V Politbyuro TsK KPSS… (In the Politburo of the CPSU) (Moscow: Gorbachev-Fond, 2006), 482. Ligachëv told the Politburo he would be happy to speak out against Yeltsin at the party plenum or the congress, but other members counseled against it. Gorbachev sounded nervous about a confrontation.

65 V Politbyuro TsK KPSS, 489.

66 On the agreement by Yeltsin’s unnamed representative, see Sukhanov, Tri goda, 84. Vitalii Tret’yakov, who has excellent sources of information, is convinced Yeltsin all the while hoped to challenge Gorbachev for the position. Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka,” part 7, 106–9.

67 Popov describes his intervention, without mentioning Gorbachev’s waffling, in Snova v oppozitsii (In opposition again) (Moscow: Galaktika, 1994), 66. The other details are in Alexei Kazannik, “Boris Yeltsin: From Triumph to Fall,” Moscow News, June 2, 2004.

68 As an alternative, Gorbachev offered him the chair of the People’s Control Committee of the USSR, a monitoring organization most reformers considered superfluous. It would have required Yeltsin to give up his parliamentary seat. He declined, preferring, Gorbachev says, “to take upon himself the functions of leader of the opposition in the parliament” (Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:458). The job went to Yeltsin’s former Sverdlovsk colleague, Gennadii Kolbin.

69 Andrei Karaulov, Vokrug Kremlya: kniga politicheskikh dialogov (Around the Kremlin: a book of political dialogues), 114–15. Another mark of the committee’s low status was that until December 1989 its offices were in the Moskva Hotel, not in a government building.

70 Vladimir Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy” (Entourage), part 3, Rabochaya tribuna, March 28, 1995.

71 “Yeltsin Discusses Candidacy, Issues, Rivals,” FBIS-SOV-91-110 (June 7, 1991), 61.

72 Andrei Sakharov, Gor’kii, Moskva, daleye vezde (Gorky, Moscow, after that everywhere) (New York: Izdatel’stvo imeni Chekhova, 1990), 169. Sakharov (170–71) writes of Yeltsin hogging the microphone at a rally organized by the dissident group Moscow Tribune.

73 Edward Kline, interview with the author (February 15, 2007). Sakharov told Kline he only had one serious conversation with Yeltsin.

74 Shapovalenko in August 1991 was to be designated presidential representative to Orenburg oblast. He was one of only three presidential representatives in the provinces to survive Yeltsin’s two terms. Pëtr Akonov, “Sud’ba komissarov” (Fate of the commissars), Izvestiya, August 23, 2001.

75 Viktor Sheinis, Vzlët i padeniye parlamenta: perelomnyye gody v rossiiskoi politike, 1985–1993 (The rise and fall of parliament: years of change in Russian politics, 1985–93) (Moscow: Moskovskii Tsentr Karnegi, Fond INDEM, 2005), 229–31. Yeltsin’s cause was also strongly supported by the environmentalist Aleksei Yablokov and by Il’ya Zaslavskii, an advocate for the disabled.

76 Yevgenii Savast’yanov, a Sakharov camp follower who attended the Interregional meetings, interview with the author (June 9, 2000). Also Bortsov and Lantseva interviews and interviews with Yelena Bonner, Sakharov’s widow (March 13, 2001), Mikhail Poltoranin (July 11, 2001), and Gavriil Popov (June 1, 2001).

77 Arkadii Murashov, interview with the author (September 13, 2000). Yeltsin complained openly about the group’s disorganization and “endless meetings and consultations.” “Yeltsin Interviewed by Sovetskaya molodëzh’,” FBIS-SOV-90-021 (January 31, 1990), 73).

78 In addition to those mentioned in the text, Stankevich interview and interviews with Yurii Ryzhov (June 7, 2000) and Mark Zakharov (June 4, 2002).

79 Popov interview.

80 Yeltsin expressed approval of foreign investment in the USSR but, just weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, also gave a favorable assessment of economic change in East Germany. To a young Harvard economist at the meeting, Yeltsin showed “all the dissatisfaction with the sclerotic Soviet system but no clue about any market anything.” Lawrence H. Summers, interview with the author (November 25, 2005).

81 Dan Quayle, Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 170.

82 Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 104–5. See also George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), 142–43.

83 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 99.

84 Yeltsin and his party did not always see American reality for what it was. For example, he came to the conclusion that homelessness was not a major problem in New York, and one member of the Russian group declared that the homeless were on the streets not because they had nowhere to sleep but because they wanted the authorities to give them plots of land on which they could build houses. Ibid., 100–101.

85 Ibid., 149, 153. I learned of Yeltsin’s upset on the bus from Wesley Neff of the Leigh Bureau, who witnessed it. Excerpts from the Randall’s video are in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 2.

86 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 150.

87 Boris Nemtsov, first interview with the author (October 17, 2000). Yeltsin was “shocked” when he described the Houston store to Naina upon his return. She underwent a similar shock a few months later during a private visit to the Netherlands. In November 1991, when she accompanied Yeltsin on his first foreign visit as Russian president to Germany, the wife of the mayor of Cologne took her shopping for shoes and on a walk through the city market. Thinking of Moscow’s bare shelves, “I was ashamed. I had worked my whole life, we had wanted to make life better, and we had not done anything. I wanted to hide somewhere.” Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007).

88 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 181.

89 James MacGregor Burns, Transforming Leadership: A New Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 166.

90 Gaidar, Gibel’ imperii.

91 See especially Archie Brown, “Gorbachev, Lenin, and the Break with Leninism,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 15 (Spring 2007), 230–44.

92 I owe the sequence frown-doubt-assent to Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life (New York: Scribner, 2004), 38. On the ambiguous attitudes of younger Soviets, see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever.

93 “Yeltsin Airs Plans for Deputies Elections,” FBIS-SOV-9-021 (January 31, 1990), 69. In this context, Yeltsin meant “leftward” to connote openness to change, and not to a greater state role in the economy, as the word tends to mean in the West. In the 1990s Russian understandings of left-right terminology came into better conformity with foreign ones.

94 In John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 49–50. Yeltsin first indicated he thought of himself as a social democrat on a visit to Greece the month before. John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991), 108.

95 The decision was made a few days after Korzhakov celebrated Yeltsin’s fifty-eighth birthday with him. “The bosses especially did not like the toasts I raised to Boris Nikolayevich. Fallen leaders of the Communist Party, it turns out, are not supposed to have any prospects for the future.” Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 69. Viktor Suzdalev, another of Yeltsin’s three guards from 1985 to 1987, was removed for the same offense. Yurii Kozhukhov, the head bodyguard, was demoted by the KGB after November 1987 but dropped contact with Yeltsin.

96 Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata; poslesloviye (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk; epilogue) (Moscow: Detektiv-press, 2004), 517–18. He relates that the machine was at idle as the driver talked to the driver of a Zhiguli car through the car window. “It became clear later” that the passenger had a damaged spinal disk and bruised kidneys, “after which he was very ill for a long time.” Korzhakov says he and a neighbor, businessman Vladimir Vinogradov, helped with medical expenses and paid for the funeral, since the unnamed victim “had no close relatives.” Korzhakov writes that Yeltsin never inquired about the man’s condition, and does not mention having volunteered information about it to his boss. Yeltsin family members say the Korzhakov volume was the first they had heard of the matter.

97 A lurid book written with Korzhakov’s cooperation replays many of his stories about Yeltsin, but not this one. The book also makes extensive use of KGB files. See Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni.

98 Robert S. Strauss, interview with the author (January 9, 2006).

99 Viktor Yaroshenko, Yel’tsin: ya otvechu za vsë (Yeltsin: I will answer for everything) (Moscow: Vokrug sveta, 1997), 20.

100 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 174.

101 See on the coverage Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 341–50; and Yaroshenko, Yel’tsin, 29–61.Wesley Neff, who accompanied Yeltsin on the trip, says he most nights had no more than one or two drinks and was never inebriated. Yaroshenko, a USSR deputy who accompanied him, recalls (Yel’tsin, 21) that Yeltsin was insulted when he found his New York hotel room stocked with many bottles of liquor, saying this showed how some Americans extended “hospitality to a ‘Russian peasant.’”

102 “Yeltsin Interviewed,” 77.

103 Vadim Bakatin, interview with the author (May 29, 2002). Bakatin was to be head of the KGB in the autumn of 1991 and may have had access to files about the incident there. Rumor has long had it that Yeltsin went to see the Bashilovs’ chambermaid. The woman, Yelena Stepanova, denies any relationship and says KGB officers told her he met someone and then ended up in a ditch on the property. Anna Veligzhanina, “Yel’tsin padal s mosta ot lyubvi?” (Did Yeltsin fall from the bridge out of love?), Komsomol’skaya pravda, November 21, 2004. Several persons close to Yeltsin at the time believe he engineered the occasion as a publicity stunt.

104 Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy,” part 3.

105 At an interview with a journalist on October 21, Yeltsin was “in a fantastic mood.” Andrei Karaulov, Chastushki (Humorous verses) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1998), 169.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1 George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 125. As Breslauer shows, polarization was Gorbachev’s worst fear, because of his personality and his reading of historical experiences such as the destruction of reform communism in Czechoslovakia in 1968. As for Yeltsin, his power-seeking is difficult to comb out from his substantive goals. The study that most accentuates his drive for power is Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1997). Even it must concede (340) that Yeltsin also had transformative aims.

2 Lev Sukhanov, Tri goda s Yel’tsinym: zapiski pervogo pomoshchnika (Three years with Yeltsin: notes of his first assistant) (Riga: Vaga, 1992), 241.

3 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 78.

4 Lyudmila Pikhoya, interview with the author (September 26, 2001). Kharin died in 1992, but Il’in stayed with Yeltsin until 1998 and Pikhoya until 1999.

5 Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 81.

6 V. I. Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak: iz dnevnika chlena Politbyuro TsK KPSS (But this is how it was: from the diary of a member of the Politburo of the CPSU) (Moscow: Sovet veteranov knigoizdaniya, 1995), 342–43, 348, 362–63.

7 The book was widely distributed in other Soviet republics. The CPSU first secretary in Ukraine, Vladimir Ivashko, told the Politburo it had made Ukrainian coal miners question their party dues: “The miners say, Why should we pay money so that someone else can live in luxury?” Politburo transcript, April 9, 1990 (Volkogonov Archive, Project on Cold War Studies, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University), 356.

8 “Yeltsin’s RSFSR Election Platform Outlined,” FBIS-SOV-90-045 (March 7, 1990), 108–9; L. N. Dobrokhotov, ed., Gorbachev–Yel’tsin: 1,500 dnei politicheskogo protivostoyaniya (Gorbachev–Yeltsin: 1,500 days of political conflict) (Moscow: TERRA, 1992), 173 (italics added).

9 For example, in January 1990, Yeltsin, building on discussions in the Sverdlovsk years, advocated the creation of seven “Russian republics” within the RSFSR, which apparently would have been controlled by ethnic Russians and would have been equal in powers to, but much larger than, the non-Russian republics. He repudiated this formula for confusion and conflict in August 1990. In an equally problematic statement, he said to the Russian congress in May 1990 that he favored “the sovereignty of the raion [district] soviet,” which would have subjected Russia and its provinces to centrifugal forces at the most local level. He never repeated the phrase. See V. T. Loginov, ed., Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’ (The union could have been saved), rev. ed. (Moscow: AST, 2007), 135, 156, 166.

10 Vyacheslav Terekhov, interview with the author (June 5, 2001). It is a confused comment, for in the Bible Jesus goes to the hill of Golgotha to be crucified. Yeltsin believed that in the forthcoming struggle it was his opponents who would lose out.

11 Politburo transcript, March 7, 1990 (Volkogonov Archive), 356.

12 Polling figures are given in John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 28–29; Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 203, 270–71; and Matthew Wyman, Public Opinion in Postcommunist Russia (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 85.

13 Politburo transcript, March 22, 1990 (Volkogonov Archive), 219; Sergei Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno (Top nonsecret) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 40–41.

14 Politburo transcript, March 22, 1990, 207–8.

15 In Loginov, Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’, 147–48.

16 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 175; Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 803–4.

17 Journalist Vladimir Mezentsev, interview with the author (September 26, 2001). Mezentsev had worked for Yeltsin until just before the event and was present at it.

18 Georgii Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh (With leaders and without them) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 367.

19 Vladimir Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy” (Encourage), part 9, Rabochaya tribuna, April 7, 1995.

20 Nuisance candidates took thirty-two votes in the first round and eleven in the third. The remaining deputies not included in the totals here crossed off the names of all the candidates entered.

21 Aleksandr Budberg, “Proigravshii pobeditel’: Mikhailu Gorbachevu—75” (Losing victor: Mikhail Gorbachev at 75), Moskovskii komsomolets, March 3, 2006.

22 Korzhakov, Yeltsin’s bodyguard and confidant, had had his wages covered by three business cooperatives. Lantseva, his main press spokesman until July 1991, first received a salary in February 1991. Neither Lantseva nor Bortsov, who wrote speeches for Yeltsin until 1995, had Moscow residency until 1991. Author’s interviews with Lantseva (July 9, 2001), Bortsov (June 11, 2001), and Mezentsev. See also Vladimir Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy,” part 3, Rabochaya tribuna, March 28, 1995.

23 Mikhail Bocharov, interview with the author (October 19, 2000).

24 The delegates “took into account that if they voted for [Lobov] it would be a kind of linkup between the party and Yeltsin.” Yurii Prokof’ev, Do i posle zapreta KPSS: pervyi sekretar’ MGK KPSS vspominayet (Before and after the ban on the CPSU: a first secretary of the Moscow gorkom remembers) (Moscow: Algoritm, 2005), 218.

25 XXVIII s”ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soyuza: stenograficheskii otchët (The 28th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: stenographic record), 2 vols. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1991), 1:472–75.

26 Author’s interviews with Gavriil Popov (June 1, 2001) and Sergei Stankevich (May 29, 2001).

27 Baturin et al., Epokha, 93. See also Sukhanov, Tri goda, 338–39.

28 An early draft of the announcement called on legislative leaders and President Gorbachev to follow his example. A copy, with corrections in Yeltsin’s handwriting, is in Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), 543; it was obtained from the widow of Lev Sukhanov.

29 Viktor Sheinis, Vzlët i padeniye parlamenta: perelomnyye gody v rossiiskoi politike, 1985–1993 (The rise and fall of parliament: years of change in Russian politics, 1985–93) (Moscow: Moskovskii Tsentr Karnegi, Fond INDEM, 2005), 357.

30 Naina Yeltsina, personal communication to the author (July 29, 2007).

31 Anatolii Chernyayev, 1991 god: dnevnik pomoshchnika Prezidenta SSSR (The year 1991: diary of an assistant to the president of the USSR) (Moscow: TERRA, 1997), 37.

32 Politburo transcript, May 3, 1990 (Volkogonov Archive), 516, 533.

33 Pervyi s”ezd narodnykh deputatov SSSR, 25 maya–9 iyunya 1989 g.: stenograficheskii otchët (The first congress of people’s deputies of the USSR, May 25–June 9, 1989: stenographic record), 6 vols. (Moscow: Izdaniye Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR, 1989), 2:48.

34 Hough, Democratization and Revolution, 385. On this general issue, see also Edward W. Walker, Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

35 Most accounts leave out this last detail. The congress in fact rejected an amendment that would have had the declaration of primacy click in immediately. Gwendolyn Elizabeth Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT: Democratization, Suverenizatsiia, and Boris Yeltsin in the Breakup of the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995), 272–73. Once the provision was in effect, though, it was reminiscent of the theory of nullification put forth to defend states’ rights in the United States by John C. Calhoun in the 1820s and 1830s.

36 Boris Yeltsin, first interview with the author (July 15, 2001).

37 Ivan Silayev, interview with the author (January 25, 2001). Agreements were reached with Lithuania in the Baltic and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, but the general arrangement stayed put.

38 Bill Keller, “Boris Yeltsin Taking Power,” New York Times, September 23, 1990.

39 “Trusy Yel’tsina” (Yeltsin’s trunks), http://www.channel4.ru/content/200205/10/112.trus.html.

40 A. L. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani (The Yeltsins in Kazan) (Kazan: Aibat, 2004), 70–71; Loginov, Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’, 165–66.

41 “Yeltsin Continues Russian Tour to Bashkir ASSR,” FBIS-SOV-90-156 (August 13, 1990), 82.

42 Dobrokhotov, Gorbachev–Yel’tsin, 198.

43 Ibid., 194.

44 Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh, 373; Aleksandr Yakovlev, first interview with the author (June 9, 2000). Yakovlev said that with him Gorbachev was at first somewhat receptive to the vice-presidential initiative, but went solidly against it after discussion with Politburo members.

45 Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2002).

46 At the Politburo meeting hours after Yeltsin attacked Gorbachev, the Kremlin chief of staff, Valerii Boldin, said it was time “to part with illusions with relation to Yeltsin…. He will never work together with us. He is a not entirely healthy person and sees himself only in confrontation.” Prime Minister Ryzhkov concurred, saying Yeltsin was only interested in power and would not rest until he had Gorbachev’s job. V Politbyuro TsK KPSS… (In the Politburo of the CPSU) (Moscow: Gorbachev-Fond, 2006), 618–19.

47 Yelena Bonner, interview with the author (March 13, 2001). Yeltsin made the comment as Bonner stood with him on the balcony of the Russian White House, at the conclusion of the putsch of August 1991. She had told him several months before that Gorbachev had made him look foolish over the Five Hundred Days plan.

48 Vyacheslav Chornovil, “Yel’tsin vnis duzhe konstruktyvnyi moment u politychnu real’nist’ v Ukraini” (Yeltsin injected a very constructive note into Ukrainian political reality), Za vil’nu Ukrainu (Ukrainian-language newspaper, L’viv), November 23, 1990; reference supplied by Roman Szporluk. Despite the implicit recognition of the border, Chornovil did say Yeltsin’s attitude toward the Crimea issue gave him some concern.

49 Chernyayev, 1991 god, 76.

50 Karen Brutents, Nesbyvsheyesya: neravnodushnyye zametki o perestroike (It never came true: engaged notes about perestroika) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyye otnosheniya, 2005), 108.

51 Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire (New York: Random House, 1995), 488.

52 Yeltsin was invited to Strasbourg by the International Politics Forum, a Parisbased organization linked to European Christian Democratic parties. When he arrived, he mistook dignitaries at the airport, waiting for another visitor, for a welcoming group for him. The city mayor, Cathérine Trautman, recognized the situation for what it was and organized a dinner the next day with local officials and businessmen. “These people were impressed by him for presenting so dignified a face.” Yeltsin flew out of Strasbourg when it became clear he would not be allowed to participate in the assembly’s deliberations. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, French scholar and parliamentarian, interview with the author (September 11, 2007).

53 John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991), 252.

54 Dmitri K. Simes, After the Collapse: Russia Seeks Its Place as a Great Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 89.

55 Monica Crowley, Nixon in Winter (New York: Random House, 1998), 43. Nixon said to another associate (Simes, After the Collapse, 89) that in American terms Gorbachev was “Wall Street” but Yeltsin was “Main Street.” In his last book (Beyond Peace [New York: Random House, 1994], 45), Nixon said Gorbachev was better suited to “drawing rooms” and Yeltsin to “family rooms.”

56 Dan Quayle, Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 171.

57 CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, “Yeltsin’s Political Objectives,” SOV 91-10026X (June 1991), 1, 7; declassified version obtained at http://www.foia.cia.gov.browse_docs.asp? On interdependency, the report acknowledged Yeltsin’s “awareness of the multistranded interweaving of goals and analysis.” He understood, for example, that, “One cannot promote Russian welfare without (a) dropping the burden of empire, (b) marketizing the economy, and (c) cutting military expenditures.” He realized that, “One cannot marketize if one does not (a) dismantle the Stalinist system and create a climate of legality, (b) cut back the military-industrial complex, (c) resolve societal problems peacefully, and (d) gain Western economic collaboration.” And it had sunk in that, “One cannot achieve nonviolent solutions to societal problems without (a) eliminating totalitarian structures, (b) gaining voluntary resolution of ethnic conflicts, and (c) improving living standards.”

58 Vladimir Isakov, interview with the author (June 4, 2001). For details, see V. B. Isakov, Predsedatel’ Soveta Respubliki: parlamentskiye dnevniki, 1990–1991 (Chairman of the Council of the Republic: parliamentary diaries, 1990–91) (Moscow: Paleya, 1996).

59 Vladimir Zhirinovskii, interview with the author (January 22, 2002). On CPSU and KGB backing for the formation of Zhirinovskii’s party, and the financial sum provided, see Aleksandr Yakovlev, Sumerki (Dusk) (Moscow: Materik, 2003), 574—75.

60 “Yeltsin Gives Speech in Moscow,” FBIS-SOV-91-106 (June 3, 1991), 75.

61 On spatial distribution of the vote, see Gavin Helf, “All the Russias: Center, Core, and Periphery in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1994); and Scott Gehlbach, “Shifting Electoral Geography in Russia’s 1991 and 1996 Presidential Elections,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 5 (July–August 2000), 379–87.

62 Aleksei Yemel’yanov in Dobrokhotov, Gorbachev–Yel’tsin, 339.

63 “My mozhem byt’ tvërdo uvereny: Rossiya vozroditsya” (We can be certain that Russia will be reborn), Izvestiya, July 10, 1991.

64 Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno, 84–87; Baturin et al., Epokha, 122; Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh, 377.

65 Of the two main office buildings in the Kremlin, No. 14, dating from the 1930s, when Stalin razed a monastery, a convent, and a small palace to make room for it, was much the inferior, although Brezhnev had his office there. Building No. 1, completed in 1790, housed the imperial Senate before 1917 and was mostly for the USSR Council of Ministers after 1917.

66 Gorbachev at first tried to work on a new union treaty in negotiations within USSR institutions. His switch in April to negotiations among and with the Soviet republics was a sign of how much his position had weakened, and opened him up to pressure for concessions on issue after issue. Philip G. Roeder, Where Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 178–80.

67 Carrère d’Encausse interview. Revisiting the inter-republic negotiations of the winter before, and anticipating the agreement struck in December 1991, Yeltsin specifically raised with Carrère d’Encausse the possibility of a voluntary “commonwealth” of the three Slavic republics of the USSR—Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

68 Baturin et al., Epokha, 135, 137.

69 V. I. Boldin, Krusheniye p’edestala: shtrikhi k portretu M. S. Gorbacheva (Smashing the pedestal: strokes of a portrait of M. S. Gorbachev) (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 403.

70 See Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 412–13; Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT,” 361–62; and Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 2:308.

71 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 54–56; Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 2:556–57.

72 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 96.

73 Voshchanov, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 3. Gorbachev reports the overture in his memoirs (Zhizn’ i reformy, 2:555) and criticizes Yeltsin for not informing him about it. “Most likely he held it in reserve, never knowing when it might come in handy.”

74 Prokof’ev, Do i posle zapreta KPSS, 244. A number of well-informed Muscovites have told me they are sure that Kryuchkov and the plotters briefed Yeltsin on their plan. No evidence has ever been brought forward. Ruslan Khasbulatov, the acting chairman of the Russian parliament at the time, and later to be a blood enemy of Yeltsin’s, was one of the first to see him the morning of August 19, and he reports that Yeltsin was “flabby and prostrate” at the news of the coup, which can only mean that he had been given no warning. R. I. Khasbulatov, Velikaya Rossiiskaya tragediya (Great Russian tragedy), 2 vols. (Moscow: SIMS, 1994), 1:161.

75 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002), in which he told me about the Kubinka landing. In Zapiski, 73, he wrote that he landed at Vnukovo, not Kubinka. He also stated there (71) that the putschists considered having his plane shot down. Sukhanov, Tri goda, 15, says the same. These details will not be clarified until independent researchers get access to the archives concerned.

76 V. G. Stepankov and Ye. K. Lisov, Kremlëvskii zagovor (Kremlin plot) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1992), 119–21; “GKChP: protsess, kotoryi ne poshël” (The GKChP: the process which never got going), part 4, Novaya gazeta, August 13, 2001 (italics added).

77 Viktor Yaroshenko, Yel’tsin: ya otvechu za vsë (Yeltsin: I will answer for everything) (Moscow: Vokrug sveta, 1997), 131–32.

78 Stepankov and Lisov, Kremlëvskii zagovor, 121. The plotters’ plans for Yeltsin’s detention at Arkhangel’skoye-2 are described in ibid., 117–25, 156–57, 160–61, 165–66. In Zapiski, 97–98, Yeltsin recounts another telephone conversation with Kryuchkov, taken at Yeltsin’s initiative from the Russian White House. And Vadim Bakatin, who headed the KGB in the fall of 1991, adds that there was dissension among the Alpha commanders over whether to arrest Yeltsin: Izbavleniye ot KGB (Deliverance from the KGB) (Moscow: Novosti, 1992), 20–21.

79 Stepankov and Lisov, Kremlëvskii zagovor, 123.

80 See Brian D. Taylor, Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 241–42. Several Russian sources add that at the meeting at which Kryuchkov revealed Yeltsin’s noncooperation, Oleg Baklanov, the party overseer of the military-industrial complex and one of the GKChP octet, scribbled a note to himself saying, “Seize B. N. [Boris Nikolayevich].”

81 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 68. As Yeltsin’s grandchildren prepared to leave the dacha with Naina a little later, his daughters warned them to take to the floor of the car if firing broke out, at which point his ten-year-old grandson asked if they would be shot directly in the head. Den’ v sem’e prezidenta (A day in the president’s family), interviews of the Yeltsin family by El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, April 20, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya).

82 Gennadii Burbulis, “Prezident ot prirody” (A president by nature), Moskovskiye novosti, January 27, 2006; and quotation from Mary Dejevsky, a British journalist who was on the spot, interview with the author (September 14, 2007).

83 The quotation and details of his decision are taken from my third Yeltsin interview. Khasbulatov has written (Velikaya Rossiiskaya tragediya, 1:163) that he and others persuaded Yeltsin to get up on the tank, but Yeltsin’s account contradicts this. Viktor Yaroshenko, a Yeltsin adviser who was present, has said Yeltsin may have seen a young man lie down on the ground in front of another tank minutes before, and the man’s bravery may have influenced him. Friends pulled the man from the path of Tank No. 112 with a split-second to spare. The scene and Yaroshenko’s comments are captured in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 3.

84 The appeal and other major documents from August 1991 can be found at http://old.russ.ru/antolog/1991/putch11.htm.

85 Victoria E. Bonnell and Gregory Freidin, “Televorot: The Role of Television Coverage in Russia’s August 1991 Coup,” in Nancy Condee, ed., Soviet Hieroglyphics : Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 32.

