Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

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 Some moments found him the epitome of energy and activism; at others, he was unexpressive and withdrawn.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

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

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

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

  I won’t hide the fact that at a certain point I began to feel an impalpable, cumulative fatigue. I got tired of seeing the same face every day in my office, at meetings and receptions, at the dacha, on the tennis court, in the steambath. It is possible and necessary for someone to try to influence the president—to get things done, to carry through on one’s ideas. But there has to be some limit. As freely as Gennadii Burbulis had walked into any meeting he felt like, he started coming to see me in person all the time. He overstepped some boundary in our personal relations. Well, it happens.29

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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