What made the case for a military response irresistible was the shared hubris of assuming that the army was capable of prevailing in a surgical strike. The Defense Ministry questioned only the feasibility of doing it rashly and in mid-winter. Pavel Grachëv believed the republic could be secured in ten days, and showed Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin on a map how the advance would go.111 Oleg Lobov, the Sverdlovsk apparatchik who by this time was secretary of the Security Council, the coordinating body for national security (rather like the National Security Council in Washington, D.C.), is reported to have boasted to a lawmaker in November 1994 that there would be “a small, victorious war” in Chechnya, which would “raise the president’s ratings” as, he said, the U.S. intervention in Haiti had helped Bill Clinton’s.112 Lobov in an interview with me in 2002 said he never made the statement, while confirming that he had thought the war would go more swimmingly than it did.113 As for Yeltsin, although there is no evidence that he linked Chechnya to his approval ratings, he had a pollyannaish view of Russian military capabilities and was now of the opinion that independence for a Chechen statelet would be “the beginning of the breakup of the country.”114
The Kremlin first attempted covert action to overthrow Dudayev in league with local anti-government militias. When this did not work, Yeltsin had his Security Council sanction a military operation. On November 30 he signed Decree No. 2137 authorizing the army and the MVD to “restore constitutional order” in Chechnya. Three columns of troops and armor tore across the provincial border on December 11. On December 31, without proper intelligence or infantry cover, tanks entered Grozny, which the tsar’s Terek Cossacks had founded as a fortress in 1818. Chechen squads mowed down many of the crews and hid in housing and office buildings. Russian guns and airstrikes within weeks made a moonscape out of the city and created a humanitarian catastrophe. The Russian contingent numbered 40,000 by January 1995 and 70,000 by February. By some estimates, 25,000 civilians and 1,500 Russian troops had died by April 1995. As early as January 4, Yeltsin was demanding to know at a Kremlin meeting why so many had been killed in the blitzkrieg. “Russia at this moment,” he was to write in his memoirs, “parted with one more exceptionally dubious but fond illusion—about the might of our army . . . about its indomitability.”115 He and the country had paid a prohibitive price for the illusion and for being drawn into what he confessed in 1996 had been “the most botched war in the history of Russia.”116
Chechnya has been called Yeltsin’s Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, or Iraq. It was a sorrier trial in one sense—its firsthand feedback into national life and politics. The butchery and squalor seen on the television news were not in some distant land but in a corner of Russia. The vox populi turned against the war in the spring of 1995, even as federal battalions chased the Chechen warriors out of the urban areas and into the hills. But on June 14, 1995, Shamil Basayev, a former firefighter, computer salesman, and airplane hijacker—who claimed he had been in the crowd defending Yeltsin at the Russian White House in August 1991—opened up a home front using the foreign weapon of terrorism. Basayev and his gunmen drove three trucks untouched into Budënnovsk, Stavropol province, and took 1,400 patients, medical personnel, and others hostage in a hospital, demanding a Russian pullout from Chechnya. Yeltsin ill-advisedly took off for a meeting of the G-7 in Halifax, Canada, leaving Viktor Chernomyrdin to negotiate with Basayev (and save lives) for two days of the crisis. By the time it was over on June 18, 126 townspeople had been executed or killed in the crossfire and the Chechens had escaped. On June 21 the Duma for the first and only time voted (by 241 votes to seventy-two) no-confidence in Yeltsin’s government, after which he fired the Stavropol governor and three cabinet members: Interior Minister Yerin, Minister of Nationality and Regional Affairs Yegorov, and the head of the security service, Sergei Stepashin.
The military thrust in Chechnya wound down after Budënnovsk. On July 30 Moscow signed a protocol with the guerrillas calling for a cease-fire, a disarming of the Chechen formations, and a drawdown of army units. In late 1995 it went through the motions of returning Doku Zavgayev as head of the republic and staging an election. But militants in the countryside continued to ambush the federal forces and their local clients, kidnapping and piracy went on unabated, and few weapons were turned in. Dudayev’s death in April 1996 had little effect on the Russians’ growing yearning for a way out. The presidential election of the summer of 1996 (see Chapter 14) was to force the issue.