86 That was the peak crowd at the White House. But there were about 200,000 pro-Yeltsin demonstrators on August 20 at Moscow city hall on Tverskaya Street, where the police and military presence was slighter, and significant demonstrations were mounted at many Russian and Soviet cities. See Harley Balzer, “Ordinary Russians? Rethinking August 1991,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 13 (Spring 2005), 193–218.

87 When the unassuming Lobov addressed a rally in Sverdlovsk, the commander of the local military district threatened to lock him up. Lobov then warned that he would call a general strike. The standoff was averted by the collapse of the coup. Oleg Lobov, interview with the author (May 29, 2002).

88 Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 434; Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 172. Richard Nixon thought Bush’s praise of Yeltsin grudging and that the putsch had shown that Bush had been “wrong all along” about the relative merits of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Crowley, Nixon in Winter, 64.

89 John B. Dunlop, “The August 1991 Coup and Its Impact on Soviet Politics,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5 (Winter 2003), 112–13. Bush’s decision and the “bitter protests” of the National Security Agency were first reported in Seymour M. Hersh, “The Wild East,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1994. Testified one U.S. official, “We told Yeltsin in real time what the communications were…. We monitor every major command, and we handed it to Yeltsin on a platter.” The NSA’s concern was about disclosure of American monitoring capabilities. President Bush decided, properly, that helping Yeltsin at a turning point was a more important stake.

90 “Throne out of bayonets” was an expression of the English theologian William R. Inge ( 1860–1954). I do not know how Yeltsin came across it.

91 The Yeltsin speech and the comments about the Kremlin are in Stepankov and Lisov, Kremlëvskii zagovor, 163–64, 179. In his interview with me (May 22, 2000), Shaposhnikov said he prepared a written order on shooting up the Kremlin and discussed implementation with local officers.

92 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 114.

93 Quotation from Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 115–16. See also Robert V. Barylski, The Soldier in Russian Politics: Duty, Dictatorship, and Democracy Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998), 131–34. Yeltsin had known Bakatin, the former party boss of Kirov province, for some time and had considered him as a vice-presidential running mate. But he never met Shaposhnikov before demanding that Gorbachev appoint him—they had spoken by telephone only. Author’s interviews with Bakatin (May 29, 2002) and Shaposhnikov.

94 Dejevsky interview.

95 I. Karpenko and G. Shipit’ko, “Kak prezident derzhal otvet pered rossiiskimi deputatami” (How the president answered the Russian deputies), Izvestiya, August 24, 1991.

96 Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 438.

97 See on this point Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 423–25.

98 As paraphrased by Gorbachev’s chief negotiator, Shakhnazarov (S vozhdyami i bez nikh, 462).

99 Yurii Baturin, “Kak razvalili SSSR 15 let nazad” (How they pulled down the USSR fifteen years ago), Moskovskiye novosti, December 8, 2006; Baturin, “Pochemu 25 noyabrya 1991 goda tak i ne sostoyalos’ parafirovaniye Soyuznogo dogovora” (Why the union treaty was not initialed on November 25, 1991), Novaya gazeta, December 12, 2006.

100 Bakatin, Izbavleniye ot KGB, 223, describes meeting with Yeltsin in early December to ask for cash to pay the KGB’s bills until the end of the year.

101 Baturin et al., Epokha, 167. Gorbachev did not give up entirely on November 25. At the press conference, skipped by all of the republic leaders, he expressed the hope that a treaty would be signed on December 20.

102 Transcript in V Politbyuro TsK KPSS, 724–28.

103 Quoted in Roeder, Where Nation-States Come From, 185.

104 Kravchuk told Richard Nixon in 1993 “that Boris Yeltsin’s drive for Russian sovereignty led him to believe for the first time that secession from the USSR was a credible option for Ukraine.” Simes, After the Collapse, 55.

105 In an account published in 1994, Kravchuk claimed that he first thought of the meeting and sold Shushkevich on the idea. Shushkevich has consistently claimed authorship, and Yeltsin always agreed. See Loginov, Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’, 432–45. A quirky line in Shushkevich’s biography was that he taught Lee Harvey Oswald Russian in 1960–61 while chief engineer at a Minsk electronics plant.

106 Stanislav Shushkevich, interview with the author (April 17, 2000); Jan Maksymiuk, “Leaders Recall Dissolution of USSR,” http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/2001/520104.shtml. Yegor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Days of defeats and victories) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 149, says the source of the confusion was that Kozyrev put the draft under the wrong door.

107 Leonid Kravchuk, “Kogda Belovezhskiye soglasheniya byli podpisany, Yel’tsin pozvonil Bushu” (When the Belovezh’e accord was signed, Yeltsin phoned Bush), http://president.org.ur/news/news-140783.

108 Details from ibid.; Leonid Kravchuk, “Nekontroliruyemyi raspad SSSR privël by k millionam zhertv” (An uncontrolled dissolution of the USSR would have led to millions of casualties), http://news.bigmir.net/article/worldaboutukraine/724174; Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, 554–55; and Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 2:601.

109 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 2:600.

110 James A. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace, 1989–1992 (New York: Putnam’s, 1995), 569–70 (italics added); Strobe Talbott, “America Abroad,” Time, October 26, 1992.

111 Andrei Grachëv, Dal’she bez menya: ukhod prezidenta (Go ahead without me: the exit of a president) (Moscow: Progress, 1994), 247–48; Shaposhnikov interview. There were reports after the August coup that Gorbachev was consulting Yeltsin on control of the nuclear force. Dunlop, Rise of Russia, 269.

112 Aleksandr Yakovlev, second interview with the author (March 29, 2004); Shakhnazarov, Popov, and Shaposhnikov interviews; and Loginov, Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’, 473 (concerning Shevardnadze). In a memoir, Popov says Yeltsin could have combined the Russian and the Soviet presidencies, and regrets he did not try to convince Yeltsin to do so. Gavriil Popov, Snova v oppozitsii (In opposition again) (Moscow: Galaktika, 1994), 260, 269.

113 Second Yeltsin interview; interview with Ruslan Khasbulatov (September 26, 2001). Yeltsin writes in Zapiski, 154–55, that he had a mental aversion to replacing Gorbachev: “This path was barred for me. Psychologically, I could not take Gorbachev’s place.” Gorbachev observed to Shevardnadze on December 10 that if Yeltsin had been willing to take over in August, the decision could have been imposed on him. Loginov, Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’, 473.

114 Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, Vybor (Choice), 2nd ed. (Moscow: PIK, 1995), 138 (quotation); Shaposhnikov interview.

115 Hough’s thesis in Democratization and Revolution, 465, is that it was all about power: “Yeltsin’s temptation to get rid of Gorbachev by abolishing his job must have been irresistible.” This ignores the fact that the disappearance of the Soviet Union downsized Gorbachev’s “job.” Gorbachev, in his memoirs, portrays Yeltsin at the time as greedy for power and two-faced, but also under the influence of dogmatically anti-USSR advisers such as Gennadii Burbulis.

116 This could not have been the only condition for Yeltsin, since he had accepted treaty drafts that would not have been signed by all the republics. He seemed to assume that Russia’s cornucopia of resources, to be sold to nonsignatories at world market prices, would induce them to cooperate. Stewart (“SIC TRANSIT,” 322) calls this “the cash and carry solution.”

117 These categories were introduced by Roman Szporluk in “Dilemmas of Russian Nationalism,” Problems of Communism 38 (July–August 1989), 16–23. John Dunlop (Rise of Russia, 266–67) says Yeltsin acted like a “velvet imperialist” in the fall of 1991, but I do not find this a helpful label. Yeltsin’s vision was centered on the core Russian state, although he hoped it would retain influence in the former Soviet republics.

118 Chernyayev, 1991 god, 259–60.

119 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 31.

120 This phrase comes from Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State.

CHAPTER NINE

1 CIA, Director of Central Intelligence, “The Deepening Crisis in the USSR: Prospects for the Next Year,” NIE 11-18-90 (November 1990), 15–18; declassified version obtained at http://www.foia.cia.gov.browse_docs.asp?

2 Ibid., 17–18. The 1990 NIE assumed, as almost all forecasts did, that the Soviet state in some form would have to survive for light at the end of the tunnel to be feasible. It did warn that economic difficulties “would make unilateral steps by the republics to assert their economic independence more likely.” But, of course, by the end of 1991 events had far outrun this possibility.

3 Vyacheslav Terekhov, interview with the author (June 5, 2001).

4 “Yeltsin Criticizes ‘Half-Hearted’ Reforms,” FBIS-SOV-90-049 (March 13, 1990), 74.

5 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 163. In his June 1991 visit to Washington, Yeltsin told President Bush there was no way a military or police coup against Gorbachev would succeed or be attempted. George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), 505.

6 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 33.

7 Pavel Voshchanov, interview with the author (June 15, 2000). Voshchanov was present at the celebration.

8 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 34.

9 Oleg Poptsov, Khronika vremën “Tsarya Borisa” (Chronicle of the times of “Tsar Boris”) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1995), 75.

10 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 148. I will cite this source often in the coming chapters. The coauthors are four former presidential assistants (Yurii Baturin, Mikhail Krasnov, Aleksandr Livshits, and Georgii Satarov), four former speech writers (Aleksandr Il’in, Vladimir Kadatskii, Konstantin Nikiforov, and Lyudmila Pikhoya), and a former press secretary (Vyacheslav Kostikov). I also interviewed six of the coauthors (Baturin, Kostikov, Krasnov, Livshits, Pikhoya, and Satarov).

11 The renaming occurred when the Russian Supreme Soviet was debating ratification of an agreement among CIS members concerning the nuclear arsenal. A deputy noted that Yeltsin had signed as president of “the Russian Federation,” and not of the RSFSR. Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov moved that the name be changed (with “Russia” as an alternative), and the motion passed unanimously.

12 “Minnoye pole vlasti” (The minefield of power), Izvestiya, October 28, 1991.

13 Valentina Lantseva, interview with the author (July 9, 2001).

14 Aleksandr Tsipko, “Drama rossiiskogo vybora” (The drama of Russia’s choice), Izvestiya, October 1, 1991.

15 Details in Marc Zlotnik, “Yeltsin and Gorbachev: The Politics of Confrontation,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5 (Winter 2003), 159–60. Gorbachev has bitterly reported that the day Yeltsin took over in the Kremlin, December 27, was three days ahead of the agreed-upon date, and that he held uncomely festivities there that morning with Gennadii Burbulis and Ruslan Khasbulatov. Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 2:622.

16 Years later, in January 2000, Vitalii Tret’yakov, as editor of the elite newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta, put out a piece about Yeltsin called “Sverdlovsk Upstart.” He had been working on a book on Yeltsin’s career which was never published (some draft chapters were serialized in 2006 and have been cited in this book). Gorbachev rang him up with congratulations on the title. Tret’yakov, interview with the author (June 7, 2000).

17 Robert S. Strauss, interview with the author (January 9, 2006).

18 Baturin et al., Epokha, 226. Yeltsin described Gorbachev as having made a promise about nonparticipation, in “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ne skryvayu trudnostei i khochu, chtoby narod eto ponimal” (Boris Yeltsin: I do not conceal the difficulties and want the people to understand that), Komsomol’skaya pravda, May 27, 1992.

19 It was Yeltsin who had the ban eased to allow Gorbachev to fly to Berlin for the funeral of Willy Brandt, the former German chancellor. He phoned the court chairman, Valerii Zor’kin, to press the case. Jane Henderson, “The Russian Constitutional Court and the Communist Party Case: Watershed or Whitewash?” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 40 (March 2007), 7.

20 Yeltsin actually took the initiative to repair relations with Yegor Ligachëv. He had a staffer telephone Ligachëv in 1994 or 1995 and offer to enlarge his pension. Ligachëv hotly refused. Oksana Khimich, “Otchim perestroiki” (Stepfather of perestroika), Moskovskii komsomolets, April 22, 2005.

21 Aleksandr Rutskoi, interview with the author (June 5, 2001).

22 Voshchanov interview.

23 Alexei Kazannik, “Boris Yeltsin: From Triumph to Fall,” Moscow News, June 2, 2004. Cinema director El’dar Ryazanov filmed an interview with Yeltsin and his wife and daughters in the apartment in April 1993. Yeltsin stayed clear of the kitchen stool because it had a nail protruding from the seat; it was one of a set given him by friends in Sverdlovsk on his fortieth birthday in 1971. Den’ v sem’e prezidenta (A day in the president’s family), interviews by Ryazanov on REN-TV, April 20, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya).

24 Tat’yana D’yachenko, “Papa khotel otprazdnovat’ yubilei po-domashnemu” (Papa wanted to celebrate his birthday home-style), Komsomol’skaya pravda, February 1, 2001.

25 Zavidovo staff reported that Yeltsin’s retinue occupied it “in the spirit of conquerors.” He first inspected it with Yurii Petrov and Korzhakov in November of 1991. Yurii Tret’yakov, “‘Tsarskaya’ okhota” (The tsar’s hunt), Trud, November 20, 2003. Such a perception was inevitable, given the magnitude of the change. The provincial locales all had public park land and commercial facilities as well as a secured compound for the president and other officials. Volzhskii Utës is primarily a healthcare facility. Facilities for the Soviet leadership outside Russia, notably Foros in Ukraine and Pitsunda in Georgia, were, of course, not available to Yeltsin.

26 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002).

27 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 35.

28 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 335. He switched back to a ZIL briefly in 1997, during a campaign against use of expensive foreign vehicles, then went back to the Mercedes. The Ilyushin-62 was replaced in 1996 by a larger Ilyushin-96.

29 Yurii Burtin, “Gorbachev prodolzhayetsya” (Gorbachev is continuing), in Burtin and Eduard Molchanov, eds., God posle avgusta: gorech’ i vybor (A year after August: bitterness and choice) (Moscow: Literatura i politika, 1992), 61.

30 Muzhskoi razgovor (Male conversation), interview of Yeltsin by El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, November 7, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya).

31 In some of Yeltsin’s comments on the issue, there were intimations of patriotic pride and also of the right to live well, just as his countrymen were all entitled to live now. A campaign pamphlet in 1996 said of his transportation: “The president of Russia, like the president of any other country and like millions of other Russian citizens, does not go to work on a trolley bus.” “Special privileges,” it said, were an impossibility in post-communist society, in that luxuries were no longer distributed through secret channels and citizens with means could purchase them on the open market: “Ministers travel in Mercedes, yet anyone who is capable of earning enough money can buy a Mercedes…. In any department store, you can buy the same suit as [Prime Minister Viktor] Chernomyrdin and the same cap as [Moscow Mayor Yurii] Luzhkov.” Prezident Yel’tsin: 100 voprosov i otvetov (President Yeltsin: 100 questions and answers) (Moscow: Obshcherossiiskoye dvizheniye obshchestvennoi podderzhki B. N. Yel’tsina, 1996), 18.

32 Vadim Bakatin, the last head of the Soviet KGB, and Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, the last Soviet minister of defense, both appointed with Yeltsin’s backing in August, believed Yeltsin wanted more security coordination than obtained but was unable to sell it to the other states. Vadim Bakatin, Izbavleniye ot KGB (Deliverance from the KGB) (Moscow: Novosti, 1992), 232–33; author’s interviews with Bakatin (May 29, 2002) and Shaposhnikov (May 23, 2000). See also Robert V. Barylski, The Soldier in Russian Politics: Duty, Dictatorship, and Democracy Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998), 173–225.

33 “Yeltsin News Conference with Foreign Journalists,” FBIS-SOV-91-174 (September 9, 1991), 66, 69.

34 Author’s interviews with Valerii Bortsov (June 11, 2001) and Ivan Rybkin (May 29, 2001); second interview with Sergei Filatov (May 25, 2002); second interview with Aleksandr Yakovlev (March 29, 2004); third Yeltsin interview.

35 Author’s first interview with Grigorii Yavlinskii (March 17, 2001). Yeltsin tried but failed to persuade Yavlinskii to tailor the program to Russia and not the USSR, reduce its running time to 400 days (its original length), and omit mention of price hikes. Yavlinskii feels that Yeltsin was fixated on his struggle with Gorbachev and had no intention of doing any serious reform until after his election as president of Russia.

36 Baturin et al., Epokha, 190.

37 Bill Keller, “Boris Yeltsin Taking Power,” New York Times, September 23, 1990.

38 Gwendolyn Elizabeth Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT: Democratization, Suverenizatsiia, and Boris Yeltsin in the Breakup of the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995), 280. Stewart, working as a photojournalist, taped Yeltsin’s remarks on August 24, 1990, in Dolinsk. She calls them “laissez-faire populism.” Her illustrated account of Yeltsin on Sakhalin is available at http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~gestewar/peopleschoice.html.

39 “B. N. Yel’tsin otvechayet na voprosy ‘Izvestii’” (B. N. Yeltsin answers the questions of Izvestiya), Izvestiya, May 23, 1991.

40 Anatolii Chernyayev, 1991 god: dnevnik pomoshchnika Prezidenta SSSR (The year 1991: diary of an assistant to the president of the USSR) (Moscow: TERRA, 1997), 260.

41 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 235. As several scholars have pointed out, this sentence is not in the English translation of the memoir.

42 Jonathan Sanders, interview with the author (January 21, 2004).

43 Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). Berlin thought negative freedom to be superior to positive liberty. Cf. for a different perspective Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999).

44 Mikhail Fridman, interview with the author (September 21, 2001). His reference is to Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

45 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 121, 235–36, 238, 392. See Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 70–71, 89; and George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 153–54. This therapeutic aspect has sometimes been confused with Social Darwinism, which stresses survival of the fittest and abandonment of the weak. At the societal level, Yeltsin was interested in Russia converging with the West, not competing with it.

46 “Boris Yel’tsin otbyl na otdykh” (Boris Yeltsin has left for a rest), Izvestiya, September 25, 1991.

47 Viktor Sheinis, interview with the author (September 20, 2001); V. T. Loginov, ed., Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’ (The union could have been saved), rev. ed. (Moscow: AST, 2007), 325.

48 Gennadii Burbulis, second interview, conducted by Yevgeniya Al’bats (February 14, 2001). Yeltsin’s invitation to Burbulis has never been on the public record.

49 Rutskoi interview; and Mikhail Poltoranin, interview with the author (July 11, 2001).

50 Yurii Petrov, second interview with the author (February 1, 2002). Petrov had looked Yeltsin up while on leave in Moscow at the end of July and told him he was willing to work in his new government. Yeltsin showed him a staff report on organization of the U.S. White House and offered him the job.

51 G. Shipit’ko, “B. Yel’tsin pytayetsya vosstanovit’ poryadok v koridorakh vlasti” (Boris Yeltsin tries to restore order in the corridors of power), Izvestiya, October 16, 1991. Deputy Premier Igor Gavrilov resigned on October 7 and Economics Minister Yevgenii Saburov on October 9. The acting chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, accused several ministers and advisers of incompetence and demanded their resignations, whereupon one of them, Sergei Shakhrai, stated that Khasbulatov was mentally unstable. Silayev was taken care of after December: Yeltsin appointed him Russian ambassador to the European Community in Brussels.

52 The “miracle worker” reference comes from Gennadii Burbulis, third interview, conducted by Yevgeniya Al’bats (August 31, 2001). Other information is from Poltoranin interview; interview with Ryzhov (September 21, 2001); and second interview with Yavlinskii (September 28, 2001). Poltoranin came closest to acceptance and wrote up a list of possible ministers, but withdrew because he felt he did not know enough about the economy.

53 Third Burbulis interview.

54 Gaidar’s mother was from Sverdlovsk and was the daughter of Pavel Bazhov, a distinguished writer of fairytales set in the Urals. She became friendly with Yeltsin’s mother when they were patients at a Moscow hospital. Yegor Gaidar, second interview with the author (January 31, 2002).

55 My reconstruction of the enlistment of Gaidar relies on accounts by him, Yeltsin, and Burbulis. Or see Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 163–64: “Why did I choose Yegor Gaidar?… Gaidar’s theories coincided with my private determination to travel the most painful part of the route [of economic reform] quickly…. If our minds were made up, it was time to get going!” For an alternative explanation based on envy and power-seeking, for which no evidence is cited, see Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 240–41: “Gaidar’s appointment served Burbulis’s purpose, because it ensured that Yeltsin would not appoint someone who was either more popular than Burbulis… or more influential with Yeltsin… thus endangering Burbulis’s position at court. One of Yeltsin’s reasons for picking Gaidar for the job of ‘leading reformer’ was that his bland and aloof manner in public made him an unlikely future contender for elective office, even if his reform package were to turn out to be successful and popular.”

56 Yegor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Days of defeats and victories) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 105.

57 Moscow journalist Mikhail Berger, quoted in David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs : Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002), 180.

58 “Obrashcheniye Prezidenta Rossii k narodam Rossii, k s”ezdu narodnykh deputatov Rossiiskoi Federatsii” (Address of the president of Russia to the peoples of Russia and the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation), Rossiiskaya gazeta, October 29, 1991.

59 On November 3 and 4, Yeltsin remained in contact with Yavlinskii about the possibility of him taking the job. Gaidar says when he heard of it he felt “as if he had just jumped out from under the wheels of an onrushing train.” Yavlinskii broke off the negotiations and Gaidar was given the position. Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 110.

60 Lyudmila Telen’, “Izbiratel’ Boris Yel’tsin” (Voter Boris Yeltsin), Moskovskiye novosti, October 21, 2003. This revealing interview is translated as “Boris Yeltsin: The Wrecking Ball,” in Padma Desai, ed., Conversations on Russia: Reform from Yeltsin to Putin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 79–94. Burbulis, born in 1945, was senior in the new group. Gaidar was born in 1956, Anatolii Chubais (the minister for privatization) in 1955, and Aleksandr Shokhin (labor minister and deputy premier) in 1957. As early as the summer of 1990, Yeltsin had promoted several men in their thirties into high economic posts in the RSFSR—Grigorii Yavlinskii (deputy premier), who was born in 1952, and Boris Fëdorov (finance minister), born in 1958.

61 See Chernyayev, 1991 god, 265; Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 99–102; and Sergei Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno (Top nonsecret) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 80. Ruslan Khasbulatov writes that Yeltsin was more upset at Gorbachev than at his Supreme Soviet: Chechnya: mne ne dali ostanovit’ voinu (Chechnya: they did not allow me to halt the war) (Moscow: Paleya, 1995), 20–21.

62 The expression is associated with the views of the economist Jeffrey Sachs. Shock therapy in the narrow sense was first applied in Bolivia in 1985 and, in Eastern Europe, in Poland in 1990. Sachs, then at Harvard University and now at Columbia, modeled his approach on Ludwig Erhard, the architect of West Germany’s postwar recovery.

63 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 102. The passage on potato planting is mistranslated in the English version of the memoir as “just as potatoes were introduced under Catherine the Great.” Peter is thought to have brought potatoes back from Holland around 1700 and to have encouraged their cultivation in the greenhouses at his Strelna Palace, outside St. Petersburg.

64 Muzhskoi razgovor. Some leading Russian historians, now free to chastise the past, debunked Peter in the 1990s as a clumsy autocrat, at the same time Yeltsin thought he was imitating him. Ernest A. Zitser, “Post-Soviet Peter: New Histories of the Late Muscovite and Early Imperial Russian Court,” Kritika 6 (Spring 2003), 375–92.

65 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 235. For roughly the first year after the 1991 coup, Yeltsin often referred to a communist return to power as a real and present danger. In May 1992, for example, he spoke in favor of quick changes to the Russian constitution. “Otherwise those forces that are grouping together right now, the former party apparatus, will develop to the point that it would be very difficult to struggle with them.” “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ne skryvayu trudnostei.”

66 Burtin, “Gorbachev prodolzhayetsya,” 60.

67 Ibid.

68 Yurii Afanas’ev, “Proshël god… ” (A year has passed), in Burtin and Molchanov, God posle avgusta, 9.

69 Telen’, “Izbiratel’ Boris Yel’tsin.”

70 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 105.

71 Baturin et al., Epokha, 177. Yeltsin said in the speech that the price reform would take place before the end of December. Gaidar and his team had pushed him not to give a definite date.

72 “Yeltsin Discusses Candidacy, Issues, Rivals,” FBIS-SOV-91-110 (June 7, 1991), 64–65. During the campaign Yeltsin also made crowd-pleasing promises that were sure to complicate any move to the market, such as indexing minimum wages, pensions, and student stipends at 150 percent of the USSR average. These benefits, he assured voters, would be funded by withholding financial transfers to the Soviet government. In June 1990 he stated that he was working with three alternative schemes for price reform, all of which “foresee a mechanism that will rule out a lowering of living standards.” L. N. Dobrokhotov, ed., Gorbachev–Yel’tsin: 1,500 dnei politicheskogo protivostoyaniya (Gorbachev–Yeltsin: 1,500 days of political conflict) (Moscow: TERRA, 1992), 205.

73 “Obrashcheniye Prezidenta Rossii.”

74 Gaidar, first interview with the author (September 14, 2000). Yeltsin said in his October speech that he had promised improvement by late 1992 in his presidential election campaign; I have not found any such statement. Gaidar writes in his memoir that, beginning with Five Hundred Days, the time limits in various reform plans were useful mostly as hooks for getting Yeltsin and the politicians to sign on to radical reform. “By itself, the realism or unrealism of a program had no significance from an economic point of view. But even a false idea, once taken aboard by the masses, becomes a material force.” Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 65. Yeltsin had to deal with that force before and after Gaidar’s exit.

75 Nine percent of Russian workers polled by sociologists in 1993 had not received the previous month’s wage in full. This proportion reached 49 percent in 1994 and 66 percent at the beginning of 1996. Eighteen percent of employees in 1994, and 32 percent in 1996, received no wages in the previous month. Hartmut Lehmann and Jonathan Wadsworth, “Wage Arrears and the Distribution of Earnings in Russia,” William Davidson Institute, University of Michigan, Working Paper 421 (December 2001).

76 Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), the most adulatory of the Western studies, is no exception. Some of the most positive reviews of Yeltsin’s policies have been made by liberal economists. See especially Anders Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995), and Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Andrei Shleifer, A Normal Country: Russia after Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). Cf. for diametrically opposed analyses Stefan Hedlund, Russia’s “Market” Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism (London: UCL, 1999); Jerry F. Hough, The Logic of Economic Reform in Russia (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2001); Marshall I. Goldman, The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry (London: Routledge, 2003); and David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

77 Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York: Norton, 2000), 41, 49, 58. See also Cohen’s “Russian Studies Without Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 15 (January–March 1999), 37–55.

78 Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 306, 629, 627. Less frequently, and not any more helpfully, Yeltsin has been gibbeted for the opposite vice, of infinite flexibility and unprincipledness. “Like many successful politicians,” writes Michael Specter, a Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times in the 1990s, “he is a human mood ring, a man whose ideology changes with the seasons, with the country he is visiting, with the phases of the moon. Such tactics work in Russia, which has never really decided whether it belongs in Europe or Asia.” Michael Specter, “My Boris,” New York Times Magazine, July 26, 1998. Another analyst, who met Yeltsin several times in the company of Richard Nixon, writes of him as selfobsessed and “devoid of any meaningful purpose beyond his own political fortunes.” Dmitri K. Simes, After the Collapse: Russia Seeks Its Place as a Great Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 137.

79 Main indicators are conveniently summarized in Åslund, Building Capitalism ; Shleifer, Normal Country; and Peter T. Leeson and William N. Trumbull, “Comparing Apples: Normalcy, Russia, and the Remaining Post-Socialist World,” Post-Soviet Affairs 22 (July–September 2006), 225–48.

80 The military-industrial complex, currency question, and oil pricing were largely out of Moscow’s hands. Not so the London Club (commercial) and Paris Club (sovereign) debts of the Soviet Union. Moscow assumed these $100 billion worth of obligations in exchange for Russia having the agreed-upon status of legal heir to the USSR. It was forced to restructure the sovereign debt twice in the Yeltsin years, in 1996 and 1999, and retired it in 2006.

81 This point is well made in M. Steven Fish, “Russian Studies Without Studying,” Post-Soviet Affairs 17 (October–December 2001), 332–74, which is a reply to Cohen’s “Russian Studies Without Russia.” See more generally Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

82 As argued in William Tompson, “Was Gaidar Really Necessary? Russian ‘Shock Therapy’ Reconsidered,” Problems of Post-Communism 49 (July–August 2002), 1–10.

83 Andrei Grachëv, Dal’she bez menya: ukhod prezidenta (Go ahead without me: the exit of a president) (Moscow: Progress, 1994), 82.

84 Gorbachev arrived in Beijing for a state visit on May 15, 1989, just as the Tienanmen student protest began. The demonstrators were admirers of his and timed their action to coincide with his arrival, so as to deter the police from reprisal. They displayed banners praising Gorbachev, which he would have seen from his motorcade that day. The government declared martial law on May 20, after his departure, and cracked down on the protesters on June 3–4.

85 An excellent treatment of these variables is Kelly M. McMann, Economic Autonomy and Democracy: Hybrid Regimes in Russia and Kyrgyzstan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

86 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 265 (italics added).

87 See on this general point Stephen Hanson, “The Dilemmas of Russia’s Anti-Revolutionary Revolution,” Current History 100 (October 2001), 330–35; and Martin Malia in Desai, Conversations on Russia, 344–46.

88 Viktor Sheinis, Vzlët i padeniye parlamenta: perelomnyye gody v rossiiskoi politike, 1985–1993 (The rise and fall of parliament: years of change in Russian politics, 1985–93) (Moscow: Moskovskii Tsentr Karnegi, Fond INDEM, 2005), 670.

89 “While many complain about ‘shock therapy’ in Russia, the sad truth is that too little shock was delivered to achieve any therapy, and the actual reforms were far less radical than those in Central Europe.” Åslund, Building Capitalism, xiii. This is an economist’s assessment. A political scientist comes to the same point. Since it scores in about the fortieth percentile among post-communist countries on indices of economic freedom, “gradualism, rather than shock therapy, best characterizes economic policy in post-Soviet Russia.” M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 159–60.

90 Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 236.

91 Oleg Poptsov, Trevozhnyye sny tsarskoi svity (The uneasy dreams of the tsar’s retinue) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 2000), 311.

CHAPTER TEN

1 Valerie Bunce and Maria Csanádi, “Uncertainty in the Transition: Post-Communism in Hungary,” East European Politics and Society 7 (Spring 1993), 269.

2 Irvine Schiffer, Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 11. See also Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City: Doubleday, 1962), 300, and the reference to emergencies “associated with a collective excitement through which masses of people respond to some extraordinary experience and by virtue of which they surrender themselves to a heroic leader.”

3 Leszek Balcerowicz, “Understanding Postcommunist Transitions,” in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., Economic Reform and Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 96. Balcerowicz, who coined the term “extraordinary politics,” was the author of economic shock therapy in post-communist Poland from 1989 to 1991.

4 Yegor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Days of defeats and victories) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 170.

5 Bunce and Csanádi, “Uncertainty in the Transition,” 270 (italics added). It is for this reason that another specialist predicts that, although charismatic leaders may well crop up in post-communist countries, they “will be of real, but limited, consequence—that is, they can affect the distribution of power in a larger or smaller area, but are unable to act as the catalyst for a new way of life.” Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 266.

6 Yu, A. Levada et al., Obshchestvennoye mneniye—1999 (Public opinion—1999 edition) (Moscow: Vserossiiskii tsentr izucheniya obshchestvennogo mneniya, 2000), 100–101.

7 Ibid. Another series of polls, using a more simply worded question, traces the decline in Yeltsin’s popularity in starker terms. Eighty-seven percent of Russians “fully supported” him in September 1991 and 4 percent said they did not support him. That ratio had dropped to 69 percent to 5 percent in November 1991 and to 43 percent to 19 percent in January 1992; it was 28 percent to 24 percent in March 1992, and 24 percent to 31 percent in July 1992. Leonty Byzov, “Power and Society in Post-Coup Russia : Attempts at Coexistence,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 1 (Spring 1993), 87.

8 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 168.

9 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 256.

10 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 176.

11 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 258.

12 Ibid., 256.

13 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 190–91; author’s second interview with Yegor Gaidar (January 31, 2002). Yeltsin told Gaidar after the meeting that he had tried unsuccessfully to reach him by phone to tell him of the removal of Lopukhin. Gaidar did not believe it.

14 Yeltsin left Gaidar to sign off on the Gerashchenko appointment on his behalf. Gaidar later called it the worst mistake he made in 1992 and said it would have been much better to go with Gerashchenko’s predecessor, Georgii Matyukhin. Yeltsin also told associates he almost immediately regretted the appointment. Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 195; Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 235.

15 Baturin et al., Epokha, 251.

16 Vyacheslav Terekhov, interview with the author (June 5, 2001).

17 The greatest controversy was over the exclusion of Khizha, with whom Yeltsin did not want to work closely. One deputy protested that there had been a “gentlemen’s agreement” to put him on the final list, but Yeltsin denied it. Interviewed in the lobby after the action, he said,“My opinion had to be taken into account, too.” Vladimir Todres, “S”ezd” (The congress), Nezavisimaya gazeta, December 15, 1992; Nikolai Andreyev and Sergei Chugayev, “U Gaidara—golosa iskrennikh storonnikov, u Chernomyrdina—doveriye s”ezda” (Gaidar got the votes of sincere supporters and Chernomyrdin got the trust of the congress), Izvestiya, December 15, 1992. Khizha left the government in May 1993.

18 Chernomyrdin was deputy minister of the oil and gas industry from 1982 to 1985, answering for the west Siberian fields. His responsibilities included the pipelines being built through Sverdlovsk oblast. He lived at the time, he told me, in the city of Tyumen, the capital of the province bordering Sverdlovsk on the east. He was appointed minister in February 1985 and saw much of Yeltsin when Yeltsin was department head and secretary in the Central Committee apparatus, touring the Siberian fields with him and Gorbachev in September 1985. Chernomyrdin, as a member of the CPSU Central Committee, attended the October 1987 plenum, where he walked up to Yeltsin and shook his hand at the intermission. Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000).

19 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 326.

20 “Viktor Stepanovich… almost openly sympathized with Gazprom, which he had created practically with his own hands.” Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000),120.

21 See on this point Daniel S. Treisman, “Fighting Inflation in a Transitional Regime: Russia’s Anomalous Stabilization,” World Politics 50 (January 1998), 250–52.

22 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 183.

23 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 256, 258. Not all managers in the petroleum industry favored price controls. As Gaidar describes, quite a few wanted the restrictions to be lifted.

24 Author’s interviews with Lev Ponomarëv and Gleb Yakunin (both on January 21, 2001). See also Valerii Vyzhutovich, “My podderzhivayem Yel’tsina uslovno” (We support Yeltsin conditionally), Izvestiya, October 7, 1991.

25 Yurii Burtin, “Gorbachev prodolzhayetsya” (Gorbachev is continuing), in Burtin and Eduard Molchanov, eds., God posle avgusta: gorech’ i vybor (A year after August: bitterness and choice) (Moscow: Literatura i politika, 1992), 60. See for details Viktor Sheinis, Vzlët i padeniye parlamenta: perelomnyye gody v rossiiskoi politike, 1985–1993 (The rise and fall of parliament: years of change in Russian politics, 1985–93) (Moscow: Moskovskii Tsentr Karnegi, Fond INDEM, 2005), 677–87.

26 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 245.

27 Gennadii Burbulis, second interview, conducted by Yevgeniya Al’bats (February 14, 2001).

28 Baturin et al., Epokha, 202.

29 Chernomyrdin interview.

30 Anders Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995), 198.

31 Boris Fëdorov, interview with the author (September 22, 2001). In September 1993 Yeltsin wanted to have Fëdorov replace Gerashchenko in the central bank, but canned the idea due to Chernomyrdin’s strong opposition.

32 Baturin et al., Epokha, 256. On fiscal and monetary policy after Fëdorov, see Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy, 200–203; and Treisman, “Fighting Inflation in a Transitional Regime,” 235–65.

33 “Obrashcheniye prezidenta k sograzhdanam” (Address of the president to his fellow citizens), Rossiiskaya gazeta, August 20, 1992.

34 In his first book of memoirs, in 1990, he did refer to perestroika as “a revolution from above,” but mostly to convey that it did not engage the populace and was resisted by established interests. Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 103.

35 “B. N. Yel’tsin otvechayet na voprosy ‘Izvestii’” (B. N. Yeltsin answers the questions of Izvestiya), Izvestiya, May 23, 1991.

36 See Yel’tsin, Marafon, 236–37.

37 “Obrashcheniye prezidenta k sograzhdanam.” The quotation is from Mayakovsky’s 1918 poem “Left March,” a celebration of the 1917 Revolution.

38 These events are described in Timothy J. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 654–57. On August 23 patrolmen and deputies had to escort Yurii Prokof’ev, Yeltsin’s successor as Moscow first secretary, from the building of the city party committee adjacent to the Central Committee, after demonstrators refused to let him leave.

39 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 166 (italics added).

40 Lyudmila Pikhoya, interview with the author (September 26, 2001).

41 Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, “Russian Archives in Transition: Caught between Political Crossfire and Economic Crisis,” International Research and Exchanges Board, Working Paper, January 1993, 3; conversations with Jonathan Sanders. One mentally deranged American from the Vietnam era was discovered; he stayed in Russia.

42 Mark Kramer, “The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New Findings,” Journal of Contemporary History 33 (April 1998), 165.

43 Benjamin B. Fischer, “Stalin’s Killing Field,” https://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99–00/art6.html. For some reason, the Katyn massacre had a special resonance for Yeltsin. He had tears in his eyes at the meeting with the journalists in Moscow. In Warsaw, Fischer maintains, he was likely inspired by Willy Brandt, who as chancellor of West Germany in 1970 fell to his knees after placing a wreath at a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto destroyed by the Nazis in 1943. Gorbachev acknowledged Soviet responsibility for the Katyn deaths in 1990 but said Lavrentii Beriya, the head of the secret police, made the decision. The documents given to Wałesa in 1992 verify that the decision was taken in March 1940 by Stalin and the Politburo, six of whose members signed the resolution. Soviet propaganda before Gorbachev had claimed that German troops killed the captive Poles.

44 “Beseda zhurnalistov s prezidentom Rossii” (Conversation of journalists with the president of Russia), Izvestiya, July 15, 1992.

45 In the former East Germany, all citizens were in 1991 given the right to inspect their files in the archives of the Stasi security service. Millions did so, with devastating results. “There have been countless civil suits initiated when victims uncovered the names of those who had denounced and betrayed them, and many families and friendships were destroyed.” John O. Koehler, “East Germany: The Stasi and Destasification,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 12 (Summer 2004), 391. But the policy did shatter the police state, which never happened in Russia.

46 This point is well brought out in Samuel H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 2003).

47 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 162. Yeltsin introduced Volkogonov to Bill Clinton at a meeting in Moscow several months before the general died of cancer. Volkogonov spoke about his work, and “Yeltsin’s face took on a look I’d never seen there before: one of unadulterated compassion, affection, admiration, and sorrow.” Ibid.

48 Aleksandr Yakovlev, second interview with the author (March 29, 2004). On the process, see Natal’ya Rostova, “Vozhdi ochen’ toropilis’” (The leaders were in a big hurry), Nezavisimaya gazeta, October 26, 2001.

49 A variation on the theme that would have been more relevant to Russia was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But it was appointed only in 1995, after the Russian debate had peaked, and I am unaware of any serious exploration of its applicability. In Latin America after military rule, there have been similar efforts in countries such as Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and Uruguay.

50 When the communists first presented their suit in the spring, parliamentary deputy Oleg Rumyantsev launched a countersuit signed by more than seventy legislators. The court combined the two cases in May. In November it declined to rule on the legislators’ suit. The litigation is ably analyzed in Kathleen E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory in the Yeltsin Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 11–29; and Jane Henderson, “The Russian Constitutional Court and the Communist Party Case: Watershed or Whitewash?” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 40 (March 2007), 1–16.

51 Victor Yasmann, “Legislation on Screening and State Security in Russia,” RFE/RL Research Report 2 (August 13, 1993), 11–16; Kieran Williams, Aleks Szczerbiak, and Brigid Fowler, “Explaining Lustration in Eastern Europe: A Post-Communist Politics Approach,” European Institute, University of Sussex, Working Paper 62 (March 2003).

52 Yevgenii Krasnikov, “Protivostoyanie” (Opposition), Nezavisimaya gazeta, May 7, 1993; Sheinis, Vzlët i padeniye parlamenta, 699.

53 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 165.

54 Ibid., 166.

55 Smith, Mythmaking, 48.

56 Second Yakovlev interview.

57 The removal of the body was kept secret. The mausoleum was draped in a tarpaulin to fool German bombers, and sentries were still posted. “Ordinary Russians assumed that Lenin was still there, a symbol of resistance and eventual victory.” Rodric Braithwaite, Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War (London: Profile, 2006), 95; and more generally I. B. Zbarskii, Ob”ekt No. 1 (Object No. 1) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000).

58 For comparisons, see Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Examples would be Hungary, Rumania, and the post-Yugoslav countries.

59 Most details here are from my second interview with Yeltsin (February 9, 2002); first interview with Georgii Satarov (June 5, 2000); and interview (January 21, 2004) with Jonathan Sanders, who advised the Reed family. Stalin’s office and personal rooms in Building No. 1 were also emptied and the pieces put in storage or sold off.

60 Glinka’s song had finished second in a contest for an anthem for the empire in 1833. The contest was won by “God Save the Tsar” by Aleksei L’vov (1798–1870). “The Internationale” was the Soviet anthem until 1944, when the composition by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (1883–1946) and Sergei Mikhal’kov (1913–), its lyrics approved by Stalin, was instated.

61 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 172. On the number of awards, see Vladimir Shevchenko, Povsednevnaya zhizn’ Kremlya pri prezidentakh (The everyday life of the Kremlin under the presidents) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2004), 67. The biggest batch of new orders and medals was the several dozen instituted by presidential decree on March 2, 1994. Fifty-two Soviet honorary titles were renewed as Russian awards on December 30, 1995. The Order for Services to the Fatherland, instated on March 2, 1994, was roughly equivalent to the Order of Lenin. The Order of Honor substituted for the Soviet Badge of Honor, the first state award Yeltsin had received in Sverdlovsk in 1966. The most significant reinstatement of a pre-1917 award was of the Order of St. Andrei in 1998.

62 The Prisekin painting can be viewed at http://prisekin.ru. The Ioganson canvas had replaced a pre-1917 portrait of Alexander III, the second-last of the tsars, by Il’ya Repin of the Wanderers school. Alexander Nevsky was known to all Russians of Yeltsin’s generation from schoolbooks and from the 1938 film by Alexander Eisenstein, which climaxes in thirty minutes of fighting on the ice, with the music of Sergei Prokofiev in the background.

63 The price tag is unknown. Officials stated that the Grand Kremlin Palace project in Yeltsin’s second term cost $335 million. I very much doubt this was all that was spent. Even if it was, other projects would have pushed the total over the $500 million mark.

64 Boris Grishchenko, Postoronnyi v Kremle: reportazhi iz “osoboi zony” (A stranger in the Kremlin: reportage from “the special zone”) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2004), 82–83.

65 “U nas tut vsë nastoyashcheye” (Everything here is genuine), interview with Pavel Borodin in Kommersant-Daily, March 24, 1999.

66 Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007); and “U nas tut vsë nastoyashcheye.”

67 Aleksandr Gamov, “K dnyu rozhdeniyia Yel’tsina v Kreml’ zavezli bulyzhniki iz Sverdlovska” (For Yeltsin’s birthday they have brought cobblestones from Sverdlovsk), Komsomol’skaya pravda, January 29, 1999.

68 “Vse govoryat—strana v nishchete, a tut takiye khoromy” (Everybody says the country is impoverished, but here we have such mansions), interview with Pavel Borodin in Kommersant-Daily, June 19, 1999.

69 The work in the Kremlin had many critics. According to some, preservationists in the Ministry of Culture were not consulted on the contract for Building No. 1 and it was implemented hastily and roughly. Others insisted that many corners were cut both there and in the Grand Kremlin Palace, some ersatz materials were employed, and chandeliers and other objects were sold off below market value. There were also allegations of graft involving the Swiss firm Mabetex. See on this issue Chapter 16.

70 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 196–97.

71 Richard J. Samuels, with a debt to the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

72 Five Moscow streets named after Lenin were renamed in the Yeltsin years, and six were unchanged. Of forty-three other Soviet figures after whom streets were named, all references were dropped to nineteen and to twenty-four they were not (for eight of the twenty-four the name was changed in some cases but not in others). Graeme Gill, “Changing Symbols: The Renovations of Moscow Place Names,” Russian Review 64 (July 2005), 480–503.

73 During his first official visit to France, in February 1992, Yeltsin spoke at Versailles and asked the French to invite persons of Russian origin, many of them members of Parisian high society, to the event. He spoke from the prepared text for a few minutes and then addressed the local Russians directly, pronouncing them welcome in their country of origin and thanking France for having sheltered them. “It was a fantasy moment,” recalled one participant, as protocol was abandoned and guests embraced Yeltsin and the Moscow delegation. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, interview with the author (September 11, 2007).

74 Benjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, “Unraveling the Threads of History: Soviet-Era Monuments and Post-Soviet National Identity in Moscow,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92 (September 2002), 532.

75 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 196. He mentions as one of the practical obstacles differences of opinion over restitution of nationalized property.

76 Vladimir Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy” (Entourage), part 4, Rabochaya tribuna, March 29, 1995. Twenty-nine deputies abstained on the Kryuchkov vote, which was held in July 1989; six voted against.

77 Bakatin, Izbavleniye ot KGB, 120. See also J. Michael Waller, “Russia: Death and Resurrection of the KGB,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 12 (Summer 2004), 333–55.

78 Gennadii Burbulis, third interview, conducted by Yevgeniya Al’bats (August 31, 2001).

79 These were not misplaced fears. One of the difficulties in sorting out new responsibilities for the old KGB was that “many of its structures and functions were necessary for the preservation of a democratic society.” Waller, “Russia: Death and Resurrection,” 347.

80 Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 175; Aleksandr Korzhakov, interview with the author (January 28, 2002).

81 Decree No. 2233, December 21, 1993, in Rossiiskaya gazeta, December 24, 1993.

82 Sergei Kovalëv, interview with the author (January 21, 2001).

83 Second Yakovlev interview.

84 “It is hard labor for me to be filmed, as it is with any regulated, forced behavior. I sweat bullets, and I hate terribly to see myself on the screen.” Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 37. In Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin shone in televised performances where he did something concrete—answering citizens’ letters.

85 Source: interviewers with former staffers. See on this general subject A. L. Il’in et al., Otzvuk slova: iz opyta raboty spichraiterov pervogo prezidenta Rossii (Echo of the word: from the work experience of the speech writers of the first president of Russia) (Moscow: Nikkolo M, 1999).

86 Sergei Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno (Top nonsecret) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 103.

87 Gorbachev’s long-windedness reminded Yeltsin of Leo Tolstoy, whose monumental novels he had not wanted to read as a schoolboy in Berezniki. Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2002).

88 Valentina Lantseva, interview with the author (July 9, 2001).

89 Marietta Chudakova, interview with the author (April 14, 2003).

90 Mark Zakharov, interview with the author (June 4, 2002). Yegor Gaidar had a similar conversation with Yeltsin in the spring of 1992, suggesting the Kremlin set up a new unit for selling the reforms. “Yegor Timurovich,” he said, “do you want me to re-create the propaganda department of the CPSU Central Committee? Look, as long as I am in charge that won’t happen.” Oleg Moroz, “Kak Boris Yel’tsin vybiral sebe preyemnika” (How Boris Yeltsin chose his successor), Izvestiya, July 7, 2006.

91 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 397; Marafon, 63 (italics added). The latter passage is not in the English translation.

92 A large body of research has established the political importance of the speech of U.S. presidents, leaving in dispute whether myth or substance predominates in it. See Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Richard J. Ellis, ed., Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); and Shawn J. Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945–1955 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002).

CHAPTER ELEVEN

1 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 166–67.

2 As one scholar says of constitutional politics, it is about the components of a state or would-be state coming together, keeping themselves together, or being held together. The third path applies best to Yeltsin’s Russia. Alfred Stepan, “Russian Federalism in Comparative Perspective,” Post-Soviet Affairs 16 (April–June 2000), 133–76.

3 Ibid., 165.

4 Yevgenia Albats, “Bureaucrats and the Russian Transition: The Politics of Accommodation, 1991–2003” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2004), 93.

5 For an overview, see Andrew Barnes, Owning Russia: The Struggle over Factories, Farms, and Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

6 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002).

7 The auction process is analyzed in Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (Toronto: Doubleday, 2000), chap. 8; and David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002), chaps. 12 and 13.

8 Oleg Poptsov, Khronika vremën “Tsarya Borisa” (Chronicle of the times of “Tsar Boris”) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1995), 71.

9 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 168.

10 See Stephen Holmes, “What Russia Teaches Us Now: How Weak States Threaten Freedom,” The American Prospect 33 (July–August 1997), 30–39; David Woodruff, Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); William Alex Pridemore, ed., Ruling Russia: Law, Crime, and Justice in a Changing Society (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); and Timothy J. Colton and Stephen Holmes, eds., The State after Communism: Governance in the New Russia (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

11 Brian D. Taylor, Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 307–9.

12 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 259–60.

13 Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 440–41, citing Matthew Wyman, Public Opinion in Postcommunist Russia (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 166–67.

14 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 153, 394. While Yeltsin never described himself as nostalgic for the USSR, his wife did in one interview in 1997: “Like everyone, I have nostalgia for the Soviet Union, when we all lived together like in a big family. And now it is as if everyone has run off. Friends of mine from the institute [UPI] live abroad—in Minsk, in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan.” Interview of March 1, 1997, on Ekho Moskvy radio, at http://www.echo.msk.ru/guests/1775.

15 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 62.

16 Seventy-one percent of the USSR’s 11,000 strategic warheads were based in Russia, 16 percent in Ukraine, 12 percent in Kazakhstan, and 1 percent in Belarus. Russia’s control was 100 percent for submarine-launched strategic weapons but only 62 percent for missile-delivered warheads and 24 percent for aircraft-delivered warheads. Yegor Gaidar, Gibel’ imperii: uroki dlya sovremennoi Rossii (Death of an empire: lessons for contemporary Russia) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006), 421–22.

17 Author’s first interview with Andrei Kozyrev (January 19, 2001) and second interview with Yegor Gaidar (January 31, 2002). U.S. President Clinton’s main adviser for Russia and Eurasia recalls Kozyrev as “obsessed” with the Yugoslav situation and as worrying that the use of force against the Serbs would stir up nationalist passions and bring “a Russian Milošević” to power. Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 73–74.

18 Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 92.

19 First Kozyrev interview.

20 Ambassador Strauss provided informal feedback on a draft of Yeltsin’s speech to Congress. Yeltsin asked how members of Congress would question him at the session and was relieved to hear that foreign guests were not interrogated. Author’s interviews with Strauss and James F. Collins (both on January 9, 2006). Collins was Strauss’s top deputy in the embassy.

21 “Russian President’s Address to Joint Session of Congress,” The Washington Post, June 18, 1992. Richard Nixon, Yeltsin’s great admirer, watched the speech on television. “When Yeltsin made statements that Nixon believed were not getting a properly enthusiastic response, he yelled to the Congress through the television, ‘Cheer, you jerks!’” Monica Crowley, Nixon in Winter (New York: Random House, 1998), 97.

22 Niall Ferguson and Brigitte Granville, “‘Weimar on the Volga’: Causes and Consequences of Inflation in 1990s Russia Compared with 1920s Germany,” Journal of Economic History 60 (December 2000), 1061–87.

23 James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2003), 94.

24 Nigel Gould-Davies and Ngaire Woods, “Russia and the IMF,” International Affairs 75 (January 1999), 7–8. The IMF announced $1 billion in external support to Russia in July 1992, $3 billion in June 1993, and $6.8 billion in April 1995.

25 Talbott, Russia Hand, 286. Clinton made this statement to U.S. government officials on a flight to Russia the night of August 31–September 1, 1998.

26 Goldgeier and McFaul, Power and Purpose, 54.

27 Talbott, Russia Hand, 32, 63.

28 Ibid., 115, 145.

29 Reginald Dale, “Clinton’s ‘Preposterous’ Suggestion,” http://www.iht.com/articles/2000/06/09/think.2.t_0.php.

30 Russia requested the Council of Europe seat in May 1992. In May 1998 it ratified the council’s Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and anti-torture protocol and recognized the right of petition of its citizens to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Russians today file more suits with the court than any other nation. To conform to European norms, Yeltsin established a moratorium on executions in 1996 and in June 1999 commuted the sentences of 713 death-row prisoners. Three post-Soviet states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) joined the EU in 2004; seven other post-communist countries joined in 2004 and 2007.

31 A. L. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani (The Yeltsins in Kazan) (Kazan: Aibat, 2004), 71.

32 CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, “The Politics of Russian Nationalisms,” SOV 91-10044 (October 1991), 13; declassified version obtained at http://www.foia.cia.gov.browse_docs.asp?

33 The republics numbered sixteen until 1991, when four lesser ethnic entities (autonomous oblasts) were reclassified and the Chechen-Ingush republic broke in two, bringing the total to twenty-one. One surviving autonomous oblast and ten “autonomous districts” remained of inferior standing after the reshuffle; three of the eleven voted for sovereignty. The process is well laid out in Jeffrey Kahn, Federalism, Democratization, and the Rule of Law in Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 102–23.