If any consolation is to be taken from the Chechen fiasco, it is that Yeltsin did not put it to use to asphyxiate debate or political liberties. He pats himself on the back in Presidential Marathon: “If during those . . . critical days we had gone for extraordinary measures and had limited freedom of speech, a split would have been unavoidable” between state and society.117 It is no idle boast. At one of the low points of his administration, struggling to keep the state together with the bluntest of instruments, he could have attacked democratic freedoms in the name of protecting the state, but elected not to.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Boris Agonistes
If there is an enduring truism about Boris Yeltsin, it is that he had a colorful personality—a juicy or succulent personality (sochnaya lichnost’) is another idiom one hears Russians use. It was the stuff of countless news stories in his years in power and suffuses the Yeltsin legend.
Human personalities are elusive. The out-of-the-ordinary individual may outdo the ordinary in erecting “identity shields” to mask what is beneath the skin.1 Yeltsin’s carapace as national leader was unusually impenetrable. It differed in degree if not in kind from the reserve he maintained in Sverdlovsk, where he had found himself on familiar and stable terrain. Yeltsin seemed to bring to the metropole a fear of giving himself away, as Sergei Filatov, his chief of staff for three years, says—an unease “that someone would half-open a nook of his personal, secret life or read his inmost thoughts.” Vyacheslav Kostikov, his spokesman from 1992 to 1995, gives up in his memoir on jamming him into a master formula or sobriquet: “In reality, no one knows Yeltsin, and he does nothing to bring clarity to his selfportrait.” A member of the Kremlin press pool remembers Yeltsin as “the substantiation of power on two legs”; what went on inside his head flummoxed her to the end.2
The swashbuckler Man on the Tank from 1991 remains the culminating image of Yeltsin for the ages. Going from maverick to master, he began to project other, competing images. And some of them—lashing out at former parliamentary colleagues in 1992 and 1993, brandishing the notorious conductor’s baton in Berlin in 1994, looking wan after heart attacks in 1995—spoke of disquiet and even anguish. But these were not the only juices that flowed, which makes it important to eschew clichés and pop psychology and establish, as best one can, the actual balance among them. If the private man had not been predictive of the public man, one might not care. Here we can rest easy. As milestone events of Yeltsin’s first presidential term go to show, his interior landscape, inscrutable as it was, was highly relevant to his choices and to the fingerprints he left as leader.
Events were overtaking two of Yeltsin’s life scripts as the curtain lifted on the post-communist era. He had long since sloughed off his sense of political duty to the Soviet Union. His residual sense of filial duty ended on March 21, 1993, with the death of his mother from heart failure. Klavdiya Vasil’evna was eighty-five and had been staying with the Moscow Yeltsins for some months. The evening before, as the raucous conflict with the Supreme Soviet heated up, she took in the television news with them, bussed her son, and said to him, “That’s my boy, Borya,” as she went back to her bedroom. This was the last he heard from her. She was given an Orthodox burial at Kuntsevo Cemetery, with several priests and a choir. Yeltsin held a clod of frozen earth in his hand for some minutes before tossing it on the casket.3
The rebellion scenario now read like diaries stored in a dusty attic. In the August coup, Oleg Poptsov had marveled at his capability for overturning the status quo: “The framework of pow
er has to be adjusted to him. A person with a cunning, deep-set capacity for mutiny, he can smash this framework in a single minute.”4 The framework of power had been not only adjusted to Yeltsin but harnessed to him. There was no one left to rebel against.
Yeltsin never discarded his testing script, with its tinges of strength and competency. At his desk, he used trite policy details as tests. A topnotch speed reader—aided by a pencil, he ran his eye along the diagonal of the page, from upper left to lower right—he would memorize factoids and passages from official documents and retrieve them in discussions weeks or months later, tickled when he could recite the exact page number. Away from the office, exercise and sport remained the main devices. For old times’ sake, Yeltsin might still do a walrus swim in a frigid river or lake. Aleksandr Korzhakov reports one on the Moskva River on a March day in the early 1990s, with ice floes bobbing. Whenever possible, Yeltsin capped a steam bath with a plunge into a snowbank or freezing water; he would submerse himself in the water, ticking off the seconds, for two full minutes, longer than most men half his age could stand the temperature and the oxygen deprivation. 5 With volleyball behind him, Yeltsin had taken up tennis, the racket sport that also has a serve-and-volley structure, while working at Gosstroi. He played it in pairs and had a booming serve, although he was lumbering on his feet and rallied poorly with his mutilated left hand. Shamil Tarpishchev, the professional captain of the Russian national team, was his personal coach, and found him no more genial in the face of a loss than his Sverdlovsk volleyball mates had. One time Tarpishchev thought it would be amusing to offer to play doubles against Yeltsin and Korzhakov by pairing with Yeltsin’s grandson Boris, and to neutralize his advantage by handcuffing himself to young Boris. The manacled Tarpishchev and Boris, Jr., won the first set. “I looked over and the president was exerting himself and glowering at Borya and me. We threw the second set and got out of there.”6
As in almost any leadership career, success was still the script of the most import to Yeltsin. Richard Nixon, who met with him in 1991, 1992, and 1993, saw in Yeltsin “a relentless inner drive that propelled him to the top,” rather like Nixon, who was also raised poor, made it almost to the top in the United States, was set back, and clawed his way back up Everest.7 If getting to be “first” motivated Yeltsin in the good old days, staying first motivated him now, and that was no easier a task, for one had to pedal like mad in this environment just to stand still. And building a better way of life, as he was to say in his retirement speech, was proving to be “excruciatingly difficult” and “exceptionally complicated,” and that realization was never out of his mind. He had always been hard on himself. As his daughter Tatyana said in an interview, “Even when he had made some kind of speech and I would say, ‘Papa, that went fantastically,’ or he had pulled off some kind of deal very well, he would say, ‘No, nonetheless I could have done it better.’ . . . Even when something came out very well, he was always dissatisfied to some extent.” 8 Now he seemed to be such more often and more thoroughly. In one of his several televised dialogues with the president in 1993, the filmmaker El’dar Ryazanov inquired if he was satisfied with his work. Yeltsin’s stygian response prefigured his 1999 valedictory: “I am rarely satisfied with my work. . . . I am satisfied with my work 5 to 10 percent of the time and 90 percent of the time I am dissatisfied. I am constantly dissatisfied with my work, and that is a frightful thing.”9
At the middle of the heaving sea that was Boris Yeltsin’s life in his presidential years there sat an atoll of domestic tranquility. As he had except at UPI and in his first year as an engineer, he based himself in, and drew succor from, a traditional household—“a patriarchal Urals family” arrayed around “a supreme authority, the grandfather.”10 Yelena Okulova and her husband and children (a boy, Ivan, was born in the late 1990s) had an apartment midtown and then in the Krylatskoye block, a floor below the in-laws’ piedà-terre. Yeltsin’s second daughter, Tatyana, and her family resided in Boris and Naina’s home, dividing their time between Moscow and Barvikha-4. She went from the military institute to a position in the Dawn of the Urals Bank, a small firm based in Perm, in 1994, and then onto maternity leave when her second son, Gleb, was born in August 1995. (Tatyana’s first son, Boris, studied at Winchester, an English boarding school, from 1996 to 1998.) The Dyachenkos and Okulovs had dachas of their own. Callers at the Yeltsin home often remarked on the prevalence of females, children, bicycles, and toys.
While Boris Nikolayevich may have been the patriarch, the stabilizer in the family unit was its warmhearted, retiring, and boundlessly patient matriarch. Now a homemaker full-time, she devoted herself to a demanding spouse. Naina Iosifovna, an aide of hers, Natal’ya Konstantinova, observed in a memoir, “carries her husband like a crystal vase,” seeing him through toil and trouble.11 She overcame the claustrophobia about vehicles and airplane cabins that she had been subject to in Sverdlovsk. In 1993, after eight years in the capital, she declared that she did not yet feel “at home” there and spent long hours on the telephone with friends and kin in Yekaterinburg and Orenburg. “Life here has not treated us kindly,” she said to Ryazanov. “They have poured so much filth on us. In my entire life before, I never had even one drop of this.”12 Her widowed mother, Mariya Girina, lived in Yekaterinburg; she was buried in Shirokorechenskoye Cemetery next to Yeltsin’s father in 1994. Naina attended religious services with greater regularity in the 1990s and hung several painted icons on the walls of Barvikha-4. Without fanfare, she took up small-scale philanthropy. She sponsored maternity homes, pediatric hospitals, and orphanages and arranged food and medical aid for elderly female stars of the Soviet stage and screen who had fallen upon hard times. Boris did not make a habit of discussing politics with her, but they consulted on the personal fallout of political matters and she had a voice on staff she saw daily (such as drivers, cooks, and photographers). “Without her,” he confided mawkishly but truthfully, “I would never have borne up under so many political storms . . . not in 1987, not in 1991, not later.”13