34 Elise Giuliano, “Secessionism from the Bottom Up: Democratization, Nationalism, and Local Accountability in the Russian Transition,” World Politics 58 (January 2006), 295; Rashit Akhmetov, “Provody” (Sendoff), http://tatpolit.ru/category/zvezda/2007-05-04/285.

35 See Dmitry Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 125. As many as 20,000 protested during the October session of the Tatarstan Supreme Soviet, and more than fifty were injured in clashes with the police. Altogether, 142 nationalist rallies were held in Tatarstan between 1987 and 1993.

36 Aleksandr Tsipko, “Drama rossiiskogo vybora” (The drama of Russia’s choice), Izvestiya, October 1, 1991. Four of Russia’s ethnic republics and twenty-nine of its other territories exceeded the population of Estonia, whose separation from the USSR Yeltsin recognized in August 1991.

37 M. K. Gorshkov, V. V. Zhuravlëv, and L. N. Dobrokhotov, eds., Yel’tsin–Khasbulatov: yedinstvo, kompromiss, bor’ba (Yeltsin–Khasbulatov: unity, compromise, struggle) (Moscow: TERRA, 1994), 130.

38 See especially Kahn, Federalism, Democratization, and the Rule of Law, 123–32, 153–54 (story about Burbulis at 153); Akhmetov, “Provody” (Shaimiyev’s feats); Dmitry Gorenburg, “Regional Separatism in Russia: Ethnic Mobilisation or Power Grab?” Europe-Asia Studies 51 (March 1999), 245–74; and Giuliano, “Secessionism from the Bottom Up,” 276–310.

39 On August 21, 1991, Yeltsin removed by decree the chief executives of three provinces (Rostov, Samara, and Lipetsk). He first appointed individuals to this office on August 24. But on August 22 Yeltsin asserted the right to name “presidential representatives,” who were there independent of the holders of the local office.

40 Outside of war-torn Chechnya, the only republic where Yeltsin ever stepped in to name a president was Karachayevo-Cherkessiya in September 1995, at the request of the local parliament.

41 Secondary accounts mention republic proposals in the provinces of Arkhangel’sk, Irkutsk, Kaliningrad, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Orël, Primor’e, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, Vologda, and Voronezh. For comparisons, see Philip G. Roeder, Where Nation–States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 192–93; and Yoshiko M. Herrera, Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 194–244.

42 Timothy J. Colton and Cindy Skach, “A Fresh Look at Semipresidentialism: The Russian Predicament,” Journal of Democracy 16 (July 2005), 113–26.

43 Khasbulatov heard about the agreement from news reports while on a visit to South Korea. He wanted to talk about it with Yeltsin by telephone but had to settle for Naina Yeltsina. Rutskoi was informed about the deal by one of Khasbulatov’s deputies. Author’s interviews with Khasbulatov (September 26, 2001) and Rutskoi (June 5, 2001).

44 Josephine T. Andrews, When Majorities Fail: The Russian Parliament, 1990–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 26.

45 Gorshkov, Zhuravlëv, and Dobrokhotov, Yel’tsin–Khasbulatov, 201.

46 Khasbulatov interview.

47 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 265. Chernomyrdin had declared in December, when appointed premier, that he intended to work closely with the congress. This prompted Yeltsin’s press secretary, Vyacheslav Kostikov, to write a sarcastic pseudonymous article about him in a newspaper. Chernomyrdin complained to Yeltsin, who told Kostikov his criticism was fair but he should keep it to himself, and “I will sort things out with Chernomyrdin myself.” Ibid., 322–33.

48 Ibid., 293.

49 Gorshkov, Zhuravlëv, and Dobrokhotov, Yel’tsin–Khashulatov, 324–25.

50 Boris Yeltsin, first interview with the author (July 15, 2001).

51 Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 158–59. He says the agent to be used was chloropicrin, which causes lachrymation and vomiting; in high enough doses, it can lead to serious injury or death.

52 Gorshkov, Zhuravlëv, and Dobrokhotov, Yel’tsin–Khashulatov, 369–71.

53 The Constitutional Court had ruled that the results on the third and fourth questions would be binding only if a majority of the entire electorate came out in favor.

54 Dmitri K. Simes, “Remembering Yeltsin,” http://www.nationalinterest.org/BlogSE.aspx?id=14110.

55 Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 514.

56 Baturin et al., Epokha, 345.

57 I owe this point to Valentin Yumashev, who knows Yeltsin’s political thinking as well as anyone. Yeltsin describes his conversations with Grachëv about the constitutional crisis, and his confidence in Grachëv’s support, in Zapiski, 350–51. On September 16 Yeltsin paid a call on the Dzerzhinsky Motorized Rifle Division, which reported to the MVD.

58 Previously undisclosed details from the author’s second interview with Vladimir Bokser (May 11, 2001) and interview with Vitalii Nasedkin (June 9, 2001).

59 Baturin et al., Epokha, 357.

60 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 347.

61 Ibid., 375; Gorshkov, Zhuravlëv, and Dobrokhotov, Yel’tsin–Khasbulatov, 526.

62 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 347.

63 Ibid., 384–86, describes the scene with Grachëv, as does Sergei Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno (Top nonsecret) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 317. On the allimportant responsibility question, see Robert V. Barylski, The Soldier in Russian Politics: Duty, Dictatorship, and Democracy Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998), 260–62; and especially Taylor, Politics and the Russian Army, 295–301.

64 Louis D. Sell, “Embassy Under Siege: An Eyewitness Account of Yeltsin’s 1993 Attack on Parliament,” Problems of Post-Communism 50 (July–August 2003), 61.

65 This act is described in Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 198.

66 Some opposition sources put the death toll much higher, at 500 or even 1,000.

67 Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Sergei Filatov, proposed the plebiscite to him on October 5, having fielded a suggestion to this effect from Yurii Ryzhov, the Russian ambassador to Paris (who had heard it from the Sorbonne law professor Michel Lesage). Yeltsin agreed immediately, says Filatov (Sovershenno nesekretno, 325–26). But Yeltsin had consistently favored putting a new constitution to the electorate, and so was returning to this idea rather than discovering it.

68 Valerii Zor’kin had favored a “zero option” whereby Yeltsin and parliament would face election at exactly the same time. Yeltsin was never for it, although it would probably have yielded better electoral results for him than those realized in December 1993.

69 “Prezident Rossii otvechayet na voprosy gazety ‘Izvestiya’” (The president of Russia answers the questions of the newspaper Izvestiya), Izvestiya, November 16, 1993.

70 Unnamed speaker on October 23, in Konstitutsionnoye soveshchaniye: stenogrammy, materialy, dokumenty (The Constitutional Conference: stenographic records, materials, documents), 20 vols. (Moscow: Yuridicheskaya literatura, 1996), 19:163.

71 Timothy J. Colton, “Public Opinion and the Constitutional Referendum,” in Timothy J. Colton and Jerry F. Hough, eds., Growing Pains: Russian Democracy and the Election of 1993 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1998), 293. Fifty-five percent of the electors voted on the constitution. A Yeltsin decree had set the bar for confirmation at a 50 percent turnout and a 50 percent positive vote. This was much lower than the absolute majority of the entire electorate required by the Russian law on referendums, adopted in October 1990.

72 Even a study deeply critical of Yeltsin stresses the self-isolation of his opponents and that “none of our criticism of Yeltsin implies that a military victory by the White House forces would have set Russia on a better path than it in fact took. That seems most improbable.” Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 428.

73 “Prezident Rossii otvechayet na voprosy gazety ‘Izvestiya.’”

74 In this sense, Yeltsin “sought to construct the presidency as the ruler of those who govern, rather than one who is himself responsible for governing.” Alexander Sokolowski, “Bankrupt Government: Intra-Executive Relations and the Politics of Budgetary Irresponsibility in El’tsin’s Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 53 (June 2001), 543.

75 Some court decisions indicated he should explain his vetoes, but Yeltsin complied selectively and no systematic list of vetoes was published. Yeltsin signed 752 bills from 1994 through 1998 and vetoed 216. Andrea Chandler, “Presidential Veto Power in Post-Communist Russia, 1994–1998,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 34 (September 2001), 487–516.

76 Konstitutsionnoye soveshchaniye, 20:40, which shows Yeltsin’s stroke of the pen. This was the most important of the fourteen changes Yeltsin made in the draft transmitted to him on November 7. The final clause of Article 90 did specify that his edicts “should not contradict” the constitution and laws.

77 Because Soviet leaders were primarily party heads, protocol was simple and arrangements were handled by the foreign ministry. Gorbachev created a protocol office in his new presidential establishment in 1990. Yeltsin hired the tactful and decent Shevchenko in January 1992 and upgraded the office. For the arrangements on everything from heraldry to the goblets at Kremlin banquets, see V. N. Shevchenko et al., Protokol Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Protocol of the Russian Federation) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000).

78 Gorshkov, Zhuravlëv, and Dobrokhotov, Yel’tsin–Khasbulatov, 543.

79 Quoted in Timothy J. Colton, “Introduction,” in Colton and Hough, Growing Pains, 13. Six cabinet ministers were on the Russia’s Choice list but five, including three deputy premiers, ran for other parties and blocs.

80 Details here from Aleksandr Petrov, “Glavnaya tema: ‘menya vosprinyali kak yel’tsinskogo palacha’” (Main theme: “they took me for Yeltsin’s executioner”), Moskovskiye novosti, September 30, 2003.

81 The line of reasoning Kazannik pursued, and it is a debatable one, is that the government might have negotiated peacefully with the rebels on October 3, in the hours after their initial attack on the Ostankino television tower was repulsed. He knew that the trail of responsibility for “criminal orders,” if that is what they were, led back to Yeltsin as commander-in-chief, but prosecution of a sitting president was an “extremely complex” problem. Ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 When Khasbulatov sent Yeltsin a letter in 1996 asking to be allowed to use a Kremlin medical clinic, Yeltsin agreed without hesitation. Yevgenii Kiselëv, “Plyaski na grablyakh” (Dancing on horse rakes), Moskovskiye novosti, September 30, 2003.

84 Kazannik had him released on bail pending trial due to his heart condition. Yeltsin objected (better to let him die in prison, he said) but let it be. After the amnesty, Barannikov asked Yeltsin to let him live in the apartment building in Krylatskoye in which the president’s family was to be registered, and Yeltsin was in favor, until Korzhakov talked him out of it. Petrov, “Glavnaya tema”; Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 143–44. Barannikov died in July 1995.

85 Ligachëv was elected in 1993. In 1995 he was joined in the communist fraction by Anatolii Luk’yanov. Nikolai Ryzhkov was also elected in 1995 and sat in an affiliated group.

86 See Paul Chaisty and Petra Schleiter, “Productive but Not Valued: The Russian State Duma, 1994–2001,” Europe-Asia Studies 54 (July 2002), 704; and Tiffany A. Troxel, Parliamentary Power in Russia, 1994–2001: President vs. Parliament (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

87 Thomas F. Remington, “Laws, Decrees, and Russian Constitutions: The First Hundred Years” (unpublished paper, Emory University, 2006). This does not count secret decrees, mostly, one assumes, in the national-security realm. The numbers refer only to “normative” decrees with wide consequences, as opposed to “nonnormative” rulings on particular cases. See also Remington, “Democratization, Separation of Powers, and State Capacity,” in Colton and Holmes, State after Communism, 261–98; and Scott Parrish, “Presidential Decree Authority in Russia, 1991–1995,” in John M. Carey and Matthew S. Shugart, eds., Executive Decree Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 62–103.

88 Roeder, Where Nation-States Come From, 168–69.

89 Giuliano, “Secessionism from the Bottom Up,” 286. The significance of Yeltsin’s triumph over his opponents at the center, and the contrast with Gorbachev’s weakness in 1990–91, is well drawn in Roeder, Where Nation-States Come From, chap. 6.

90 This had been Yeltsin’s intent all along, but the plan was upended by his dissolution of provincial legislatures in October 1993, which left half of the proposed representatives to the Federation Council without qualifying office. On the shift to direct election of governors, see Marc Zlotnik, “Russia’s Elected Governors: A Force to Be Reckoned With,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 5 (Spring 1997), 184–96.

91 “Mr. Yeltsin proposes that each of these homelands make a treaty with Russia ‘on an equal basis,’ agreeing on the division of power. His hope is that once they are given full responsibility for their decisions, they will see the folly of economic and political isolation, and the advantages of throwing in with Mr. Yeltsin for greater influence and efficiency. ‘I don’t know, perhaps you will decide to delegate your foreign relations to Russia,’ Mr. Yeltsin suggested. ‘Why should you keep 170 embassies in 170 countries?’” Bill Keller, “Kazan Journal: Yeltsin’s Response to the Separatists,” New York Times, September 3, 1990. Shaimiyev has said that the evening of the Kazan speech Yeltsin asked his advice on what to do next. Shaimiyev suggested a working group to come up with a treaty, and Yeltsin agreed. Anna Rudnitskaya, “Stranno prinyali i stranno otklonili” (Adopted strangely and voted down strangely), http://www.izbrannoe.ru/6077.html.

92 Boris Bronshtein and Vasilii Kononenko, “Lidery demonstratiruyut v Kazani novyye podkhody, a okruzheniyie—ispytannyye priëmy pokazukhi” (The leaders demonstrate new approaches in Kazan, but their entourage engages in tested forms of make-believe), Izvestiya, June 1, 1994.

93 Kahn, Federalism, Democratization, and the Rule of Law, 165.

94 See especially ibid.; Matthew Crosston, Shadow Federalism: Implications for Democratic Consolidation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Yeltsin did reverse a good many decisions by provincial executives but he did not make it a practice to review provincial legislation. See V. O. Lunich and A. V. Mazurov, Ukazy Prezidenta RF (Decrees of the president of the Russian Federation) (Moscow: Zakon i pravo, 2000), 79–86.

95 “Prezident RF otvechayet na voprosy redaktsii ‘Truda’” (The president of the Russian Federation answers the questions of the editorial board of Trud), Trud, August 26, 1994.

96 Daniel S. Treisman, After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 75–79.

97 Baturin et al., Epokha, 397. A good example of toleration of socialistic policies was Lenin’s birthplace, Ul’yanovsk on the south Volga. Under the former CPSU boss Yurii Goryachev, the provincial government controlled food prices and prevented the export of foods to other areas until 1995.

98 Yeltsin, speaking in retirement about his relations with Rossel. Kirill Dybskii, “Ot pervogo litsa: vsë pravil’no” (From the first person: everything is fine), Itogi, January 30, 2006. In the Kursk election, the Kremlin supported the incumbent, Vasilii Shuteyev, whom Yeltsin had appointed in 1991. Of the four governors other than Rossel fired by Yeltsin in 1993, three—Yurii Lodkin in Bryansk, Vitalii Mukha in Novosibirsk, and Pëtr Sumin in Chelyabinsk—regained their posts through election in 1995–96. Aleksandr Surat in Amur oblast ran for election in 1997 but lost. Rossel began his comeback by being elected to represent Sverdlovsk in the Federation Council, the national upper house, in December 1993, one month after being fired by Yeltsin; in April 1994 he was chosen chairman of the oblast legislature.

99 Author’s interviews with Emil Pain (April 3, 2001), Leonid Smirnyagin (May 24, 2001), and Valentin Yumashev (several, 2006 and 2007). Prusak (born 1960) was the youngest member of this group and Matochkin (born 1931) the oldest. Yeltsin’s ties with Guvzhin, Shaimiyev, and Stroyev went back to his apparatchik roots. Mikhail Nikolayev of Sakha fell into the same category, but I omit him from the list because his relations with Yeltsin blew hot and cold. Yeltsin knew Fëdorov, Prusak, and Sobchak from the Soviet congress of deputies and the Interregional Deputies Group, and Nemtsov from the Russian parliament. Fëdorov was Russian minister of justice from 1990 until his resignation in 1993 but continued to have cordial dealings with Yeltsin after moving to Chuvashiya.

100 He made the remark at the opening of a tennis court, during a tour of Volga cities on the steamboat Rossiya. Yeltsin had asked Nemtsov to do something about the nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovskii, who was following in his wake in a rented boat, making anti-Yeltsin speeches at every stop. Nemtsov ordered the local water authorities to detain Zhirinovskii’s vessel in one of the Volga locks upriver of Nizhnii Novgorod—a peremptory resolution of the problem that Yeltsin loved and in which he surely saw a similarity to his own assertiveness. Yeltsin took Nemtsov with him to the United States and introduced him to President Clinton as a potential heir. “Boris Nemtsov—Yevgenii Al’bats o Yel’tsine” (Boris Nemtsov to Yevgeniya Al’bats about Yeltsin), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007.

101 “Prezident RF otvechayet na voprosy redaktsii ‘Truda.’

102 The 350,000 Chechens affected were part of the 2 million Soviet citizens deported during the war. In the North Caucasus, four other groups—the Balkars, Ingush, Kalmyks, and Karachai—were also deported en masse, and none of them was to reject Russian authority in the 1990s.

103 See Emil Souleimanov, An Endless War: The Russian-Chechen Conflict in Perspective (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007), 24–26.

104 Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 107.

105 Thomas Goltz, Chechnya Diary: A War Correspondent’s Story of Surviving the War in Chechnya (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), 52.

106 Undated statement shown in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 4.

107 Gall and de Waal, Chechnya, 150–51; John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 158–60.

108 V. A. Tishkov, Ye. L. Belyayeva, and G. V. Marchenko, Chechenskii krizis: analiticheskoye obozreniye (The Chechen crisis: an analytical review) (Moscow: Tsentr kompleksnykh sotsial’nykh issledovanii i marketinga, 1995), 33.

109 Ibid. This conversation with Shaimiyev has been dated variously in March or May of 1994. But Gall and de Waal, Chechnya, 146–47, relying on interviews, refer to a conversation on June 10. See also the references to Dudayev’s rhetoric in Taimaz Abubakarov, Rezhim Dzhokhara Dudayeva: zapiski dudayevskogo ministra ekonomiki i finansov (The regime of Djokhar Dudayev: notes of Dudayev’s minister of economics and finance) (Moscow: INSAN, 1998), 167.

110 Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 69.

111 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 371.

112 Sergei Yushenkov, chairman of the Duma’s defense committee at the time, quoted in Gall and de Waal, Chechnya, 161. The statement is reported a little differently in S. N. Yushenkov, Voina v Chechne i problemy rossiiskoi gosudarstvennosti i demokratii (The war in Chechnya and problems of Russian statehood and democracy) (Moscow: Semetei, 1995), 75. Here Lobov is quoted as observing that Clinton’s ratings went up after the Haiti operation but not as advocating that Yeltsin intervene in Chechnya for that reason.

113 Oleg Lobov, interview with the author (May 29, 2002).

114 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 88. George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chap. 9, maintains that Yeltsin began the war as much to recoup lost popularity as to negate the threat to Russia’s unity. The argument is well put, but there is no hard evidence to support it.

115 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 69.

116 Muzhskoi razgovor dva (Male conversation two), interview of Yeltsin by El’dar Ryazanov on ORT-TV, June 16, 1996 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya).

117 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 69.

CHAPTER TWELVE

1 The phrase is from Arnold M. Ludwig, King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 172–74.

2 Quotations from Sergei Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno (Top nonsecret) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 418–19; Vyacheslav Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom: zapiski press-sekretarya (Romance with a president: notes of a press secretary) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997), 163; and Tatyana Malkina, interview with the author (June 13, 2001).

3 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 308; “Proshchaniye s mamoi” (Farewell to mama), Argumenty i fakty, March 24, 1993.

4 Oleg Poptsov, Khronika vremën “Tsarya Borisa” (Chronicle of the times of “Tsar Boris”) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1995), 55.

5 Yeltsin holding his breath is taken from Shamil Tarpishchev, interview with the author (January 25, 2002). For the swims, see Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 77–78; Lev Sukhanov, Tri goda s Yel’tsinym: zapiski pervogo pomoshchnika (Three years with Yeltsin: notes of his first assistant) (Riga: Vaga, 1992), 306–7; and Aleksandr Lebed’, Za derzhavu obidno (I feel hurt for the state) (Moscow: Moskovskaya pravda, 1995), 380.

6 Shamil’ Tarpishchev, Samyi dolgii match (The longest match) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1999), 300. The transferability of Yeltsin’s volleyball skills to tennis makes sense in light of history. William G. Morgan of Holyoke, Massachusetts, invented volleyball in 1895 as a mix of tennis, basketball, and handball.

7 Monica Crowley, Nixon in Winter (New York: Random House, 1998), 111. Yeltsin canceled a fourth meeting in 1994 out of unhappiness with Nixon having first met opposition politicians.

8 Tatyana Yumasheva, third interview with the author (January 25, 2007).

9 Muzhskoi razgovor (Male conversation), interview of Yeltsin by El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, November 7, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya).

10 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 337.

11 Natal’ya Konstantinova, Zhenskii vzglyad na kremlëvskuyu zhizn’ (A woman’s view of Kremlin life) (Moscow: Geleos, 1999), 136.

12 Den’ v sem’e prezidenta (A day in the president’s family), interviews of the Yeltsin family by El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, April 20, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya).

13 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 350. I learned about the philanthropy from my interviews with Irena Lesnevskaya (January 24, 2001) and Galina Volchek (January 30, 2002). Two of the actresses Naina Yeltsina aided were Sof’ya Pilyavskaya (1911–2000) and Marina Ladynina (1908—2003).

14 Konstantinova, Zhenskii vzglyad, 225.

15 Kozyrev interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 2.

16 Vladimir Shevchenko, third interview with the author (July 15, 2001).

17 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 340–41. Yeltsin’s declared hard-currency book royalties peaked in 1994 at $280,000. He first made disclosures about his income and property during the 1996 election campaign. See A. A. Mukhin and P. A. Kozlov, “Semeinyye” tainy, ili neofitsial’nyi lobbizm v Rossii (“Family” secrets, or unofficial lobbying in Russia) (Moscow: Tsentr politicheskoi informatsii, 2003), 106–9.

18 Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 314–15. The original is in Marafon, 340.

19 Author’s interviews with family members. In the late 1990s, for tax purposes, Yeltsin declared the value of the city apartment and the land and dacha at Gorki-10 at about $210,000. In today’s prices, the Gorki-10 land alone would be worth many times that. Unverifiable and, to me, implausible claims about the Yeltsins enriching themselves at the public trough can be found at http://compromat.ru/main/eltsyn/a.htm; and http://www.flb.ru/info. Many were originally published in the newspaper Moskovskii komsomolets.

20 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 473.

21 Yeltsin’s displeasure at Rutskoi that day has been well documented. In one of his press interviews after the death of Yeltsin in 2007, Rutskoi said how impressed he was by the fact that Yeltsin never swore!

22 Aleksandr Korzhakov, interview with the author (January 28, 2002).

23 Vladimir Shevchenko, Povsednevnaya zhizn’ Kremlya pri prezidentakh (The everyday life of the Kremlin under the presidents) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2004), 126–27.

24 Matt Taibbi, “Butka: Boris Yeltsin, Revisited,” http://exile.ru/105/yeltsin.

25 Viktor Manyukhin, Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 178.

26 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 270.

27 Robert S. Strauss, interview with the author (January 9, 2006).

28 Of the German, Yeltsin wrote (Marafon, 164), “Kohl and I always found it easy to understand each other psychologically. We resembled one another in terms of our reactions and style of communication and saw the world from the same generational bell tower.” Yeltsin used the word “friend” (drug) to describe Kohl, Jiang, and Jacques Chirac of France (born in 1932), and mentioned how much he liked speaking Russian with Jiang, who lived in Moscow in the 1950s. He did not discuss Strauss in his memoirs. By contrast, Yeltsin’s relations with François Mitterrand, the president of France until January 1996 (born in 1916), were always chilly.

29 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 250.

30 Details from Korzhakov interview. The Sakha visit was in December 1990, when Yeltsin was still parliamentary chairman.

31 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 391.

32 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 9.

33 The masculine side of comradeship has been revealed in studies of Soviet propaganda, literature, and art. See Eliot Borenstein, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

34 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 198–99.

35 Conversation with Naina Yeltsina during my third interview with Boris Yeltsin (September 12, 2002).

36 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 458, 19.

37 Viktor Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000). Chernomyrdin is one of Moscow’s most accomplished swearers, and thus had to suppress that habit as well as any chumminess.

38 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 176–77; Aleksandr Rutskoi, interview with the author (June 5, 2001).

39 This congruity was stressed in my interviews with Boris Nemtsov.

40 Yegor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Days of defeats and victories) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 106.

41 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:372. Gorbachev throws in archly that many Soviet builders lied about project completion and made believe that half-finished buildings were ready for occupancy.

42 Other than Yeltsin, the construction engineer who soared highest in Russian politics in the 1990s was the Sverdlovsker Oleg Lobov. Lobov was a level-tempered administrator with none of Yeltsin’s quirks.

43 Georgii Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh (With leaders and without them) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 376.

44 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 305.

45 Oleg Davydov, “Yel’tsinskaya trekhkhodovka” (The Yeltsin three-step), in A. N. Starkov, ed., Rossiiskaya elita: psikhologicheskiye portrety (The Russian elite: psychological portraits) (Moscow: Ladomir, 2000), 65–80.

46 See, for example, “Altered Statesmen: Boris Yeltsin,” http://www.discoverychannel.co.uk/alteredstatesmen/features5.shtml. The Wikipedia online encyclopedia now reports as established fact that Yeltsin, along with Winston Churchill, was cyclothymic. Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), provides what purports to be analysis of other mental conditions, including paranoia, persecution mania, schizophrenia, and “hysterical psychopathy.” This text reports a few useful anecdotes, mostly from Korzhakov, but the discussion of Yeltsin’s mental state is pure character assassination. Never saying directly that he had most of these conditions, let alone adducing evidence, it prints stylized descriptions of them in boldface in the midst of narration of incidents in his life, leaving it to the reader to draw conclusions. It is also full of basic factual errors. For more responsible discussion of select themes, see Martin Ebon, “Yeltsin’s V.I.P. Depression,” http://www.mhsource.com/exclusive/yeltsin.html.

47 Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 151; Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 87; Baturin et al., Epokha, 367; Sergei Filatov, second interview with the author (January 25, 2002).

48 Tarpishchev interview.

49 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 85–86.

50 Muzhskoi razgovor.

51 Baturin et al., Epokha, 504.

52 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 304–5.

53 Ibid., 239.

54 Ibid., 293.

55 Ibid.; Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 203.

56 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 203.

57 This event is reported only in the revised edition of Korzhakov’s memoir: Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata; poslesloviye (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk; epilogue) (Moscow: Detektiv-press, 2004), 245–46. He told me about it in our interview in 2002. The other men present were reportedly Viktor Ilyushin and Mikhail Barsukov, neither of whom has contradicted Korzhakov’s account. Korzhakov knew Yeltsin would not be able to put a bullet in his head but feared, nonetheless, that he might have a heart attack due to the strain.

58 Baturin et al., Epokha, 632.

59 Yelena Bonner, interview with the author (March 13, 2001).

60 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 23.

61 Yevgenii Primakov, Vosem’ mesyatsev plyus… (Eight months plus) (Moscow: Mysl’, 2001), 93.

62 Ludwig, King of the Mountain, 233–40. Ludwig (233) includes combinations of the following symptoms: “a melancholy mood, a sleep disturbance, increased or decreased appetite, lack of energy, excessive tearfulness, a sense of dread or futility, social withdrawal, morbid thoughts, or suicidal preoccupation.”

63 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 348.

64 Baturin et al., Epokha, 505, 507.

65 Third Yeltsin interview.

66 Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom, 301, 306–7.

67 Valentin Yumashev, fourth interview with the author (January 22, 2007).

68 Author’s first interview with Vladimir Bokser (May 11, 2000) and interviews with Jack Matlock (September 1, 2005), Robert Strauss (January 9, 2006), Valerii Bortsov (June 11, 2001), Aleksandr Rutskoi (June 5, 2001), and Yurii Ryzhov (June 7, 2000); and Aleksandr Korzhakov, “Yel’tsin ne pozvolyal, chtoby v yego kompanii sachkovali s vypivkoi” (Yeltsin did not allow people to goof off because of drink in his company), http://news.rin.ru/news///130889.

69 A reporter in 1991 asked her about Yeltsin’s upbringing, and she brushed off reports that he was a drinker: “I know, a lot of rumors are circulating. But I am his mother, I know my son.” She then related the story, reported in Chapter 2, of Yeltsin as a teenager in Berezniki pouring another boy’s glass of vodka on the ground. Izabella Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov ot Belogo doma” (Thousands of kilometers from the White House), Vechernyaya Moskva, October 2, 1991.

70 Talbott, Russia Hand, 44–45; Strobe Talbott, interview with the author (January 9, 2006). Given the eight-hour time difference between Washington and Moscow and Clinton’s dislike of early-morning appointments, coordination of the two presidents’ schedules was no easy task.

71 By evening’s end, Yeltsin’s skin was stretched across his cheeks and a Clinton adviser knew what people meant when they described someone who had too much to drink as “tight.” George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), 140.

72 Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 411–12, 217.

73 Vladimir Bokser, second interview with the author (May 11, 2001); and Bonner interview.

74 Andrei Kozyrev, second interview with the author (September 18, 2001). Kozyrev declined to name the minister.

75 The performance can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAr0MgGrwHA.

76 The letter is reproduced in Baturin et al., Epokha, 521–23. Korzhakov writes that Pavel Grachëv also signed; the other sources deny it. Yeltsin assistants Yurii Baturin and Georgii Satarov took part in the composition but did not sign, since they had been with him for only a year. The Repin painting in question is the tableau Reply of the Zaporozh’e Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey, completed in 1891.

77 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 349.

78 On his visit to Britain in the last week of September, undertaken after his return from Sochi, Yeltsin spent a night at Chequers as a guest of John Major. He and the prime minister called on an English pub in the village of Great Kimble, knocking on the door to get the owner to open up (Yeltsin said he was the president of Russia and the proprietor replied that he was the kaiser of Germany). That evening at the residence, Yeltsin “came downstairs visibly drunk, and took an immediate dislike to his placement. He picked up his own table card, next door to that of Princess Alexandra, and deposited both the card and himself next to John Major, with whom he chatted amiably, if incoherently, all evening.” Max Hastings, Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers (London: Macmillan, 2002), 205.

79 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 348–50.

80 “When she caught sight of Korzhakov, she shook” (Pri vide Korzhakova, yei sotryaslo). Valentin Yumashev, third interview with the author (September 13, 2006).

81 Baturin et al., Epokha, 515.

82 Ibid., 524; Lyudmila Pikhoya, interview with the author (September 26, 2001).

83 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 349.

84 Ludwig, King of the Mountain, 453.

85 For Churchill in the 1930s, “A typical day’s imbibing would begin in midmorning with a whisky and soda and continue through a bottle of champagne at lunch, more whisky and soda in the afternoon, sherry before dinner, another bottle of champagne during dinner, the best part of a bottle of brandy after dinner, and would end with a final whisky and soda before going to bed. On occasions he drank even more than this.” Clive Ponting, Churchill (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 388.

86 Anatolii Chernyayev, 1991 god: dnevnik pomoshchnika Prezidenta SSSR (The year 1991: diary of an assistant to the president of the USSR) (Moscow: TERRA, 1997), 265.

87 Stephanopoulos, All Too Human, 140. Of the correspondence between alcohol consumption and performance in government, Ludwig (in King of the Mountain, 230) reports being “astounded by how well certain rulers were able to run their countries and accomplish impressive deeds” despite their periodic abuse of alcohol. He gives Churchill and Atatürk as examples. A counterexample is Harold Wilson, the British prime minister of the 1960s and 1970s who suffered alcoholic dementia by age sixty.

88 I first heard this interpretation of mass attitudes toward Yeltsin’s use of alcohol from the pollster Aleksandr Oslon (interview, January 25, 2001).

89 Ruslan Khasbulatov, interview with the author (September 26, 2001).

90 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 156.

91 “Sostoyaniye zdorov’ya Borisa Yel’tsina khorosheye” (The state of Boris Yeltsin’s health is good), Izvestiya, July 10, 1992.

92 Author’s interview with El’dar Ryazanov (May 30, 2001); Muzhskoi razgovor.

93 Korzhakov’s firsthand account stresses Yeltsin’s heart pains, but the group had drinks on the ground and in the air. During the 1996 election campaign, Boris Nemtsov, the governor of Nizhnii Novgorod region, who had made cracks about Shannon, was to accompany him on a snap trip to Chechnya. Nemtsov polished off a quart of vodka on the return flight—Yeltsin had almost none—and was incoherent in front of the press at the Moscow airport. Back in Nizhnii, a telephone call from Yeltsin awakened him the next morning at six A.M., and the president taunted him with the similarity to his mishap in Ireland. “Boris Nemtsov—Yevgenii Al’bats o Yel’tsine” (Boris Nemtsov to Yevgeniya Al’bats about Yeltsin), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007.

94 The dates of the first two attacks were publicized in 1995. The third was kept secret and is mentioned, without an exact date, in Chazov, Rok, 250–51; Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 319; and Yel’tsin, Marafon, 22. Chazov speaks of an attack in September 1995, but seems to confuse it with the event of October 26. Yeltsin implies in his memoir that his first full-fledged heart attack (a myocardial infarction, which causes permanent damage to muscle cells) was in December; Chazov, a cardiologist, does not make this distinction.

95 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin… poslesloviye, 325–26.

96 Chazov, Rok, 248–50. In the United States in October, Yeltsin was busy at the bar at the United Nations and the summit with President Clinton in Hyde Park, New York. It was after Hyde Park that Clinton made his oft-quoted one-liner to Strobe Talbott that “Yeltsin drunk is better than most of the alternatives sober.” Yeltsin was to claim in Marafon, 49, that he was never shown the physicians’ report that recommended the angiogram.

97 See the comments on Yeltsin drinking faux vodka toasts with water in Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 450.

98 Drafts of Article 3 contained a guarantee of “freedom of the means of mass communication.” Liberal aides preferred the grander “freedom of mass communication,” and won the president over.

99 Quotations from Baturin et al., Epokha, 494.

100 Vyacheslav Kostikov, interview with the author (May 28, 2001). Journalists sometimes got phone calls from Yeltsin about particular stories. In September 1992, for example, Yeltsin rang up Izvestiya’s diplomatic correspondent and told him his stories about Russian-Japanese relations were “too ironic,” but his tone was warm and he did not demand any change. Konstantin Eggert, interview with the author (September 12, 2006).

101 Yakovlev had broadcast a documentary about ethnic relations in the North Caucasus that inflamed local officials; Poptsov was accused of anti-government bias in news coverage. Both moved on to other successes.

102 Ellen Mickiewiecz, Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Ivan Zassoursky, Media and Power in Post-Soviet Russia (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 2004).

103 Mayor Anatolii Sobchak of St. Petersburg was involved in the negotiations over its creation, because it initially broadcast on Channel 5, the national station out of the northern capital. NTV moved to Channel 4 in 1994 and was allowed to broadcast the full day three years later. The first private station in Russia was TV-6, which started in January 1993. Originally partnered with Ted Turner, TV-6 mostly broadcast entertainment.

104 Igor Malashenko, interview with the author (March 18, 2001).

105 Viktor Shenderovich, interview with the author (February 26, 2004); Shenderovich, Kukliada (Puppet games) (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Fonda Russkoi poezii, 1999), 21–44; David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002), 291–94. The script for “Lower Depths” is in Shenderovich, Kukly (Puppets) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 137–44. Hoffman emphasizes Korzhakov as the instigator of the formal charge, but Shenderovich (interview) said it was made at the request of Chernomyrdin.

106 Shenderovich interview. The Hamlet skit is in Shenderovich, Kukly, 6–15.

107 Shenderovich, Kukly, 121–22.

108 I am grateful to John Dunn of the University of Glasgow for the total number of Yeltsin roles. See his “Humour and Satire on Post-Soviet Russian Television,” in Lesley Milne, ed., Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 181–222.

109 Shenderovich, Kukly, 136.

110 Author’s interviews with family members.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1 The nickname for the route when Stalin was driven up and down it daily was the amerikanka, “American way,” in reference to its satin-smooth blacktop. Stalin’s two main dachas were located off of it, which was one of its attractions to the communist elite. The area it ran through had little industry, was upwind and upriver of Moscow and its pollution, and contained many villas and gentry estates from tsarist times that were adaptable to new needs.

2 As noted in Chapter 10, Yeltsin was in Building No. 14 for about eighteen months in 1994–96. During the reconstruction of Building No. 1, the focal fireplace in the president’s ceremonial office was also redone in malachite at his request. Ivan Sautov, director of the Tsarskoye Selo estate near St. Petersburg, supervised the renewal. “Yeltsin was very satisfied and personally thanked many of the builders and subcontractors. He is after all a construction engineer and understands this kind of thing.” “U nas tut vsë nastoyashcheye” (Everything here is genuine), interview with Pavel Borodin in Kommersant-Daily, March 24, 1999. Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev all had their Kremlin offices in Building No. 1, though in different rooms than Gorbachev; Brezhnev’s place was in Building No. 14.

3 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 166.

4 Quotations from ibid., 167–68.

5 Examples here would be American presidential theory, France’s dual executive, and German federalism and electoral legislation.

6 “My mozhem byt’ tvërdo uvereny: Rossiya vozroditsya” (We can be certain that Russia will be reborn), Izvestiya, July 10, 1991.

7 “Obrashcheniye Prezidenta Rossii k narodam Rossii, k s”ezdu narodnykh deputatov Rossiiskoi Federatsii” (Address of the president of Russia to the peoples of Russia and the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation), Rossiiskaya gazeta, October 29, 1991.

8 Stalin told a relative in the 1930s that the Russians “need a tsar, whom they can worship and for whom they can live and work.” He compared himself to Peter the Great, Alexander I, Nicholas I, and the Persian shahs. Georgia, his birthplace, was for centuries part of the Persian empire. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Random House, 2003), 177.

9 Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001); Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999).

10 Boris Nemtsov, Provintsial (Provincial) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997), 81–82. The incident in Nizhnii Novgorod is more fully described in Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (Toronto: Doubleday, 2000), 38–40.

11 These are the components of the regal bearing given in Arnold M. Ludwig, King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 179–80.

12 The appellation ignored Boris Godunov, whose life was fictionalized in Alexander Pushkin’s play and Modest Mussorgsky’s opera. Godunov reigned from 1598 to 1605, during the Time of Troubles preceding the Romanov dynasty.

13 His granddaughter Yekaterina related in the late 1980s that when she asked Yeltsin’s help with a personal problem (removing the bodyguard attached to her when she enrolled in university), “The tsar resolved the problem in his own manner” and ordered the guard removed. “Sensatsionnoye interv’yu rossiiskoi ‘printsessy’” (Sensational interview with a Russian princess), Moskovskii komsomolets, January 9, 1998. The piece was first published in Paris Match in December 1997.

14 Boris Nemtsov, first interview with the author (October 17, 2000). The exchange in Stockholm occurred on December 2, 1997, in Yeltsin’s second term.

15 Pavel Voshchanov, interview with the author (June 15, 2000). That incident occurred in February 1992, just before Voshchanov stepped down, when he questioned a personnel decision by Yeltsin.

16 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002)

17 Aleksandr Livshits, interview with the author (January 19, 2001).

18 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 424.

19 Yegor Gaidar, second interview with the author (January 31, 2002).

20 Boris Fëdorov, Desyat’ bezumnykh let (Ten crazy years) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1999), 131.

21 Livshits interview.

22 The Kremlin had constitutional authority over 30,000 positions in the executive branch (Donald N. Jensen, “How Russia Is Ruled—1998,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 7 [Summer 1999], 349). But the number Yeltsin attended to was several hundred.

23 Yeltsin concerned himself with golden parachutes only for functionaries who had been close to him. In 1993, for instance, he made Yurii Petrov head of a new State Investment Corporation, in control of several hundred million dollars of capital. When Viktor Ilyushin stepped down as senior assistant in 1996, he was appointed deputy prime minister, and when he left that position he was hired as a vice president of Gazprom. But most of the departed easily found opportunities in the new private sector. As Oleg Soskovets, the ranking member of the Korzhakov group, with whom Yeltsin broke in 1996, put it, “In contemporary Russia, you can use your knowledge outside of the public service. They give you something to occupy yourself with, thank God.” Interview with the author (March 31, 2004).

24 Officeholders are given at http://rulers.org/russgov.html. Not counted here are the new defense minister and the new head of internal security appointed in late June 1996.

25 Baturin et al., Epokha, 339.

26 Yeltsin allies from the democratic opposition to the Soviet regime criticized the appropriation of the health directorate. See, for example, Ella Pamfilova, “Grustno i stranno” (Sadly and strangely), in Yurii Burtin and Eduard Molchanov, eds., God posle avgusta: gorech’ i vybor (A year after August: bitterness and choice) (Moscow: Literatura i politika, 1992), 188–89.

27 Quotation from Ivan Goryaev, “The Best of the Empires, Or Crafty Devil of a Manager,” http://www.newtimes.ru/eng/detail.asp?art_id=150. Borodin, a former CPSU apparatchik, had been mayor of Yakutsk since 1988 and met Korzhakov while a deputy to the Russian congress in 1990–91. He was named deputy director of the unreformed business department (then called the Main Social-Production Directorate) in the spring of 1993. The USSR Council of Ministers and the Central Committee of the CPSU had separate business offices before 1991. The head of the party unit, Nikolai Kruchina, committed suicide after the August putsch. The presidential equivalent was then kept apart from the government’s, and the congress of deputies had its own benefits arm.

28 Boris Fëdorov, interview with the author (September 22, 2001).

29 The involvement in the oil trade came to light in Yevgeniya Al’bats, “Vlast’ taino sozdaët svoyu tenevuyu ekonomiku” (The authorities are secretly creating their own shadow economy), Izvestiya, February 1, 1995. Borodin is said to have asked for an oil-export quota from the Ministry of Economics after it turned down as unaffordable, and unacceptable to the Duma, his request for funds to pay for the restoration of the Grand Kremlin Palace. An unidentified ministry official recalls: “Pal Palych… said, ‘Then give me 5 million tons of oil.’ I agreed—where else was he going to turn?” Maksim Glikin, “Oni v svoikh koridorakh” (They are in their own corridors), Obshchaya gazeta, February 8, 2001. The quota, the same source said, was later increased to 8 million tons. That much oil would have sold in the late 1990s for the better part of $1 billion, some of which would have gone to Russian producers, to taxes, and no doubt to middlemen.

30 Boris Fëdorov estimated that in his day 1 percent of requests for apartments and the like made their way to Yeltsin. Yeltsin usually routed them to Borodin, sometimes with a handwritten note. On one occasion, Yeltsin offered a toast at a banquet to an official in the executive office, mentioning in passing that this man’s housing conditions were poor. Borodin dealt with the problem without further ado. Fëdorov interview and Leonid Smirnyagin, interview with the author (May 24, 2001).

31 In 1994 Borodin controlled twenty premium dachas with a chef and security guards, 150 year-round dachas without these services, and 200 summer-season dachas. Eugene Huskey, Presidential Power in Russia (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 52.

32 “Poslaniye Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii Federal’nomu Sobraniyu, ‘Ob ukreplenii rossiiskogo gosudarstva’” (The message of the president of the Russian Federation to the Federal Assembly, “On strengthening the Russian state”) (Moscow: Rossiiskaya Federatsiya, 1994), 14.

33 Gennadii Burbulis, second interview, conducted by Yevgeniya Al’bats (February 14, 2001). The idea was not original with Burbulis. The constitutional scholar Avgust Mishin and others had been circulating it for some time.

34 Grigorii Yavlinskii, first interview with the author (March 17, 2001).

35 James MacGregor Burns, Transforming Leadership: A New Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), chap. 10.

36 Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 253–54.

37 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 177.

38 Baturin et al., Epokha, 423.

39 Vyacheslav Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom: zapiski press-sekretarya (Romance with a president: notes of a press secretary) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997), 12. The comparisons to a magnetic field or a snake come from my interview with Yevgenii Yasin (May 31, 2001). Gennadii Burbulis (first interview, June 14, 2000) saw a similarity to a wolf lying in ambush.

40 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 413.

41 Baturin et al., Epokha, 449.

42 Mikhail Zinin,”Yel’tsina zhdët Boldinskaya osen’” (A Boldin-type autumn awaits Yeltsin), Nezavisimaya gazeta, September 18, 1991.

43 Yasin interview. Decree No. 226 also relieved lobbying pressure on government bureaucrats. They could now indicate sympathy with the petitioner while saying their hands were tied. See Baturin et al., Epokha, 442.

44 Huskey, Presidential Power in Russia, 73.

45 Ibid., 40.

46 Anatolii Chubais, first interview with the author (January 18, 2001).

47 Mikhail Bocharov, interview with the author (October 19, 2000).

48 Of the first position, Yeltsin writes (Zapiski, 241), “It was thought up ‘especially for Burbulis,’ to underline his special status.” The second was bestowed in part to compensate Burbulis for not being named vice president. Burbulis (second interview) said it was a “role,” not a “position.”

49 Poltoranin had been minister of the press and information since 1991 and favored a more restrictive attitude toward the media than Fedotov. When Yeltsin, responding to parliamentary sentiment, made Fedotov minister in December 1992 (for the second time), he put Poltoranin in charge of a new Federal Information Center, which duplicated many of the ministry’s functions. Ministry and center were both dissolved in December 1993.

50 While all were aware of Yeltsin’s dislike of long memos, some found that they could slip in additional information in attachments and illustrative materials. One official took the art to a higher form by throwing in attachments and making references in the body of the note to them. Yeltsin never reprimanded him for this practice. Andrei Kokoshin, interview with the author (June 6, 2000).

51 Baturin et al., Epokha, 436.

52 Viktor Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000).

53 Oleg Poptsov, Trevozhnyye sny tsarskoi svity (The uneasy dreams of the tsar’s retinue) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 2000), 100.

54 Boris Yeltsin, first interview with the author (July 15, 2001).

55 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 262–63.

56 Oleg Lobov, interview with the author (May 29, 2002).

57 This was made abundantly clear in my interviews with both men. Korzhakov (Boris Yel’tsin, 280) describes Soskovets and several others acquiring tape recordings of speeches of the tongue-tied premier and making fun of them.

58 Morshchakov, fifteen years older than Yeltsin, had been his early protector in Sverdlovsk and the organizer of his duck and elk shoots when he was first secretary (see Chapters 3 and 4). Yeltsin first recruited him to work in the Russian Supreme Soviet while he was its chairman. Petrov and Lobov were somewhat younger than Yeltsin. Ilyushin, sixteen years younger, was from Nizhnii Tagil (like Petrov) and had been first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Komsomol and a member of the bureau of the obkom. Lobov was deputy or first deputy premier for four stints (in 1991, 1993, 1996, and 1996–97) and secretary of the Security Council from 1993 to 1996. Another prominent Sverdlovsker was Yevgenii Bychkov, the chairman of the state committee for precious metals and jewels until 1996, but he was appointed to this position by Gorbachev in 1985. One of his deputies after 1991 was Yurii Kornilov, the former chief of the Sverdlovsk KGB.

59 Pikhoya was still in the UPI social sciences department when she joined Yeltsin. Burbulis was affiliated with the institute from 1974 to 1983. Three other UPI faculty members came to Moscow at the same time as Pikhoya.

60 Lyudmila Pikhoya, interview with the author (September 26, 2001).

61 Fëdorov interview.

62 Yeltsin in his memoirs (Zapiski, 247) refers to Burbulis as “de facto the head of the Cabinet of Ministers” in the early months. Gaidar soon replaced him as the same. Yeltsin once or twice interceded at cabinet meetings on narrow points. At a session in December 1992, he criticized Andrei Vorob’ëv, the aging health minister, who passed out. Yeltsin fired him days later. Vorob’ëv was to help treat Yeltsin’s heart condition in 1996. Sergei Kolesnikov, Chernomyrdin’s head speech writer, interview with the author (June 8, 2000).

63 Gennadii Burbulis, third interview, conducted by Yevgeniya Al’bats (August 31, 2001). The State Council replaced a Political Consultative Council Burbulis set up for Yeltsin as head of the Russian parliament in 1990. Besides informing Yeltsin, this earlier body was designed to help him outbid Gorbachev for the affections of the Moscow intelligentsia.

64 The cabinet ministers were Eduard Dneprov (minister of education), Nikolai Fëdorov (justice), Andrei Kozyrev (foreign affairs), Valerii Makharadze (deputy premier), and Aleksandr Shokhin (deputy premier and labor minister). Shakhrai retained the title of state counselor when he became a deputy premier in December 1991.

65 “The creators of the new structure… are inspired by the idea of ‘the constructive state,’ which they juxtapose to ‘the corrupting state’ based on apparatus ‘moves,’ ‘corridor pragmatism,’ and the system of personal connections and mutual favors. To all appearances, the leaders of the State Council see the source of this evil in the old apparatus of the Russian Council of Ministers.” Burbulis antagonized others by trying to get a clause in the State Council’s charter giving it the right to review all draft presidential decrees. Mikhail Leont’ev, “Rossiya bez pravitel’stva” (Russia without a government), Nezavisimaya gazeta, October 5, 1991.

66 Sergei Stankevich, interview with the author (May 29, 2001). The same point was emphasized by Sergei Shakhrai, second interview with the author (January 24, 2001).

67 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 242.

68 Stankevich was to be accused of corruption for an incident in 1993. He fled the country in 1995 and returned in 1999 after the charges were dropped. A group of ten or eleven presidential advisers, most of them unpaid, remained on the roster until the end of 1993. They had very little say collectively or individually. Yeltsin retained a few individuals with that rank in later years.

69 Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom, 322. Most speculation about a supercoordinator fastened on the Security Council. Its founding secretary, Skokov, and Aleksandr Lebed, who directed it briefly in 1996, used it as a political bandstand, but its ability to coordinate was slight.

70 See Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 140–50, who says Yeltsin wanted the house to contain a common laundry and an apartment where all the residents would have social events (neither was built). Yeltsin’s daughter has said he “spent literally a couple of nights” at the flat between 1994 and 2000. Tat’yana D’yachenko, “Papa khotel otprazdnovat’ yubilei po-domashnemu” (Papa wanted to celebrate his birthday home-style), Komsomol’skaya pravda, February 1, 2001. Vladimir Shevchenko (Povsednevnaya zhizn’ Kremlya pri prezidentakh [The everyday life of the Kremlin under the presidents] [Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2004], 36) describes the aversion to the house in the same terms Yeltsin in his memoirs used to describe his overexposure to Gennadii Burbulis: “Psychologically, it was very difficult and untenable to see and converse with the very same people at home and at work.”

71 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 341.

72 According to Korzhakov, Yeltsin was “categorically against” admitting Chernomyrdin. Korzhakov convinced him, pointing out that several deputy premiers had been accepted. Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata; poslesloviye (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk; epilogue) (Moscow: Detektiv-press, 2004), 35.

73 When I spoke to Berezovskii about Yeltsin, one of his opening points was that the president had acknowledged his worth by bringing him into the club. Berezovskii, interview with the author (March 8, 2002). Rybkin also spoke fondly about it, and a half-decade after its dissolution was still carrying a member’s card in his wallet (interview, May 29, 2001). The bylaws reserved expulsion for one offense only: betrayal (predatel’stvo), which was to be decided by unanimous vote of the members. When Korzhakov lost his job in June 1996, he was evicted from the club in simpler fashion. Chernomyrdin, a member at Korzhakov’s insistence, phoned him and told him not to come around any more. “There was nothing to do. I packed up my things and went to exercise somewhere else.” Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 36.

74 Quotation from Valentin Yumashev, fourth interview with the author (January 22, 2007). Membership figure from Shamil’ Tarpishchev, Samyi dolgii match (The longest match) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1999), 294.

75 Yurii Petrov, first and second interviews with the author (May 25, 2000, and February 1, 2002).

76 Yeltsin emphasized his unhappiness at Petrov’s tactics in Zapiski, 297.

77 Quotation from Yel’tsin, Marafon, 257.

78 Huskey, Presidential Power in Russia, 58–59.

79 In addition to three or four other policy-specific assistants, the group included service providers such as Yeltsin’s protocol chief, head of chancery, and speech writers. The guitar-strumming Lev Sukhanov, who began with Yeltsin in Gosstroi in 1988, remained until 1997. His interest in the occult made him a marginal presence in his last several years in the Kremlin.

80 Baturin et al., Epokha, 210. Although Filatov’s organization was much bigger, the physical setup privileged Ilyushin. Filatov had his office in Kremlin Building No. 14 and Ilyushin his in Building No. 1, several doors from Yeltsin.

81 For example, on the morning commute with Yeltsin, Korzhakov noted the first secretary’s comments about stores they had inspected along the way. He would then telephone the party secretary for trade and services, Alla Nizovtseva, with a report. Nizovtseva, says Korzhakov, did not object to these calls, but Viktor Ilyushin, then the senior aide to Yeltsin in the gorkom, did object and accused Korzhakov of sticking his nose in other people’s business. Ilyushin was further annoyed when Korzhakov and Yeltsin developed their friendship in the summer of 1986. “He became more and more nervous when Boris Nikolayevich assigned me business falling outside the jurisdiction of the guard service.” Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 63.