Boris and Naina Yeltsin “generally do not worry about material things,” as Konstantinova wrote. 14 Although it would be absurd to say he was against the good life, Yeltsin did not go into post-communist politics, and did not stay in it, for mercenary purposes. Had he so wished, he could have left the government and ridden the new free-enterprise economy to riches. He continued to be partial to plain Russian food. In Paris on an official visit in February 1992, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev invited him to dine in one of the city’s three-star restaurants, where he could try out nouvelle cuisine concoctions. Leaving Kozyrev to go out on the town, Yeltsin stayed behind at the embassy and had the kitchen cook him meat patties and potatoes. 15
President Yeltsin handed Naina his pay envelope every Friday, as he had in Sverdlovsk, and she gave him back an allowance. He was at a loss about consumer prices, did not recognize ruble notes by denomination, did not have credit cards, and needed to be shown how to swipe a debit card at one of the automated teller machines that were cropping up in Moscow.16 His ruble salary was worth five hundred to a thousand dollars a month, varying with the exchange rate. Extra income came from several hundred thousand dollars in book royalties, mostly from his second memoir volume, Notes of a President, published in Russian and many foreign languages in 1994. Upon retirement, the couple owned, he said in Presidential Marathon, a 1995 BMW automobile (7-series), home furnishings, and personal articles (he listed guns, tennis rackets, costume jewelry, and electronics); they held no stocks, bonds, or foreign bank accounts. 17
If Yeltsin came into any bonanza, it was in the real estate market. The presidential manse at Barvikha-4 (and Gorki-9, where the family lived in the second term) was under what is today the Federal Protection Service or FSO, known up to 1991 as the Ninth Directorate of the KGB. The house was never Yeltsin’s personal property, his to sell for monetary benefit or to transmit to heirs. On two lesser holdings, the English edition of Presidential Marathon mistranslates Yeltsin. “
I own some real estate jointly with my wife,” it says, referring to the Krylatskoye flat and a 4,900-square-foot dacha on ten acres in Odintsovo district, a few miles from Barvikha-4.18 In this context, the verb vladeyu means “dispose of,” “have occupancy of,” or “have exclusive use of.” Neither the apartment nor the Yeltsin dacha, which is in the Gorki-10 compound, was owned by Boris and Naina. Both were on the books of the Presidential Business Department, another arm of the government. Under Russian legislation dating to 1991, the Yeltsins could have privatized the Krylatskoye unit by filling out a few forms but, unlike some neighbors, did not. The Gorki-10 getaway was built in 1995–96 by troops from the protection service, on the grounds that it needed to be a secure site. Yeltsin paid for the materials himself out of book revenues and, ignorant about prices, was so mortified by the cost that he considered giving up on the project. Only in 2006–7, making use of a Putin–period law on vacation homes, did he privatize the Gorki-10 dacha. It must be worth some millions of dollars, and represents Yeltsin’s main financial gain—a second-order, delayed (he took ownership just before his death), and legal effect.19
With the signal exception of his drinking, Yeltsin as president retained the tastes and mannerisms of his stiff-necked Urals ancestors. He did not use tobacco and would not abide it around him. On one presidential visit to Germany, seated at a dinner next to Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s wife, Hannelore, he removed a cigarette from her fingers and stubbed it out in an ashtray.20 Unlike Gorbachev, who cursed like a trooper, Yeltsin did not use profanity and forbade it in his hearing: He first came to question his selection of Aleksandr Rutskoi as vice president in 1991 when Rutskoi and his wife, Lyudmila, used expletives at the post-election victory party.21 Yeltsin threw no tantrums and almost never raised his voice. He spoke to officials, again in contrast to Gorbachev, in given name and patronymic, not given name only or diminutive, and in the decorous second person plural. This applied even to his sidekick Korzhakov, whom he hailed as Aleksandr Vasil’evich unless they had been speaking one-on-one for a time, when he might say Aleksandr or, infrequently, Sasha.22 Yeltsin still had his shoes buffed to a gossamer sheen and in gaps in the conversation would scan them for scuffs. The wardrobe was updated some: He switched from Russian to more debonair foreign-tailored suits and footwear and brought in tuxedos and black ties for formal Kremlin affairs, for the first time since Lenin.23
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