82 Aleksandr Korzhakov, interview with the author (January 28, 2002).

83 Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno, 233. The eavesdropping and its targets, which included Filatov and his family, Viktor Ilyushin, and members of the Chernomyrdin machine, are detailed in Igor’ Korotchenko, “Kompromat” (Compromising material), Nezavisimaya gazeta, October 12, 1996; and Valerii Streletskii, Mrakobesiye (Obscurantism) (Moscow: Detektiv-Press, 1998). The head of research of the Kremlin’s executive office was surprised when the surveillance began, associating it with Soviet ways, but thought it deterred the leaking and sale of sensitive information. Mark Urnov, interview with the author (May 26, 2000).

84 Third Yeltsin interview.

85 The outstanding example is Korzhakov’s letter to Chernomyrdin of November 30, 1994, about Russian oil exports, in which he advised him to turn over supervision to Soskovets. See Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 406–10; and Irina Savvateyeva, “Kto upravlyayet stranoi—Yel’tsin, Chernomyrdin ili General Korzhakov?” (Who governs Russia—Yeltsin, Chernomyrdin, or General Korzhakov?), Izvestiya, December 22, 1994.

86 See, for instance, the description by Yeltsin of Korzhakov’s advocacy of Barsukov (Marafon, 78); and details on his role in the decision on the procurator general, in Yurii Skuratov, Variant drakona (Version of the dragon) (Moscow: Detektiv, 2000), 68–70. The procurator whom Skuratov replaced, Aleksei Il’yushenko (the man who charged NTV with slander for the Kukly satire), had also been appointed at Korzhakov’s behest in 1994. Korzhakov was godfather of Soskovets’s first grandson in 1994, and at the same ceremony Soskovets himself was baptized, with Korzhakov again as godfather.

87 Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 358.

88 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 24.

89 Ibid., 78, 256–57.

90 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 243–46.

91 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 326.

92 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 257.

93 Alena V. Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 11.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

1 Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 308; Nikolai Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin: raznyye zhizni (Boris Yeltsin: various lives), 2 vols. (Moscow: OLMA, 2001), 2:465. In the interview, published in Komsomol’skaya pravda, Yeltsin said he favored training a group of twenty leaders from which his successor would be elected. Nothing was done about the suggestion.

2 Dmitri K. Simes, After the Collapse: Russia Seeks Its Place as a Great Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 139.

3 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 33.

4 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 525–30; Georgii Satarov, first interview with the author (June 5, 2000).

5 There is scathing commentary in Vyacheslav Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom: zapiski press-sekretarya (Romance with a president: notes of a press secretary) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997), 120–21.

6 Sergei Medvedev, interview with the author (May 28, 2001).

7 See http://www.fotuva.org/newsletters/fot13.html.

8 Tatyana Malkina, interview with the author (June 13, 2001).

9 See Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 329–31; and Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 47.

10 Malkina interview. She added that Yeltsin now and again acted as if he were in a trance or “not of these parts” (nezdeshnii).

11 See especially M. Steven Fish, “Russia’s Fourth Transition,” Journal of Democracy 5 (July 1994), 31–42; Marc Morjé Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Henry E. Hale, Why Not Parties in Russia? Democracy, Federalism, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

12 Source: scattered press reports; second interview with Gennadii Burbulis, conducted by Yevgeniya Al’bats (February 14, 2001); Sergei Stankevich, interview with the author (May 29, 2001).

13 Yevgenii Krasnikov, “Demokraty sozdayut izbiratel’nyi blok” (The democrats create an electoral bloc), Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 17, 1993.

14 Details here from Yegor Gaidar, second interview with the author (January 31, 2002). Gaidar was bitter that Yeltsin did not tell him man-to-man that he would not show up for the Russia’s Choice congress, but delegated the honor to Viktor Ilyushin. Government minister Aleksandr Shokhin and presidential adviser Sergei Stankevich stood with Shakhrai on the list of his Party of Russian Unity and Accord.

15 Second Gaidar interview. As it was, Russia’s Choice received 16 percent of the votes in the party-list half of the vote, 7 points fewer than Vladimir Zhirinovskii’s LDPR. Shakhrai’s miniparty received 7 percent, which if added to the Russia’s Choice vote, even without assistance from Yeltsin, would have put it into a dead heat with the LDPR.

16 Author’s first interview with Sergei Filatov (May 25, 2000) and second interview with Aleksandr Yakovlev (March 29, 2004).

17 Ivan Rybkin, interview with the author (May 29, 2001); first Satarov interview.

18 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 382.

19 Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2000).

20 Yevgenii Savast’yanov, interview with the author (June 9, 2000).

21 Viktor Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000). As prime instigators, he mentioned the Korzhakov-Soskovets group and Viktor Ilyushin. See also Baturin et al., Epokha, 541.

22 Oleg Poptsov, Khronika vremën “Tsarya Borisa” (Chronicle of the times of “Tsar Boris”) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1995), 220.

23 Fifteen percent of citizens polled by VTsIOM in September 1994 said they would vote for Yeltsin if an election were held tomorrow. This number slid to 6 percent in March 1995. A poll by the same organization in October 1994 revealed that a mere 3 percent had complete trust in Yeltsin, which were fewer than trusted six other politicians. Oleg Moroz, 1996: kak Zyuganov ne stal prezidentom (1996: how Zyuganov did not become president) (Moscow: Raduga, 2006), 10–11.

24 Lee Hockstader, “Yeltsin, Communist Zyuganov Launch Presidential Bids,” The Washington Post, February 16, 1996. The Russian media reported on January 22 that Gaidar was advising Yeltsin not to run at all, saying any Yeltsin candidacy would be “suicidal” and “the best present that could possibly be given to the communists.” Yeltsin wrote him a letter on February 2 asking him to be governed “not by emotions but by the interests of Russia.” Yegor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Days of defeats and victories) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 357–58.

25 The most thorough tracking polls on degrees of support were done by the VTsIOM organization, but it did none of this kind between April 1994 and March 1996. Not much seems to have changed through the end of 1995, and so we can take the April 1994 results as indicative. They showed a mere 4 percent of citizens unreservedly supporting Yeltsin and 4 percent supporting him “as long as he is leader of the democratic forces.” Thirty-one percent were opposed to him in varying degrees, while a plurality of 42 percent indicated ambivalence. In March 1996 supporters of Yeltsin, by this measure, still came to only 12 percent, with 41 percent opposed and ambivalent citizens coming to 38 percent. Yu, A. Levada et al., Obshchestvennoye mneniye—1999 (Public opinion—1999 edition) (Moscow: Vserossiiskii tsentr izucheniya obshchestvennogo mneniya, 2000), 100–101.

26 Author’s interviews with family members, which directly and persuasively contradict the assertion in Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 316–17, that the family pushed him to run in order to preserve their style of life. Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 23, notes Naina’s opposition.

27 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 25.

28 Mark Urnov, interview with the author (May 26, 2000).

29 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 24–25.

30 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 362.

31 Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 389.

32 L. N. Dobrokhotov, ed., Ot Yel’tsina k… Yel’tsinu: prezidentskaya gonka-96 (From Yeltsin… to Yeltsin: the 1996 presidential race) (Moscow: TERRA, 1997), 94.

33 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 26. In my interview with him (March 31, 2004), Soskovets would say only that he and Yeltsin had several conversations about the succession question. But Korzhakov (interview with the author, January 28, 2002) and Andranik Migranyan (interview, June 8, 2000) explicitly recalled Yeltsin saying in their hearing that he wanted Soskovets to be president after him.

34 Tat’yana D’yachenko, “Yesli by papa ne stal prezidentom… ” (If papa had not become president), Ogonëk, October 23, 2000.

35 Korzhakov (Boris Yel’tsin, 323) notes that she “did not like Soskovets’s tone.” If she had known more about her father’s work as a party functionary, he claims, she would have known that “Soskovets’s style was close to that of the early Yeltsin.”

36 Irina Savvateyeva, “Boris Yel’tsin predlozhil rossiiskim bankam sotrudnichestvo” (Boris Yeltsin suggests cooperation with Russia’s banks), Izvestiya, September 1, 1995.

37 Both Soskovets (interview) and Chubais (second interview with the author, March 30, 2004) stressed the role of Soskovets in getting Yeltsin on board for the law. Potanin (interview with the author, September 25, 2001) said Yeltsin took no interest in the auction process. “[He felt that] this was not the king’s business, it was very dirty stuff. There are dividing some things up over there—so what? I let them go to work, let them figure it out themselves.”

38 The book contract and sponsorship for the club were first revealed in Korzhakov’s memoirs and were confirmed in broad outline in my interview with Berezovskii (March 8, 2000).

39 The cars are mentioned in Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin, 284. Some details from an interview with Korzhakov are provided in Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 201. Berezovskii denied having made the gifts in his interview with me. In my second interview with Tatyana (September 11, 2006), she was adamant that she never received them. She purchased a Niva herself in 1992, she said, before ever meeting Berezovskii, and never owned or drove a Blazer.

40 The other partners in Ogonëk were Oleg Boiko and Aleksandr Smolenskii.

41 The timing is important here. Some accounts of the meeting date it in February but others in early to late March. The actual time—the week of Shrovetide—is established by the recollection by Smolenskii that they ate a Shrovetide repast, since this was the time of year. Sergei Agafonov, “Maslenitsa 1996 goda” (Shrovetide in 1996), Ogonëk, March 20, 2006. In the Orthodox calendar in 1996, Shrovetide (Maslenitsa, in Russian), the feast before the Lenten fast, went from February 19 to February 25.

42 Quotation from Yel’tsin, Marafon, 30.

43 Mikhail Khodorkovskii, interview with the author (June 7, 2001); Agafonov, “Maslenitsa 1996 goda.” There are also good descriptions of the meeting in David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002), 331–33; and Moroz, 1996, 196–97, which corrects Hoffman on some details but gets the timing wrong.

44 Berezovskii had made Naina Yeltsina’s acquaintance in 1993 when a mutual friend asked him to host a benefit reception for a childcare center Yeltsina patronized ; Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007). In an interview with David Hoffman in 2000 (Oligarchs, 333), Berezovskii said he approached Mrs. Yeltsin with a request for help to speak to Yeltsin privately after the Kremlin meeting. He reminded Yeltsin of the request and they met for several minutes.

45 Some of them, desiring to inflate their influence, were to claim later that it did. Berezovskii, for example, told Hoffman (Oligarchs, 333) that Yeltsin reorganized his campaign headquarters “the very next day.” This is rubbish. The reorganization occurred on March 19, almost a month later.

46 Baturin et al., Epokha, 555–56.

47 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 170.

48 It had been in the making for some time. Soskovets told an American campaign consultant on February 27 that one of his tasks would be to advise “whether we should call it [the election] off if you determine that we’re going to lose.” Michael Kramer, “Rescuing Boris,” Time, July 15, 1996. Nikolai Yegorov, the chief of Yeltsin’s executive office and an ally of Korzhakov and Soskovets, broached the possibility of postponing the election with governors in a provincial tour in early March, and prevailed on one of them to write to the chairman of the Federation Council in support of the idea. See Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 181–82. The fear that Yeltsin would die in a hard-fought campaign played into the calculations of the Kremlin conservatives. If Soskovets were already prime minister, he would have become acting president and presumably would have an excellent chance of winning an election. Chernomyrdin would have that advantage if Yeltsin died while Chernomyrdin was still premier.

49 Baturin et al., Epokha, 562.

50 Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 396–402; Sergei Shakhrai, third interview with the author (June 1, 2001).

51 Talbott, Russia Hand, 195; James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2003), 153.

52 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 33; D’yachenko, “Yesli by papa”; Anatolii Chubais, first interview with the author (January 18, 2001). Yeltsin describes the meeting as Tatyana’s idea. But Chubais revealed that the idea was his and that he prevailed upon her to get Yeltsin to agree. Yeltsin dates the key meetings on March 23. There is good evidence in other sources that they were held on March 18.

53 Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 402. Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 513, write of the incident: “Contrary to all the wishful thinking in the West about Russian democracy, ‘Tsar Boris’ had no qualms about throwing the constitution out the window.” But he did have such qualms, and he did act on them.

54 Aleksandr Oslon, interview with the author (January 25, 2001). Tatyana’s older sister, Yelena Okulova, played a minor advisory role in helping to arrange Naina Yeltsina’s campaign schedule.

55 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 361–69. According to Korzhakov, Chernomyrdin offered to take up the suggestion with Yeltsin; there is no record of him having done so. Korzhakov says that without Chernomyrdin’s permission he taped the conversation, which lasted from seven P.M. until almost two A.M., and that the quotations are “almost verbatim” from the transcript.

56 Second Yeltsina interview.

57 David Hoffman, “Yeltsin Vows No Delays in Election,” The Washington Post, May 7, 1996. Korzhakov gave the interview to the British newspaper The Observer. It quickly circulated in Russia.

58 Oslon interview.

59 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 165–69.

60 An eleventh candidate, Aman-Geldy Tuleyev, the governor of Kemerovo province in west Siberia, withdrew on June 5 and threw his support to Zyuganov.

61 Lebed had climbed in the Russian polls shortly after retiring from the army in May 1995. He ran for the Duma in December 1995 on the list of the Congress of Russian Communities, a nationalist organization formed by Yurii Skokov, and was elected in a district in Tula province.

62 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 363.

63 McFaul, Russia’s 1996 Presidential Election, 25–26, 109; Baturin et al., Epokha, 571.

64 Grigorii Yavlinskii, second interview with the author (September 28, 2001). Yavlinskii’s demands were contained in a letter to Yeltsin published in Izvestiya and Nezavisimaya gazeta on May 18. Korzhakov told Chernomyrdin in mid-April of a conversation Yavlinskii had a few days before with the former vice president of the United States, Dan Quayle—a conversation we must assumed was taped by officers of Korzhakov’s guard unit. Yavlinskii is said to have remarked that Zyuganov was his enemy while Yeltsin was a relative, “But you will understand that sometimes a relative is worse than any enemy.” Quayle is said to have answered, “I understand.” Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 366–67.

65 The Korzhakov-Soskovets group also put an oar in. According to Korzhakov (Boris Yel’tsin, 364), Nikolai Yegorov summoned governors to his office in Moscow and “battled in the localities” with holdouts.

66 Igor Malashenko, interview with the author (March 18, 2001).

67 Sara Oates and Laura Roselle, “Russian Elections and TV News: Comparison of Campaign News on State-Controlled and Commercial Television Channels,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 5 (Spring 2000), 40–41. Korzhakov and his Presidential Security Service complained throughout the campaign that NTV was continuing to criticize the Chechen war, and implicitly Yeltsin’s leadership of it, and to refer to Korzhakov and his group as “the party of war.” See Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata; poslesloviye (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk; epilogue) (Moscow: Detektiv-press, 2004), 420–21.

68 Our Home Is Russia got 18 percent of the mentions on the ORT nightly news (Oates and Roselle, “Russian Elections and TV News,” 38) but only 10 percent of the popular vote. The KPRF got 13 percent of the mentions and 23 percent of the votes. Russia’s Democratic Choice, the liberal party headed by Gaidar, got 12 percent of the mentions and 4 percent of the popular vote.

69 Timothy J. Colton, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 61.

70 FOM (Fond “Obshchestvennoye mneniye”), Rezul’taty sotsiologicheskikh issledovanii (Results of sociological research), June 13, 1996, 1. The complete run of this in-house bulletin of Aleksandr Oslon’s Public Opinion Foundation was supplied to the author by Oslon.

71 See Ellen Mickiewiecz, Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 178–84. Even on NTV, though, news anchors opined in the final weeks of the first-round campaign, and reporters subjected Zyuganov’s promises and claims to searching questioning while largely sparing Yeltsin.

72 FOM, Rezul’taty, June 19, 1996, 1. Surveys by the VTsIOM group show a similar trend. See Stephen White, Richard Rose, and Ian McAllister, How Russia Votes (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1997), 258. VTsIOM data show Yeltsin fifth among intended voters in the second half of January, behind Zyuganov, Lebed, Yavlinskii, and Zhirinovskii.

73 Yeltsin led Zyuganov among individuals thirty-five and younger from the beginning; he overtook Zyuganov among persons aged thirty-six to forty-five on April 21, among those forty-six to fifty-five on May 18, and among those older than fifty-five on June 1. He surpassed Zyuganov in March in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in early April in cities of over 1 million in population, in mid-May in other cities and towns, and in the villages of Russia in the first half of June. He won majority support among men and women at about the same time. Poorly educated and low-paid Russians rallied to Yeltsin, and by a narrow margin, only in June; those with a college-level diploma and higher incomes were on his side from the start. FOM, Rezul’taty, June 19, 1996, 1–3.

74 Talbott, Russia Hand, 161–62; Goldgeier and McFaul, Power and Purpose, 196–97. The request had been made by Russian diplomats before Yeltsin discussed it with Clinton in May 1995. Yeltsin first tried to sell Clinton on a delay until after the two of them left office at the end of the decade.

75 Mikhail Rostovskii, “Mutatsiya klana” (Mutation of the clan), Moskovskii komsomolets, December 3, 2002 (citing a conversation with Korzhakov).

76 Talbott, Russia Hand, 202, 204. Clinton was furious when Yeltsin lectured him in front of the press for the excesses of American foreign policy and Yeltsin left the room before Clinton could reply.

77 Alan Friedman, “James D. Wolfensohn: World Bank and Russian Reform,” International Herald Tribune, May 27, 1996.

78 Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 407.

79 Baturin et al., Epokha, 658.

80 The revelations about the assassination threat and the white lie to his wife are in “Boris Nemtsov—Yevgenii Al’bats o Yel’tsine” (Boris Nemtsov to Yevgeniya Al’bats about Yeltsin), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007.

81 FOM, Rezul’taty, June 5, 1996, 3. Earlier polls had shown that Chechnya was the single biggest strike against Yeltsin in public opinion and that 70 percent of citizens favored either a pullout or a cessation of hostilities without a pullout.

82 Ibid., April 22, 1996, 2.

83 Ibid., May 10, 1996, 2 (italics added). The bifurcation or polarization gambit is well drawn in McFaul, Russia’s 1996 Presidential Election; and Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), chap. 13.

84 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 234–38.

85 Alessandra Stanley, “With Campaign Staff in Disarray, Yeltsin Depends on Perks of Office,” New York Times, May 13, 1996. Stanley wrote in another story (“A Media Campaign Most Russian and Most Unreal,” ibid., June 2, 1996) that the “indirection and goosebumpy emotional tug” of the ads recall General Electric advertising in the United States (“We bring good things to life”). Among the foreign consultants were Sir Tim Bell of the British firm Bell Pottinger (once a counselor to Margaret Thatcher), several media advisers to California governor Pete Wilson, and Richard Dresner, a former business partner of Dick Morris. See Kramer, “Rescuing Boris”; Sarah E. Mendelson, “Democracy Assistance and Political Transition in Russia,” International Security 25 (Spring 2001), 93–94; and Gerry Sussman, Global Electioneering: Campaign Consulting, Communications, and Corporate Financing (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 139–40.

86 Source: the survey data used in the writing of Colton, Transitional Citizens.

87 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 35. See Timothy J. Colton, “The Leadership Factor in the Russian Presidential Election of 1996,” in Anthony King, ed., Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 184–209.

88 In the survey (as detailed in Colton, Transitional Citizens), 2,456 Russians were interviewed in the weeks after the election runoff and were asked to rate Yeltsin and four of his defeated rivals as possessing or not possessing the five praiseworthy traits. Sixty-four percent reckoned Yeltsin to be intelligent and knowledgeable, 55 percent thought him to have a vision of the future, 45 percent deemed him strong, and 39 percent saw him as decent and trustworthy. Only 28 percent felt he really cared about people, dwarfed by the 63 percent who rejected this statement. Of respondents who thought the Russian economy was in good shape, 75 percent said Yeltsin cared about people like them; among those who thought the economy to be in bad or very bad shape, only 22 percent agreed. Among persons whose family finances had improved in the past year, 58 percent perceived the president as empathetic; that figure was down to 17 percent in the much larger group whose finances had deteriorated.

89 Daniel Treisman, “Why Yeltsin Won,” Foreign Affairs 75 (September–October 1996), 67. This article is the best analysis of what Treisman calls the Tammany Hall dimension of the campaign. As Treisman points out, the distribution of benefits preceded the main media campaign, which began only when Yeltsin had already drawn even with Zyuganov in the polls.

90 Baturin et al., Epokha, 569.

91 The regiment’s “elite soldiers, selected for their Slavic blond looks and sixfoot stature, were refitted with pre-revolutionary dress uniforms. Heavy on gold braid and peacock colors, the uniforms were designed by the Bolshoi Theater’s costume designers and are meant to evoke the martial splendor of imperial Russia.” Alessandra Stanley, “Stripped of Themes, Yeltsin Wraps Himself in Flag,” New York Times, April 19, 1996.

92 Malashenko interview. The visit was to the Annin Flag Company in Roseland, New Jersey, on September 19, 1988. Malashenko related it to me as having been made by Ronald Reagan, but it hardly matters which U.S. politician he ascribed the scene to in his conversation with Yeltsin.

93 Ibid.

94 Medvedev interview.

95 Lee Hockstader, “Invigorated Yeltsin Hits Hustings,” The Washington Post, June 1, 1996. The Yeltsin twist can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d90JtMP2J0Y.

96 Medvedev interview.

97 Alessandra Stanley, “Spendthrift Candidate Yeltsin: Miles to Go, Promises to Keep?” New York Times, May 4, 1996.

98 Quoted in Treisman, “Why Yeltsin Won,” 70.

99 In RFE/RL Newsline, May 27, 1996.

100 The quite unbelievable scene with Denisyuk is captured in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 2. Yeltsin listens to her request and says, “OK, I will give you a car” (Ladno, podaryu mashinu). He kisses her on both cheeks and assures her that documentation will arrive with the machine. The car came through, and Denisyuk never complained.

101 Baturin et al., Epokha, 462.

102 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 296.

103 Ibid., 489.

104 “Yeltsin’s earlier television spots were largely upbeat testimonials from average citizens, but those aired today were some of the harshest blasts of the campaign. The ads begin with short statements from Russian men and women saying they do not want to go back to communism; then the announcer, harking back to the Bolshevik Revolution, intones: ‘No one in 1917 thought there could be famine.’ Grainy black-and-white film shows starving children from Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture, which killed millions. Also pictured are Russians of the late 1970s lining up at stores whose shelves are empty. The tagline for this and other ads is: ‘And the communists didn’t even change their name. They won’t change their methods.’” David Hoffman, “Yeltsin, Communist Foe Launch TV Attack Ads,” The Washington Post, June 27, 1996.

105 In the transcript of an intercepted telephone conversation with her husband the morning of June 20, Tatyana is quoted as saying Russians had formed the impression that “these people [Korzhakov and his confrères] are governing the country and not he [Yeltsin].” A bit later, she converses with her mother about the president’s options and Naina Yeltsina warns, incorrectly, that Yeltsin would never remove Korzhakov. Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), 392, 394.

106 Malashenko interview.

107 Yeltsin himself described the scene in Marafon, 45.

108 Moroz, 1996, 459–60.

109 Statistical details here taken from the survey data used in Colton, Transitional Citizens. The big change after June 16 was the shift of Lebed voters toward Yeltsin. Oslon’s polls as late as the first week of June showed only 27 percent of Lebed supporters intending to support the president in a second round. FOM, Rezul’taty, June 13, 1996, 1.

110 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 48.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1 Korzhakov in his memoirs counts the June 26 attack as Yeltsin’s fifth, but this includes September 29–30, 1994, when Yeltsin was a no-show for the meeting with Albert Reynolds in Ireland. Most of the medical experts do not classify that event as a full-flown myocardial infarction. Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), 405–6, gets to five by counting the incident in Kaliningrad on June 23 as a separate heart attack. The physician Vladlen Vtorushin is cited as the source of this information.

2 The text of the letter is in Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 451 (italics added). Yeltsin reproduced it in Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 49, saying that Korzhakov “did not conceal” the content of the letter but several times told Tatyana Dyachenko “that if something happened to me she would be guilty.”

3 Author’s interviews with El’dar Ryazanov (May 30, 2001) and Irena Lesnevskaya (January 24, 2001).

4 The chain was instituted in 1994 but Yeltsin’s decree specifying its use in the inauguration came out only on August 5, 1996. It consists of a Greek cross, seventeen smaller medals, and links of gold, silver, and white enamel.

5 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 575. Yeltsin wrote later (Marafon, 50), “Never in my life had I been so tense” as on August 9.

6 Yeltsin had offered the job to Igor Malashenko of NTV, who pleaded personal circumstances. But it would appear that he made the suggestion first to Chubais and returned to him after Malashenko’s refusal.

7 Ye, I. Chazov, Rok (Fate) (Moscow: Geotar-Med, 2001), 259.

8 Author’s interviews with Sergei Parkhomenko (March 26, 2004) and Viktor Chernomyrdin (September 15, 2000). The article appeared in the Itogi of September 10, 1996. It was reported in the press that Chernomyrdin had a bypass operation in 1992, but in fact the procedure he had was an angioplasty.

9 Renat Akchurin, quoted in “Postskriptum” (Postscript), Izvestiya, April 28, 2007.

10 “Ekslyuzivnoye interv’yu Prezidenta Rossii zhurnalu ‘Itogi’” (Exclusive interview of the president of Russia with the magazine Itogi), Itogi, September 10, 1996.

11 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 53.

12 Lawrence K. Altman, “In Moscow in 1996, a Doctor’s Visit Changed History,” New York Times, May 1, 2007. Citing an interview with DeBakey after Yeltsin’s death the previous week, Altman claims that “his Russian doctors said he could not survive such surgery.” But the fullest Russian account, by Chazov, says the Russians had already decided that the bypass was necessary and survivable and that they wanted DeBakey for psychological and strategic support. “And that is what happened. Yeltsin confirmed for himself the correctness of his decision, his family calmed down, and the press and television redirected themselves to DeBakey, leaving us finally in peace.” Chazov, Rok, 262.

13 Yeltsin had communicated his intent to do the temporary transfer in a decree dated September 19. Chernomyrdin took his provisional duties to heart: “He called military specialists in and acquainted himself in detail with the automated system for controlling [Russia’s] strategic nuclear forces.” Baturin et al., Epokha, 725.

14 See on this point Chazov, Rok, 271.

15 Akchurin in “Postskriptum.”

16 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 57.

17 Interviews with family members. Khrushchev put up Vice President Richard Nixon at Novo-Ogarëvo in 1959, since at Gorki-9 “it was not possible to provide the conveniences to which guests were accustomed. For example, there was only one toilet for everyone, located at the end of the [first-floor] hall. The bath was there, too. By American standards, only people in the slums lived in such conditions.” Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, trans. Shirley Benson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 352.

18 See Sergei Khrushchev, Pensioner soyuznogo znacheniya (Pensioner of USSR rank) (Moscow: Novosti, 1991), 69–71.

19 Anatolii Chubais, first interview with the author (January 18, 2001).

20 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 58.

21 Madeleine Albright, with Bill Woodward, Madam Secretary (New York: Miramax, 2003), 253–54.

22 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 246.

23 In the VTsIOM tracking poll in April 1997, 3 percent of the electorate gave Yeltsin unqualified support, 7 percent gave him qualified support, 41 percent were opposed to him in one degree or another, and 39 percent were ambivalent. Yu, A. Levada et al., Obshchestvennoye mneniye—1999 (Public opinion—1999 edition) (Moscow: Vserossiiskii tsentr izucheniya obshchestvennogo mneniya, 2000), 100–101.

24 Korzhakov has said (interview with the author, January 28, 2002) that he was offered $5 million to cancel publication of the book. He thinks the source of the money was a businessman out to protect Yeltsin’s interests. I have no corroboration of this claim.

25 Yurii Mukhin, Kod Yel’tsina (The Yeltsin code) (Moscow: Yauza, 2005). Like Salii in 1997, Mukhin, a Stalinist and anti-Semite, placed great stock in photographs of hands and other body parts. He has not commented on whether the death and state funeral of the real Yeltsin in 2007 led him to revise his interpretation. One of his other contributions as an analyst is work disclaiming Soviet responsibility for the 1940 massacre of Polish officers at Katyn. A competing version of the trashy tale holds that Yeltsin was an invalid from 1996 until August 6 or 7, 1999, when he died, and that three ringers, controlled by the Yeltsin family and not the CIA, filled in for him before and after his death. “Kozly i molodil’nyye yabloki” (Goats and green apples), http://www.duel.ru/200231/?31_1_3.

26 See Vladimir Shevchenko, Povsednevnaya zhizn’ Kremlya pri prezidentakh (The everyday life of the Kremlin under the presidents) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2004), 106, 138.

27 Yeltsin’s office told reporters he played tennis for about ten minutes on July 11, 1997, at Shuiskaya Chupa. That seems to have been the last time.

28 Yelena Tregubova, Baiki kremlëvskogo diggera (Tales of a Kremlin digger) (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2003), 53. Yeltsin in Stockholm was tired after a trip to Beijing. He advised the Swedes to wean themselves from coal and sign a contract with Russia for natural gas deliveries, apparently thinking back to background notes for the China visit. Sweden burns almost no coal; half of its power needs are met by atomic reactors and one-third by hydroelectric stations.

29 For a full early report, see Nikolai Andreyev, “Prezident Rossii postoyanen v svoyei nepredskazuyemosti” (The president of Russia is constant in his unpredictability), Izvestiya, May 6, 1992. Compare with Jacob Weisberg, “The Complete Bushisms,” www.slate.com/id/76886.

30 See Tregubova, Baiki kremlëvskogo diggera, 117.

31 Yelena Dikun, “Yel’tsin v Gorkakh” (Yeltsin in Gorki), Obshchaya gazeta, April 2, 1998. Kukly, the satire program on the NTV television network, had broadcast a cruel skit comparing Yeltsin to the immobilized Lenin in January 1997.

32 Of recent presidents, Jimmy Carter took the fewest vacation days, seventynine over four years. Bill Clinton took 152 over eight years.

33 Anatolii Kulikov, who replaced Viktor Yerin as interior minister in 1995, says that after his operation Yeltsin misaddressed some hand-written notes. “My accurate and delicate attempts to correct the president were not well taken,” writes Kulikov. “He would look at me and continue to write.” Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 416–17. But most former high officials whom I interviewed, including four second-term prime ministers (Chernomyrdin, Kiriyenko, Primakov, and Stepashin), emphasized his mental acuity and exceptional memory. Primakov and Stepashin, whose tenure was in the second half of term two, also emphasized the limits on his energy. Both felt he was at his full powers for two to three hours per workday. But neither, of course, knew this from direct experience, and family members insist that days this short were the exception rather than the rule.

34 Sergei Stepashin, interview with the author (June 14, 2001).

35 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 350.

36 Tatyana Yumasheva, third interview with the author (January 25, 2007). The dilution of the wine was done with Yeltsin’s consent. Aleksandr Korzhakov claims that in 1995 he had kitchen staff secretly water down some bottles of vodka to half strength, and that Yeltsin fired several of them for the ruse. Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 303–5.

37 Chazov asserts that Yeltsin violated the restrictions less than a year after his operation, but that in the late 1990s “he finally came to observe the regime and recommendations of the doctors.” Chazov, Rok, 277. When Yeltsin met with Bill Clinton in Helsinki in March 1997, he was distracted the first evening and consumed a number of glasses of wine; come morning, he “had regained his color and vigor” and seized the initiative in negotiations. At their next meeting, in Birmingham in May 1998, Yeltsin gave, “in both senses of the word, his most sober performance to date.” Talbott, Russia Hand, 237–38, 269. Talbott records no drinking on Yeltsin’s part after Helsinki, and even there the amount was hardly huge and some of it may have come in the form of adulterated wine.

38 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 350.

39 Third Yumasheva interview.

40 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 82.

41 Vladimir Potanin, interview with the author (September 25, 2001).

42 Those adjustments rarely included strikes or other collective action, mostly because ordinary people could not sort out which culprits to blame for their troubles. See Debra Javeline, Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). See also Padma Desai and Todd Idson, Work without Wages: Russia’s Nonpayment Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).

43 Kulikov made his allegations about the Russian Legion in a press conference on October 16. There are more details in Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 469–75. Chubais took the charges seriously and was taken by Lebed’s statement to the media that he expected to be president of Russia before 2000, the year the second Yeltsin term was to expire. He communicated his views to Yeltsin by memorandum, since the president did not feel well enough to meet with him. First Chubais interview.

44 Quotations from Yel’tsin, Marafon, 74, 77. In addition to stylistic aspects, Lebed shared some physical features with Yeltsin. His nose had been broken repeatedly in boxing matches, and as a party trick he flattened it against his face “like a pancake.” Michael Specter, “The Wars of Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed,” New York Times Magazine, October 13, 1996.

45 The two had a relationship. Lebed had kept up communication with Korzhakov after his dismissal. When Lebed resigned from his Duma seat, representing Tula province, in order to take up his position with Yeltsin, Korzhakov declared his candidacy. Lebed accompanied Korzhakov to Tula and introduced him as his favored candidate. Korzhakov eventually won the election.

46 Valentin Yumashev, third interview with the author (September 13, 2006).

47 Baturin et al., Epokha, 773–74.

48 Yeltsin’s chief of staff at the time, Valentin Yumashev, who was new to the job and was rarely involved in security decisions, is quite sure that Yeltsin had lost patience with Rodionov and went in intent on removing him. Third Yumashev interview. For background analysis, see Viktor Baranets, Yel’tsin i yego generaly (Yeltsin and his generals) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1997); and Dale R. Herspring, The Kremlin and the High Command: Presidential Impact on the Russian Military from Gorbachev to Putin (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2006).

49 Rodionov lamented to journalists that the meeting was conducted “in the spirit of a session of the bureau of a [CPSU] obkom.” He had told Yeltsin a few days before, he said, that he needed thirty minutes for his report, and the president had not objected. Rodionov claimed that Yeltsin further sliced his time allotment to ten minutes after Rodionov protested the fifteen-minute quota, and then called for a show of hands on dismissing him. Rodionov tried to leave the room at that point but Yeltsin ordered him to stay. Vladimir Kiselëv, “Posle otstavki” (After retirement), Obshchaya gazeta, May 29, 1997.

50 Fragments of Yeltsin’s remarks can be found in “Yel’tsin o natsional’noi ideye” (Yeltsin on the national idea), Nezavisimaya gazeta, July 13, 1996; and Mikhail Lantsman, “Prezident poruchil doverennym litsam naiti natsional’nuyu ideyu” (The president assigned his campaign aides to find a national idea), Segodnya, July 15, 1996.

51 Stepan Kiselëv, “Georgii Satarov: natsional’naya ideya—eto nebol’no” (George Satarov says the national idea will not hurt anyone), Izvestiya, July 19, 1996.

52 Details in Bronwyn McLaren, “Big Brains Bog Down in Hunt for Russian Idea,” Moscow Times, August 9, 1997; Michael E. Urban, “Remythologising the Russian State,” Europe-Asia Studies 50 (September 1998), 969–92; Kathleen E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory in the Yeltsin Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 158–65; and Andrew Meier, Black Earth: A Journey through Russia after the Fall (New York: Norton, 2003), 338. The anthology is Georgii Satarov, ed., Rossiya v poiskakh idei: analiz pressy (Russia in search of an idea: analysis of the press) (Moscow: Gruppa konsul’tantov pri Administratsii Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 1997). Yeltsin did not mention the national-idea commission in his annual address to parliament, in March 1997, or in the final volume of his memoirs in 2000.

53 Andrei Zagorodnikov, “Svyato mesto pusto ne byvayet” (A holy place is never empty), Nezavisimaya gazeta, July 30, 1996.

54 First Chubais interview.

55 Smith, Mythmaking, 84.

56 Askar Akayev, interview with the author (September 29, 2004).

57 Yeltsin in Marafon, 396, mentioned one invitation, but family members in interviews said there were several.

58 Valentin Yumashev, second interview with the author (September 11, 2006).

59 S. Alekhin, “Boris Yel’tsin: sokhranit’ kul’turu—svyataya obyazannost’” (Boris Yeltsin thinks it is a sacred duty to conserve our culture), Rossiskaya gazeta, June 10, 1997; Viktoriya Shokhina and Igor’ Zotov, “Vizit” (Visit), Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 7, 1997.

60 Russians favored reburial by 48 percent to 38 percent when first surveyed in March 1997 and by as much as 55 percent to 34 percent in July 1998. In August 1999 the percentages for and against were tied at 41. A. Petrova, “Lenin’s Body Burial,” http://bd.english.fom.ru/report/cat/societas/rus_im/zahoronenie_v_i_lenina/eof993304.

61 An American journalist aptly remarked that some on the Russian left thought communism was only slumbering and that Lenin, “lying in his glass coffin like Sleeping Beauty, is keeping the movement alive.” Alessandra Stanley, “Czar and Lenin Share Fate: Neither Can Rest in Peace,” New York Times, April 9, 1997.

62 Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2002).

63 He made this clear in conversations at the time with Boris Nemtsov, who was in charge of the reburial. Nemtsov, second interview with the author (February 6, 2002).

64 This summary does not do justice to the complexity of Russian attitudes toward the last of the Romanovs. They are well analyzed in Wendy Slater, “Relics, Remains, and Revisionism: Narratives of Nicholas II in Contemporary Russia,” Rethinking History 9 (March 2005), 53–70. The Orthodox abroad, who had always been strongly anti-communist, had control of a female’s finger which they claimed was the only true relic of the family. No tissue attributable to Nicholas and Alexandra’s hemophilic son, Aleksei, or their third daughter, Mariya, was found, which fed the suspicion of the clergy abroad. Yekaterinburg archeologists in July 2007 unearthed remains at Koptyaki that seem to be those of Aleksei and Mariya.

65 Wrote one Russian observer, “Yeltsin made a tactical move of genius, making fools out of the rivals who believed his words and refused to participate in the burial.” The observer suspected Yeltsin saw the ceremony as the first step toward another election campaign in 2000, and Luzhkov was openly eyeing a presidential run. Melor Sturua, “Puteshestviye iz Moskvy v Peterburg za tsarskiye pokhorony” (A trip from Moscow to St. Petersburg for the tsar’s funeral), Nezavisimaya gazeta, July 21, 1998. Political calculations aside, it was reported in 1998, and confirmed by Boris Nemtsov in his second interview with me, that Yeltsin resolved his doubts about participating only after a conversation about the merits of the case with Academician Dmitrii Likhachëv, a leading Russian medievalist and Gulag survivor whom he held in high regard.

66 “Vystupleniye Prezidenta RF Borisa Yel’tsina na traurnoi tseremonii v Sankt-Peterburge” (Statement of President Boris Yeltsin at the funeral ceremony in St. Petersburg), Rossiiskaya gazeta, July 18, 1998.

67 Iosif Raikhel’gauz, “Kak ya gotovil prezidentskoye poslaniye” (How I prepared the presidential message), Ogonëk, November 17, 2000.

68 “Poslaniye Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii Federal’nomu Sobraniyu, ‘Poryadok vo vlasti—poryadok v strane’” (Message of the president of the Russian Federation to the Federal Assembly, “Order in government, order in the country) (Moscow: Rossiiskaya Federatsiya, 1997), 5–6.

69 Ibid., 9, 29.

70 Lebed was more ambitious than Korzhakov and had already had success as an independent politico. But he lacked the resource that was vital to Korzhakov’s influence—a friendship with Yeltsin.

71 Eugene Huskey, Presidential Power in Russia (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 87–96.

72 Baturin et al., Epokha, 719.

73 Yurii Baturin, interview with the author (June 3, 2002). Schooled in rocket science, law, and journalism, Baturin had been rejected by the Soviet program for poor eyesight. He flew to the Mir space station in 1998 and in 2001 to the international space station with Dennis Tito, the world’s first space tourist.

74 The membership fluctuated. Valentin Yumashev chaired it after Boiko. Other members of the group in 1996–98 included Tatyana Dyachenko, press secretary Sergei Yastrzhembskii, poll taker Aleksandr Oslon, political consultant Gleb Pavlovskii, Georgii Satarov and Mikhail Lesin of Yeltsin’s staff, and Igor Malashenko of NTV.

75 In Marafon, 41, Yeltsin says it was Chubais who asked him to clarify her status. Chubais left the Kremlin for the Council of Ministers in mid-March, so the matter took some time to settle and was left to Yumashev to implement.

76 All these points are from the third Yumasheva interview. Yeltsin in his memoirs (Marafon, 36) discusses their interaction in the context of the 1996 election campaign. “As a rule, she kept her personal opinion to herself. Tatyana practically never violated this tacit rule of ours. But if she suddenly made an effort—‘Papa, I nonetheless think ... ’—I would try to change the subject.”

77 The difference between the sisters, and the similarity of Tatyana to their mother, was pointed out by Naina Yeltsina in my second interview with her (September 18, 2007). On disorganization, see the comments of Naina’s former press secretary: Natal’ya Konstantinova, Zhenskii vzglyad na kremlëvskuyu zhizn’ (A woman’s view of Kremlin life) (Moscow: Geleos, 1999), 188.

78 Newcomers to the Kremlin team soon learned the utility of the Dyachenko channel if all else failed. But veterans like Pikhoya often refused to use it. She implied in her interview with me (September 26, 2001) that it would have been beneath her dignity.

79 Dikun, “Yel’tsin v Gorkakh.”

80 The experience of Anatolii Kulikov, the interior minister from 1995 to 1998, was typical. “The whole time I was minister this weekly report to the president was a ritual that could not be violated under any circumstances.” On only one occasion in the three years, when Yeltsin happened to be occupied at the designated hour, did Kulikov miss a planned telephone call. He substituted by calling Chernomyrdin, which infuriated Yeltsin: “The prime minister, that is fine, but you are subordinated to the supreme commander-in-chief and are obligated to report personally to him!” Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 415.

81 Author’s first interview with Mikhail Krasnov (June 5, 2000) and third with Yumashev; and Baturin et al., Epokha, 761–66, which relates some details from Krasnov’s point of view. Yumashev denies Krasnov’s charge that he was indifferent to the reform, saying that the means to implement it were lacking.

82 Yeltsin offered these explanations in my second interview with him. Viktor Ilyushin and Oleg Lobov were the last of the prominent Sverdlovskers to leave high posts, as deputy premier, in March 1997.

83 Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 417–18. Kulikov seems to have had no awareness that a State Council had existed early in Yeltsin’s first term and had been abolished.

84 Sergei Kiriyenko, interview with the author (January 25, 2001).

85 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 87.

86 Ibid., 88.

87 Author’s interviews with principals; and, on Vyakhirev, “Boris Nemtsov—Yevgenii Al’bats o Yel’tsine” (Boris Nemtsov to Yevgeniya Al’bats about Yeltsin), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007. Vyakhirev and Chernomyrdin defended the shares deal until December 1997, when Yeltsin, standing behind Nemtsov at a diplomatic reception in Stockholm, Sweden, asked him if a final decision had been made. When Nemtsov said it had not, Yeltsin pulled Vyakhirev aside and said the “bandits’ agreement” was to be torn up immediately, which it was.

88 “Boris Nemtsov—Yevgenii Al’bats o Yel’tsine.”

89 Thomas F. Remington, “Laws, Decrees, and Russian Constitutions: The First Hundred Years” (unpublished paper, Emory University, 2006). Decrees averaged twenty-one per month in 1992–95 and fifteen per month in 1997–99.

90 “No Improvement in Russian Economy without Land Reform—Yeltsin,” http://news/bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/monitoring/42632.stm.

91 In sequential ballots, the code went from 213 votes in favor to 220 and then to 225, one short of the 226 needed for passage. The Duma determined on July 17 to postpone further consideration.

92 David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002), 385. The best accounts of the Svyazinvest auction and the surrounding controversy are to be found in that book and in Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (Toronto: Doubleday, 2000), chap. 12.

93 “After the last presidential election, in 1996, the oligarchs captured Yeltsin, his successive governments, and the political process.” Lee S. Wolosky, “Putin’s Plutocrat Problem,” Foreign Affairs 79 (March–April 2000), 25. See more broadly Joel S. Hellman, Geraint Jones, and Daniel Kaufmann, “Seize the State, Seize the Day”: State Capture, Corruption, and Influence in Transition, Policy Research Working Paper 2444 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2000), 1.

94 Author’s interviews with Khodorkovskii (June 7, 2001), Fridman (September 21, 2001), and Potanin.

95 Yeltsin’s capacity in principle to dictate the terms was mentioned by every businessman I spoke to about 1996, and was especially stressed by Khodorkovskii, who felt Yeltsin was at first affronted by their offer. Yeltsin in his memoirs (Marafon, 103) emphasizes that the oligarchs took the initiative. “No one asked them, and there were no obligations incurred to anyone. They came to me not to defend Yeltsin but to defend their own businesses.”

96 Second Nemtsov interview.

97 The purpose of Dyachenko’s call was to inquire about the status of Yelena Masyuk, an NTV correspondent, and two crew members, who were kidnapped by a splinter group in Chechnya in May; NTV was to pay ransom for their release several weeks later. Berezovskii, speaking as deputy secretary of the Security Council, assured her that everything possible was being done to save them. The record of the conversation, “Zapis’ telefonnogo razgovora Borisa Berezovskogo s docher’yu Yel’tsina—Tat’yanoi D’yachenko” (Transcript of a telephone conversation between Boris Berezovskii and Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko), was leaked in June 1999. It is available at http://www.compromat.ru/main/berezovskiy/dyachenko.htm.

98 Berezovskii called her Tanya and, at one point, Tanyusha, a double diminutive. She called him Boris Abramovich and “you” in the second person plural, and also referred to third parties by name and patronymic.

99 Berezovskii admitted that he personally had not declared all his income and capital on his tax returns. Dyachenko seemed to accept his point that concealment would continue to be widespread. In that case, though, businessmen “should pay more on the basis of their declared capital,” that is, pay at a higher rate and on time.

100 Ul’yan Kerzonov, “Anatolii Chubais stremitsya k polnomy kontrolyu nad Rossiyei” (Anatolii Chubais is striving for complete control over Russia), Nezavisimaya gazeta, September 13, 1997. It was widely believed that Kerzonov was a pseudonym for Berezovskii. I heard of the role of the article in my third interview with Yumashev.

101 Potanin interview. I interviewed two other oligarchs who were present, Fridman and Khodorkovskii, and both shared his puzzlement.

102 His comments to Chubais and Nemtsov are related in “Boris Nemtsov—Yevgenii Al’bats o Yel’tsine.”

103 One of the authors, Al’fred Kokh, had been dismissed in August in connection with another scandal. Aleksandr Kazakov, Maksim Boiko, and Pëtr Mostovoi were fired in November. Hoffman (Oligarchs, 304) presents evidence that the book project was a device for transferring leftover funds from the 1996 campaign.

104 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 111.

105 Ibid., 104.

106 Second Nemtsov interview. As Pëtr Aven of Alpha Group put it, “There was a not very explicit but, I would say, implicit understanding that… you help us and we’ll help you.” Aven, interview with the author (May 29, 2001).

107 Hoffman, Oligarchs, 386.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1 Quotations from Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 113, 119, 118.

2 Ibid., 118.

3 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 778–79; Georgii Satarov, first interview with the author (June 5, 2000).

4 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 119–21. The serving ministers on Yeltsin’s list were Nikolai Aksënenko (railways), Vladimir Bulgak (communications), and Sergei Kiriyenko (fuel and energy). To legislators and other politicians on April 7, he mentioned as serious candidates Yurii Luzhkov (mayor of Moscow), Yegor Stroyev (governor of Orël province and chairman of the Federation Council), and Dmitrii Ayatskov (Saratov governor), as well as Bulgak, but said nothing about the others whom he later mentioned in the memoir.

5 Ibid., 120–21.

6 In 1984 Nikolayev, as commander of a motorized rifle division in the Urals Military District, spoke at a meeting organized by the Sverdlovsk obkom of the CPSU. First Secretary Yeltsin liked the presentation and said he had “a brilliant future.” Igor’ Oleinik, “Andrei Nikolayev: genshtabist v politike” (Andrei Nikolayev: a General Staff officer in politics), http://www.lebed.com/1999/art997.htm. In 1997 Nikolayev submitted his resignation to Yeltsin in an attempt to gain an expression of support. Yeltsin surprised Nikolayev by accepting: “I don’t like it when people pressure me in this way.” Yel’tsin, Marafon, 121.

7 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 121.

8 Sergei Kiriyenko, interview with the author (January 15, 2001). In 1994 Kiriyenko spoke as a banker at a dinner for Yeltsin hosted by Nemtsov. Yeltsin asked if he would like to move to Moscow but Nemtsov objected. In August 1997 Kiriyenko, in Nemtsov’s company, saw the president at Volzhskii Utës and was invited to dine with the family.

9 Yeltsin’s memoir descriptions of them are similar in many ways, but in volume three (Marafon, 121–22) he contrasts Kiriyenko’s practical experience with Gaidar’s lack thereof. He exaggerates the difference and also misleads in speaking of them as being of “a different generation.” They were born only six years apart, and when Gaidar was made acting premier in 1992 he was seven months older than Kiriyenko was when Yeltsin nominated him in 1998.

10 This is the sequence as reported in my interview with Kiriyenko, whose memory I trust most on these events. In Marafon Yeltsin said he met with Kiriyenko before Chernomyrdin. A recently adopted law on governmental organization specified that only a first deputy premier could be appointed as acting prime minister. Yeltsin was unaware of this detail and, after signing his initial decree, had to retrace his steps, make Kiriyenko a first deputy premier, and then promote him.

11 Quotation from Vladimir Zhirinovskii, interview with the author (January 22, 2002). That the Kremlin paid the LDPR money is widely believed in Moscow. Two persons who served in very high official posts in 1998 said in interviews that cash was provided from pro-government businesses and from a covert item in the federal budget.

12 Ivan Rodin, “Kommunisty predlagayut reshit’ uchast’ Dumy otkrytym golosovaniyem” (The communists suggest that the Duma make its decision by open vote), Nezavisimaya gazeta, April 24, 1998.

13 Baturin et al., Epokha, 754.

14 Only twenty-five voted against; almost 200 spoiled ballots, abstained, or stayed out of Moscow; twelve sent in written declarations in favor, which were not counted in the total. Since the ballot was secret, the party breakdown is not known with certainty. But journalists estimated twenty to twenty-five KPRF deputies broke with Gennadii Zyuganov to support Kiriyenko. See Ivan Rodin, “Duma progolosovala za Sergeya Kiriyenko i prodlila svoë sushchestvovaniye” (The Duma voted for Sergei Kiriyenko and prolonged its existence), Nezavisimaya gazeta, April 25, 1998; and David Hoffman, “Third Vote Confirms Kiriyenko as New Russian Premier,” The Washington Post, April 25, 1998.

15 Kiriyenko interview.

16 Mikhail Mikhailovich Zadornov, an economist who worked with Grigorii Yavlinskii on the Five Hundred Days Program in 1990, is not to be confused with Mikhail Nikolayevich Zadornov, the stand-up comedian referred to in Chapter 13.

17 Source: interviews with two of the parties to the affair. Word of it circulated in the press around May 20. Boris Nemtsov had instituted a tender system for most other civilian agencies in 1997.

18 Alexei Goriaev and Alexei Zabotkin, “Risks of Investing in the Russian Stock Market: Lessons of the First Decade,” Emerging Markets Review 7 (December 2006), 380–97.

19 At one meeting with aides, Yeltsin interrupted to dial Chernomyrdin and ask him what the trend was with Russian treasury notes. “The premier became confused and asked for time to prepare an answer. Yeltsin hung up and remarked, ‘Well there you have our premier, and he doesn’t know. But I know.’ The president beamed: See how I have left him. He wanted to be first in everything.” Baturin et al., Epokha, 734.

20 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 204. Boris Nemtsov, Kiriyenko’s mentor and now one of his deputy premiers, believed a stabilizing devaluation could have been done in the first few weeks of the Kiriyenko premiership. Like Yeltsin, he said Kiriyenko would not hear of it. Nemtsov, second interview with the author (February 6, 2002).

21 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 203.

22 Aleksandr Livshits, interview with the author (January 19, 2001).

23 Russian GKOs were first issued in February 1993. Coupon-bearing OFZs (Federal Loan Bonds) were introduced in 1995 as a complement, but GKOs defined the market throughout. Western advice paved the way for both types. Although GKOs were denominated in rubles, instruments known as dollar-forward contracts hedged against reduction in the exchange rate. Once the ruble went into collapse, the dollar-forward contracts hastened its demise.

24 See Venla Sipilä, “The Russian Triple Crisis, 1998: Currency, Finance, and Budget,” University College London, Centre for the Study of Economic and Social Change in Europe, Working Paper 17 (March 2002); and Padma Desai, “Why Did the Ruble Collapse in August 1998?” American Economic Review 90 (May 2000), 48–52. For historical perspective, see Niall Ferguson and Brigitte Granville, “‘Weimar on the Volga’: Causes and Consequences of Inflation in 1990s Russia Compared with 1920s Germany,” Journal of Economic History 60 (December 2000), 1061–87.

25 The package, and the expectation that it would be granted, aggravated the crisis by facilitating the conversion of rubles into dollars by Russian and foreign speculators. Brian Pinto, Evsey Gurvich, and Sergei Ulatov, “Lessons from the Russian Crisis of 1998 and Recovery,” in Joshua Aizenman and Brian Pinto, eds., Managing Volatility and Crises: A Practitioner’s Guide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 406–39.

26 Vera Kuznetsova, “Boris Yel’tsin v ocherednoi raz poobeshchal ne idti na tretii srok” (Boris Yeltsin makes his latest promise not to seek a third term), Izvestiya, June 20, 1998. Kuznetsova added that the mill would need to put together a sound business plan to get assistance, but the gist of Yeltsin’s remarks was that a subsidy was on the way. For a humorous account of Yeltsin’s high spirits and how he mistook a female journalist for a model from the factory, see Yelena Tregubova, Baiki kremlëvskogo diggera (Tales of a Kremlin digger) (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2003), 81–84.

27 Mikhail Fridman, interview with the author (September 21, 2001).

28 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 211–12.

29 Indicative are remarks made by Stephen F. Cohen of New York University on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on September 14: “The country is in profound crisis. It’s coming apart at the seams politically, economically, socially, psychologically. The economy has collapsed. Winter is coming. People have no money. They have no food. There’s no medicine…. The so-called free market reforms in Russia have collapsed; they’re over.” Transcript at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/europe/july-dec98/russia_9-14.

30 Sergei Parkhomenko, “Podoplëka” (The real state of affairs), Itogi, September 15, 1998.

31 Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Vopros o vlasti” (The question of power), Nezavisimaya gazeta, July 10, 1998.

32 Tret’yakov did not explain how to reconcile the council with the constitution or what would happen if its head disagreed with Yeltsin, who would still have the highest standing in the state, or with the prime minister, who would continue to answer to the president.

33 Family members were emphatic on this point in interviews. Some press articles in late August and early September cited Kremlin sources and even provided the date on which Yeltsin would supposedly hand in his resignation.

34 Viktor Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000); and Valentin Yumashev, fifth interview with the author (September 17, 2007). Yeltsin reiterated in Marafon, 219–20, that his former prime minister was not the best leader for the future. But in August 1998 he accepted the Chernomyrdin option. Had the nomination gone through, Yeltsin, Yumashev said, could not have faced up to dismissing him a second time prior to the 2000 election.

35 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 288.

36 On the way in from the airport on September 1, Chernomyrdin “used the half-hour ride to lobby the president [Clinton] to support his nomination with Yeltsin, who was rumored to be giving up on him.” Ibid., 287. Clinton was smart enough not to intrude.

37 Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Vitse-prezident i drugiye” (The vice president and others), Nezavisimaya gazeta, September 12, 1998.

38 They were Andrei Kokoshin, secretary of the Security Council; Yevgenii Savast’yanov, deputy head of the Kremlin executive office; and Sergei Yastrzhembskii, press secretary and foreign-policy assistant.

39 Yeltsin felt after his conversations with Yumashev that a Chernomyrdin restored to the prime minister’s office would have “the aura of an unjustly offended person.” “In that sense, my moral loss would turn out to be a win for Chernomyrdin.” Marafon, 221

40 Viktor Zorkal’tsev, a Zyuganov deputy, had signed for the KPRF on August 28, and the pact was supported by Nikolai Ryzhkov and other pro-communist factions in the Duma. Chernomyrdin was more favorable to it than Yeltsin.

41 Yevgenii Primakov, Vosem’ mesyatsev plyus… (Eight months plus) (Moscow: Mysl’, 2001), 14.

42 In his memoir account (ibid., 7), Primakov says Yeltsin offered the post of prime minister to Maslyukov, in a desperate outburst in the presence of him and Chernomyrdin. Maslyukov, he says, declined the offer but said he would work under Primakov. Valentin Yumashev, who conducted most of the negotiations with other candidates, has strongly denied (interviews) that any such offer was made, as Yeltsin could not accept a member of the KPRF as his head of government. Yeltsin’s own memoir only mentions Maslyukov as someone he considered. It is possible that he made a statement that Maslyukov or Primakov misconstrued as an offer, or that he made and retracted one without informing his chief of staff.

43 This success should not be exaggerated. The day before Yeltsin fired him in May 1999, Primakov spoke proudly of having cut the state debt to pensioners in half and of public-sector doctors and teachers waiting two months for their pay instead of five.

44 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 239–40.

45 These trends are summarized in Goohoon Kwon, “Budgetary Impact of Oil Prices in Russia,” http://www.internationalmonetaryfund.org/external/country/rus/rr/2003/pdf/080103.pdf; and Philip Hanson, “The Russian Economic Recovery: Do Four Years of Growth Tell Us That the Fundamentals Have Changed?” Europe-Asia Studies 55 (May 2003), 365–82.

46 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 232.

47 Michael R. Gordon, “A Rough Trip for Yeltsin Adds to Worries about Health,” New York Times, October 13, 1998.

48 Yekaterina Grigor’eva, “Vladimir Shevchenko: za rabotu s Yel’tsinym ya blagodaren sud’be” (Vladimir Shevchenko: I am grateful to fate for the chance to work with Yeltsin), Izvestiya, May 21, 2007.

49 Maksim Sokolov, “Zhenikhi v dome Yel’tsina” (The bachelors in Yeltsin’s home), ibid., June 17, 1999, 2.

50 Talbott, Russia Hand, 350.

51 Quotation from Yelena Dikun, “I prezident imeyet pravo na miloserdiye” (The president, too, has the right to charity), Obshchaya gazeta, October 15, 1998. Dikun, reporting on Yeltsin’s abbreviated trip to Central Asia, said he had come to resemble Brezhnev and Konstantin Chernenko, and urged family members to take matters into their own hands: “You have nothing to explain, you know perfectly well what is going on. Every person is entitled to grow old, anybody can get unwell—there is nothing in this to be ashamed of. But to turn the process of a person’s dying away into a public spectacle or attraction is inhuman and un-Christian.”

52 Mikhail Margelov, a then-official in the executive office, interview with the author (May 25, 2000).

53 Yeltsin reclaimed first place in the April poll and held it until September 1999, when Vladimir Putin took the lead.

54 On the phone conversation, revealed to the press by Samuel Berger, Clinton’s national-security adviser, see David Stout, “Yeltsin Dismisses Graft Allegations,” New York Times, September 9, 1999. Pacolli said in 2000 that he had arranged for credit cards for Yeltsin’s daughters in 1995; his guarantee expired in two months, and Mabetex paid no bills on their behalf. Carlotta Gall, “Builder in Yeltsin Scandal Discounts Its Gravity,” ibid., January 21, 2000. The Swiss case was closed in late 2000.

55 If anyone doubts the downward spiral in Chechnya, read as follows: “There was violation of human rights on a mass scale…. A slave market openly operated in the center of Grozny, with hundreds of people (mainly Chechens) held captive as hostages and subjected to violence. Kidnapping people for exchange acquired epidemic proportions, with more than 3,500 Chechens ransomed between 1996 and 1999. Bandits and terrorists killed thousands…. Not only did Chechnya become the criminal cesspool of the CIS countries; it also became a base for international terrorism. Terrorists from many different countries became active on its territory, with their activities financed by foreign extremist centers.” Dzhabrail Gakaev, “Chechnya in Russia and Russia in Chechnya,” in Richard Sakwa, ed., Chechnya from Past to Future (London: Anthem, 2005), 32.

56 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 253.

57 Yelena Dikun, “Bol’shaya kremlëvskaya rodnya: anatomiya i fiziologiya Sem’i” (The great Kremlin clan: anatomy and physiology of the Family), Obshchaya gazeta, July 22, 1999.

58 A hypercritical treatment of Russian politics in the 1990s, for example, writes of Berezovskii both buying the favors of the Yeltsins and blackmailing them. The former assertion rests largely on the testimony of Aleksandr Korzhakov, which is unreliable on the question of Berezovskii’s personal favors and presents. The latter assertion is not backed up by hard evidence and does not square with the impression in the book that Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana respected Berezovskii’s advice and sought it out. Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001).

59 Leonid Dyachenko first came to public attention when an American investigation into money laundering discovered that he had two sizable bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. No charges were laid. Yurii Skuratov, the procurator general whom Yeltsin forced out of office in the spring of 1999, doubted that the president was informed about Dyachenko’s actions. Robert O’Harrow, Jr., and Sharon LaFraniere, “Yeltsin’s Son-in-Law Kept Offshore Accounts, Hill Told,” The Washington Post, September 23, 1999.

60 It was widely reported, for example, that Berezovskii favored the removal of Chernomyrdin in March 1998. But as replacement he advocated Ivan Rybkin, the former Duma speaker, and not Kiriyenko. Berezovskii, no more consistent in this regard than Yeltsin, was all for the reinstatement of Chernomyrdin in August 1998, and one American journalist wrote at the time that, “More than anyone else, Berezovskii brought back Chernomyrdin to power” (David Hoffman, “Tycoons Take the Reins in Russia,” The Washington Post, August 28, 1998). As we know, though, Chernomyrdin never came back to power because the Duma refused to confirm him. Primakov, who was confirmed, viewed Berezovskii as a schemer.

61 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 109–10. Yeltsin grumbled openly about Berezovskii’s pushiness at a ceremony for Russian cosmonauts in April 1998 (Hoffman, Oligarchs, 409–10).

62 Yeltsin says in his memoir that he had “several” meetings with Berezovskii. Berezovskii told me (interview, March 8, 2002) there were two conversations during the 1996 campaign and “very few” after that, three or four at most, plus a handful of larger gatherings at which both he and Yeltsin were present.

63 Berezovskii interview.

64 This statement is in Boris Berezovskii, Iskusstvo nevozmozhnogo (The art of the impossible), 3 vols. (Moscow: Nezavisimaya gazeta, 2004), 2:250.

65 “Berezovskii said to me that he had a program for psychological influence on Tanya. He could tell her for hours at a time how I, for example, was a scoundrel… and, since she was impressionable… she in the end had come to hate me fiercely.” Second Nemtsov interview. Berezovskii made the claim about meeting Dyachenko every two or three months in a press interview in 1999 (Berezovskii, Iskusstvo nevozmozhnogo, 1:142). It is possible that he was exaggerating.

66 Quotations from Berezovskii interview and third interview with Tatyana Yumasheva (January 25, 2007).

67 Valentin Yumashev, fourth interview with the author (January 22, 2007), and third Yumasheva interview; Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 606. Dikun, “Bol’shaya kremlëvskaya rodnya,” reports yet another example tending in this direction: that Yumashev as Kremlin chief of staff led the opposition to the Sibneft-Yukos merger in 1998. But Yumashev has assured me there is not an ounce of truth to this story.

68 “Pravo pobedilo emotsii” (Law has beaten emotions), Rossiiskaya gazeta, November 6, 1998. The Duma brief was not as clear-cut as one might think. In neighboring Ukraine, where the constitutional wording and the status of the incumbent were almost identical, the court ruled in December 2003 in favor of President Leonid Kuchma. He chose not to seek re-election in 2004.

69 Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007).

70 Grigor’eva, “Vladimir Shevchenko.” An alternative explanation was that Yeltsin disguised his intentions until the very end, even from close aides.

71 Michael Wines, “Impeachment Also Is Proceeding, in a Convoluted Way, in Russia,” New York Times, December 19, 1998. The proceedings are described in detail in Kaj Hobér, The Impeachment of President Yeltsin (Huntington, N.Y.: Juris, 2004). Some deputies favored a sixth charge blaming Yeltsin for the financial collapse of 1998.

72 Sergei Kovalëv, “Ne zhelayu igrat’ v beznravstennyye igry” (I do not wish to play immoral games), Nezavisimaya gazeta, May 15, 1999.

73 Strobe Talbott, interview with the author (January 9, 2006).

74 “Confrontation over Pristina Airport,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/671495.stm.

75 By this time the affair had entered the sphere of theater of the absurd. The government claimed that Skuratov was being blackmailed by the prostitutes and this left him unable to serve.

76 This historical parallel is drawn in Yel’tsin, Marafon, 302. Yeltsin was most alarmed by a comment Primakov made in February emphasizing the need to free up cells in Russian prisons for persons who would soon be arrested for economic crimes. He thought it reflected Soviet-era stereotypes.

77 Ibid., 303.

78 The main indicator of favor was seen on the nightly television news on May 5. At a Kremlin meeting that day on preparations for the millennium celebrations, Yeltsin made a show of asking Stepashin to leave his seat at the table and take the chair between him and Patriarch Aleksii II.

79 Natal’ya Konstantinova, “Boris Yel’tsin poshël na politicheskoye obostreniye i otpravil Yevgeniya Primakova v otstavku” (Boris Yeltsin has gone for a sharpening of political tensions and sent Yevgenii Primakov into retirement), Nezavisimaya gazeta, May 13, 1999.

80 These maneuvers are analyzed in Aleksandr Sadchikov, “Partiinaya distsiplina ne vyderzhala ispytaniya impichmenta” (Party discipline failed the test of impeachment), Izvestiya, May 18, 1999; and Ivan Rodin, “Kak Boris Yel’tsin obygral Zyuganova i Yavlinskogo” (How Boris Yeltsin beat Zyuganov and Yavlinskii), Nezavisimaya gazeta, May 18, 1999.

81 Valentin Yumashev, first interview with the author (February 4, 2002). A number of press accounts described Aksënenko as a flunky of Berezovskii’s, but I never found any evidence that this was so. He was appointed minister in April 1997 at the initiative of Boris Nemtsov, who was as hostile to Berezovskii as any governmental leader in 1997–98.

82 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 315.

83 Yevgenii Yur’ev, “Duma odevayetsya v kamuflyazh” (The Duma is getting dressed in camouflage), Segodnya, May 13, 1999.

84 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 312, 315. Yeltsin mentioned in that account not revealing his plan to Putin. Tatyana Yumasheva (Dyachenko) told me explicitly in our third interview that her father did not ask her opinion on the selection of Putin.

85 Sergei Stepashin, interview with the author (June 14, 2001).

86 Fifth Yumashev interview.

87 A number of accounts of Yeltsin’s last months in power, citing no sources, mention Berezovskii as giving Putin a helping hand. But a journalist who spoke with Berezovskii in British exile in 2002 reports him as being a detractor of Putin even then: “Berezovsky said he first began to have his doubts about Putin in 1999, when the little-known FSB director was promoted by Yeltsin to prime minister.” John Daniszewski, “Former Russian Rainmaker Tries Role of Dissident,” Los Angeles Times, March 3, 2002.

88 Decree No. 1763, on provisions for retired presidents, was Putin’s second as acting president. It provided for retirement pay, security, healthcare, transportation, a state dacha, and other services for all former presidents; one article gave an ex-president lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution and administrative discipline. There was no mention of family members. It was dated December 31 and published on January 5, 2000. Drafts of some parts had been prepared earlier by lawyers in the Kremlin administration, the guards service, and elsewhere. “Naturally, [Yeltsin] and Putin never discussed this question in their meetings before the president’s retirement. Boris Nikolayevich would have considered this improper. As far as I know, they never discussed it after his retirement…. [Yeltsin considered himself] completely above all this.” Valentin Yumashev, personal communication to the author (October 30, 2007). The Putin decree lost effect when it was replaced by a federal statute in February 2001.

89 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 254 (italics added). Earlier in the memoir (79), Yeltsin writes of thinking that the generals and security officials with whom he had contact in the first half of the 1990s were inadequate. “I waited for a new general to appear, unlike any other general, or rather one who was like the generals I read about in books when I was young…. Time passed, and such a general appeared… Vladimir Putin.”

90 The plotters were associated with Lev Rokhlin, a retired general and Duma member who was murdered, evidently by his wife, in early July. Rumors of a conspiracy in the Moscow Military District circulated at the time and were confirmed in my fifth interview with Valentin Yumashev.

91 Fifty-two KPRF deputies voted against Putin but thirty-two voted for him. If seven of those thirty-two had voted against, the nomination would have failed.

92 Ot pervogo litsa: razgovory s Vladimirom Putinym (From the first person: conversations with Vladimir Putin) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 131.

93 “Prezident Rossii Boris Yel’tsin: Rossiya vstupayet v novyi politcheskii etap” (The president of Russia Boris Yeltsin: Russia is entering into a new political phase), Rossiiskaya gazeta, August 10, 1999.

94 Ot pervogo litsa, 133, 135.

95 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 367.

96 See Timothy J. Colton and Michael McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2003), 173.

97 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 387–88.

98 See ibid., 9–21, and Ot pervogo litsa, 185–86. Putin’s impression that Yeltsin would not be departing until the spring (conveyed to Dyachenko and Yumashev in a conversation after December 14) is referred to in the communication from Yumashev. Yeltsin met with Putin a second time, on December 29, to discuss a year-end departure.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 397.

2 Michael Wines, “Putin Is Made Russia’s President in First Free Transfer of Power,” New York Times, May 8, 2000.

3 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya khotel, chtoby lyudi byli svobodny” (Boris Yeltsin: I wanted people to be free), Izvestiya, February 1, 2006.

4 Comment about the pneumonia in 2001 from Naina Yeltsin, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007).

5 He proudly told a journalist a year after resigning that he was getting up these days at four A.M. “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ni o chëm ne zhaleyu” (Boris Yeltsin: I am not complaining about anything), Komsomol’skaya Pravda, December 8, 2000. In later interviews, he gave the time as five or six.

6 The net worth of Deripaska, born in 1968, was estimated at $13.3 billion in 2007, putting him fortieth on Forbes magazine’s annual world list of wealthy individuals and fifth in Russia. His United Company Rusal is the largest producer of aluminum in the world.

7 A fourth great-grandson was born two months after Yeltsin’s death in 2007. Two of the boys were born to Yelena’s daughter Yekaterina and two to Yelena’s daughter Mariya.

8 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002). Naina Yeltsina took me through the library during our second interview. It held five or six thousand volumes at the time, and at least that many older books were stored in the Yeltsins’ Moscow apartment.

9 “Russian Tennis Remembers Yeltsin,” http://leblogfoot.eurosport.fr/tennis/davis-cup/2007/sport_sto1160667.shtml. Yeltsin first displayed his barrier-leaping technique at the Kremlin Cup tournament in Moscow in October 2003. He rushed out onto the court and embraced Anastasia Myskina, who won the women’s single title, with parental pride.

10 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 405–6.

11 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ni o chëm ne zhaleyu.”

12 Among the foundation’s other projects have been help for a Russian-language university in Kyrgyzstan, musical training in orphanages, a pianists’ contest in Siberia, a nursing home for army veterans, a clinic for juvenile cancer patients, small war memorials, a film series on “Freedom in Russia,” and construction of a tennis and sports complex in Yekaterinburg.

13 Kirill Dybskii, “Ot pervogo litsa: vsë pravil’no” (From the first person: everything is fine), Itogi, January 30, 2006.

14 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ni o chëm ne zhaleyu” (italics added).

15 Ibid.

16 The new lyrics were written by Sergei Mikhal’kov, now eighty-seven, the author of children’s books who wrote the original words for the Soviet anthem in 1944. Successive pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian anthems can be downloaded from http://www.hymn.ru/index-en.html.

17 Mikhail Kasyanov (born in 1957), Putin’s prime minister from 2000 to 2004, had been Yeltsin’s last finance minister in 1999. Aleksei Kudrin, the new minister of finance (born 1960), was first deputy minister from 1997 to 1999. The minister of industry and trade, German Gref (born 1964), was first deputy minister of state property from 1998 to 2000.

18 The phrase “restrained support” is from “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ni o chëm ne zhaleyu” and was specifically applied to changes in the federal system. Yeltsin in that interview (December 2000) expressed no reservations about the move against Berezovskii, who he said “did more harm than good.” He did not comment on Gusinskii, who had spent several days in jail in May 2000.

19 Yeltsin’s rethinking of the first war is apparent in Dybskii, “Ot pervogo litsa.” Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, who negotiated the 1996 cease-fire with Yeltsin and was then acting president of Chechnya, went into exile during the second war and was assassinated by Russian agents in Qatar in 2004. Federal forces killed Aslan Maskhadov, who signed the 1997 peace treaty and was president of the republic until the second Russian invasion, in Chechnya in 2005. Shamil Basayev, the organizer of the 1995 raid on Budënnovsk and the 1999 incursion into Dagestan, was killed in 2006.

20 These actions are well analyzed in Andrew Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2008).

21 “Gusinsky’s cynical brilliance throughout the campaign against him was to cloak his commercial interests and political ambitious in the language of freedom of speech.” Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia, 155. Berezovskii was less cynical, and had always treated ORT as a source of influence, not a money maker.

22 Boris Nemtsov, third interview with the author (April 12, 2002). Instead of Yeltsin, Yevgenii Primakov headed up the new board. The station was soon converted into a sports channel and went off the air in 2003.

23 Yegor Gaidar, “On ne khotel nasiliya, no tol’ko on ne byl slabakom” (He did not want to use force, but he was no weakling, either), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007.

24 Details of the interaction from interviews with family members.

25 Author’s conversation with Putin on the sidelines of the Valdai Discussion Club, Bocharov Ruchei residence, Sochi, September 14, 2007.

26 Dybskii, “Ot pervogo litsa.”

27 Andrei Kolesnikov, “Boris Yel’tsin poproshchalsya so svoyei epokhoi” (Boris Yeltsin said good-bye to his epoch), Kommersant-Daily, February 6, 2006.

28 “A Conversation with Billy Graham,” http://www/midtod.com/9612/billygraham.phtml.

29 Father Georgii Sudenov in “Ushël Boris Yel’tsin” (Boris Yeltsin has departed), Izvestiya, April 24, 2007. Sudenov, the deacon of the church in the Moscow suburb of Troparëvo, was sometimes invited to dine with the Yeltsins. Before eating, he always said grace and Yeltsin joined him in singing the Slavic hymn “Mnogaya leta” (Many years).

30 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya khotel, chtoby lyudi byli svobodny.”

31 Second Yeltsina interview.

32 Aleksandr Gamov, “Utraty” (Losses), Komsomol’skaya pravda, April 25, 2007.

33 Second Yeltsina interview.

34 Andrei Kolesnikov, “Poslednii put’ pervogo prezidenta” (The first president’s last road), Kommersant-Daily, April 26, 2007. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were both at Putin’s first inauguration and a few other ceremonial events but studiously avoided one another. Another notable attendee at the funeral was Aleksandr Rutskoi, the vice president Yeltsin put in jail during the constitutional conflict of 1993. Ruslan Khasbulatov, Rutskoi’s ally against Yeltsin, skipped the funeral, as did Aleksandr Korzhakov.

35 The press reported as fact or rumor that Naina’s handkerchief contained an icon or a cross. One journalist claimed that the crucifix from Yeltsin’s christening in 1931 had been saved all these years and was buried with him. These stories were all untrue.

CODA

1 Mikhail Gorbachev, who attended the funeral, took a moderate but still critical position when he said in a statement that Yeltsin would be remembered for his “tragic fate” and misguided policies. He softened his response in a press interview in which he noted that he and Yeltsin had both set out to improve life for the people.

2 Quoted at http://gazeta.ru/politics/yeltsin/1614107.shtml.

3 Quoted in Yekaterina Grigor’eva and Vladimir Perekrest, “Provodili po-khristianski” (He was given a Christian sendoff), Izvestiya, April 26, 2007.

4 Viktor Shenderovich, “Yel’tsin,” at http://www.shender.ru/paper/text/?file=154.

5 Commencement address at Washington University, St. Louis, May 19, 2006, at http://www.olin.wustl.edu/discovery/feature.cfm?sid=668&i=30&pg=8.

6 “Boris Yeltsin and His Role in Russian History,” at http://bd.english.fom.ru/report/map/dominant/edomt0718_2/ed071820.

7 The latest survey for which data are available was done by the Public Opinion Foundation in February 2006. The question was whether Gorbachev had done more good or more harm to the nation, and a middle category, for good and harm in equal measure, was available. Eleven percent of Russians thought Gorbachev had done more good than harm, 23 percent that he had done them in equal measure, 52 percent that he had done more harm than good, and 14 percent found it hard to answer. “Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the USSR,” at http://bd.english.fom.ru/report/cat/societas/rus_im/rus_history/gorbachev_m_s_/etb060812.

8 Sidney Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (New York: Humanities Press, 1943), 156–57. The Russian Lenin was the only one of Hook’s examples about whom he wrote an entire chapter. The prevalent image in many recent studies of social and political change is that of “path dependency,” whereby positive reinforcement, short time horizons, and inertia keep things on the same track over extended periods of time. See in particular Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 1. Before a path can be established, however, it has been pointed out that relatively small factors, such as choices by leaders or bargains struck among different groups, may push things down one of several competing paths, so that the pattern is one of “periods of relative (but not total) openness, followed by periods of relative (but not total or permanent) stability.” Ibid., 53. Yeltsin made his mark in a period of relative openness in which Hook’s metaphor of a fork in the road holds up well.

9 Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: Norton, 1969), 113, 402.

10 Gorbachev, of course, addressed these same issues in his own way, and, unlike Yeltsin, he also made conceptual breakthroughs on issues of war and peace. But Gorbachev’s reassessments on domestic issues were less thorough than Yeltsin’s, which explains why, in the radical climate of the times, Yeltsin consistently outbid him.

11 Isaiah Berlin, “On Political Judgment,” New York Review of Books, October 3, 1996, 26–30.

12 Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Knopf, 2002), xx.

13 Sergei Stankevich, interview with the author (May 29, 2001). Stankevich by the time of the interview had no use for Yeltsin and could not be suspected of bias in his favor.

14 Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 410 (italics added).

15 The significance of negative as well as positive choices is clearly drawn in Richard J. Samuels, Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 19.

16 Martin Gilman, “Becoming a Motor of the Global Economy,” Moscow Times, November 14, 2007.

17 Quotations from Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13 (January 2002), 10, 12. Carothers was writing generally of countries that have lost their way in the transition, and not specifically about Russia.

18 Even Putin’s treatment of lower-level officials brings to mind Yeltsin’s early reputation as boss for the bosses. One observer has called him “the people’s czar who reins in ministers, bureaucrats, tycoons, and even the politicians of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party.” Peter Finn, “In a Russian City, Clues to Putin’s Abiding Appeal,” The Washington Post, November 24, 2007.

19 Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), xi.

20 Henry Yasas, quoted in Tatyana Gershkovich, “Remembering Yeltsin,” Moscow Times, September 14, 2007. Some pictures are available at http://www.art4.ru/ru/news/news_detail.php?ID=2994&block_id=28.

21 Gershkovich, “Remembering Yeltsin.” Kavarga’s own description of the work in materials distributed at the gallery places more emphasis on the chaos depicted, “without which an absolutely new creation would be impossible.” Yeltsin’s name, he said, should be read as “fixing in memory either the formation or the crushing of our latest illusion.”

22 Gukova’s description from the exhibit.

23 Description at the exhibit by Tavasiyev.

24 Description at the exhibit by Leikin and Miturich-Khlebnikova.