“Am I a strong or a weak person?” Yeltsin asked in Notes of a President. “In exigent situations, I am usually strong. In routine situations, I am sometimes limp.” There are also “times when I do not look like the Yeltsin people have grown used to seeing,” including times when “I fly off the handle in stupid ways, like a child.”52
Yeltsinesque torpor was of two basal types, although the line smudged some. The first, and the easier to grasp, was the emotional blowback from failure. Several of the traumas that actuated such feelings during perestroika have been discussed in earlier chapters: the overload of governing the capital city, the secret speech, the attacks on him during his political resurrection. The psychodrama continued after 1991. In writing of it in Notes, he started with economic shock therapy:
The first one who was in for shock, and repeatedly—with pained reactions, having to strain every resource—was me, the president. Enervating bouts of depression, agonizing reflections late at night, insomnia and headaches, despair at the grimy and impoverished look of Moscow and other Russian cities, the criticism that billowed out every day in the newspapers and on the television screen, the badgering at sessions of the congress, the weight of the decisions made, the people close to me who did not support me when I needed it, who did not hold up, who deceived me—all this I had to brook.53
Yeltsin reacted in pain to the general flow of negative news and to specific events. In the spring of 1992, he was despondent for weeks over the unexpectedly high rate of inflation and the nonarrival of recovery in production. Bad tidings in the economy were a constant during his first term, but the degree of awfulness varied, with “Black Tuesday”—October 11, 1994, when the ruble lost one-quarter of its value in a single day—taking the cake. As an afterclap of Black Tuesday, the Duma initiated but did not approve a vote of no-confidence in the government.
The constitutional turbulence of 1992–93 afforded a series of precipitating events. The blows of Ruslan Khasbulatov and the deputies at the congress in December 1992 produced, Yeltsin recalls, “a relapse of the psychological wretchedness” that had plagued him when he was demoted by Gorbachev.54 He was wretched enough to think of ending it all. On December 9, 1992, the day the congress refused to accede to Gaidar as prime minister, he came home to Barvikha-4 “in a complete trance” and locked himself in the steambath. There he was lost in “very bad” thoughts (Yeltsin’s phrase, from Notes) until Korzhakov broke into the bath and took him to his wife. “I was just in time,” Korzhakov asserts, “to stop him from taking the ultimate step”—connecting the dots, that step would have been killing himself through scalding and suffocation in the steam. Korzhakov, who depicted the rescue in his anti-Yeltsin memoir, is a hostile witness. It is instructive, though, that Yeltsin’s wording implies he was in truth suicidal and that he did not contest Korzhakov’s account in Presidential Marathon in 2000. This affair is thus a far cry from the feigned suicide attempt of November 9, 1987.55 A week after locking himself in the steambath, Yeltsin was in a blue funk while on a visit to China and broke the trip off with a complaint of numbness in his extremities. Korzhakov blithely mentioned to him that Franklin Roosevelt ran the U.S. government from a wheelchair.56
Yeltsin recovered from this low-water mark, but as parliament moved toward impeachment in the spring of 1993 he “fell into a depression,” Korzhakov reports, and began to lose the thread of conversations. His mother’s death, a week before the March 28 vote on the resolution, intensified the gloom. Security Minister Viktor Barannikov had made him a birthday present of an imported handgun and a carton of ammunition, which Yeltsin stashed in an office cabinet. Alerted by an informant, Korzhakov had one of the Kremlin chefs boil the cartridges in water to disable them. Days before the roll was called, Yeltsin, with Korzhakov and two other officials looking on, took out the pistol, cocked it, and threatened to shoot himself. He let himself be talked out of pulling the trigger, unaware that the bullets had been doctored. Korzhakov says he eventually removed the firing pin.57
Chechnya brought further torture the next year. The president “was greatly afflicted by the tragedy” of the storming of Grozny, which began on December 31, 1994. For several days he cut himself off from the telephone and refused to receive even Korzhakov.58 A secondary effect of the intervention was the breakdown in relations with political liberals who had once been at his side. When Yelena Bonner criticized Yeltsin for his praise of Defense Minister Grachëv, Naina Yeltsina, with whom she had maintained social contact since Andrei Sakharov’s death, phoned to give her a tearful talking to, and the two stopped speaking.59 A schism broke out in the pro-reform Russia’s Choice movement, where Yegor Gaidar came out against the war while Boris Fëdorov, the former finance minister, left the organization in search of a more “patriotic” one. Yeltsin had arrived at “almost complete political isolation” because of the war and other issues. “I could no longer feel the support of those with whom I had begun my political career.” 60 The hostage-taking at Budënnovsk, introducing Russia at large to terrorism, sent him into a tailspin in June 1995. He announced to a meeting of the advisory Security Council on June 30 that he planned to resign the presidency, since he had initiated an unsuccessful war. Council members asked him not to, and he withdrew the threat. “I don’t think this was playacting on Yeltsin’s part,” writes Yevgenii Primakov, who attended as director of Russian foreign intelligence. “He suffered over everything connected with Chechnya.”61
Yeltsin was in good company. Among modern leaders whose biographies were studied by the psychiatrist Arnold M. Ludwig, the lifetime rate for episodes of depression or melancholia lasting several weeks or more is 14 percent (as compared to 6 percent in the population of the United States), and under a more catholic definition would be about 30 percent. Ludwig found visionary statesmen who try to reshape society, and politicians whose power is crumbling, to be most susceptible to the problem.62
Yeltsin, however, was also prone to a second type of withdrawal that is not well captured by the usual typology. It came, ironically, in the backwash of heady victory as opposed to jarring defeat.
Late Soviet occurrences of this complex—his flight from Moscow after the 1989 and 1990 elections and the 1991 putsch—have been discussed in earlier chapters. The pattern reared its head again in the first several months of 1992, when Yeltsin left Gaidar and the cabinet to prosecute economic reform with little guidance from him. In 1993, after the successful referendum of April 25, Yeltsin was dilatory in following up and took a long summer holiday at Valdai. After he did take decisive steps against the parliament in September–October, he honored a promise to pay a visit to Tokyo, worked on the constitution for several weeks, and then was hard for most of his ministers and staffers to reach until after the December election and plebiscite. The pressure of those months “was so powerful that I still do not understand how my organism got through it, how it coped,” Yeltsin recollects.63
With his presidentialist constitution, and hence his supremacy in Russian politics, in the bag, one might have predicted that Yeltsin would be in a glowing frame of mind in 1994. His mood, though, was indolent for the first half of the year. Write his former aides, “The presidential timetable for that year logs Yeltsin’s numerous and often lengthy absences, attesting to the fact that he was going through a protracted crisis.” He took two weeks in Sochi in March and did not travel publicly in the provinces until his visit to Kazan at the end of May. His annual list of presidential objectives was finalized only in late April, when he initialed it but declined to set priorities among them. A staff memorandum attributed falling approval ratings to “the president’s passivity and lack of clarity over goals and policy.”64
These events are harder to make sense of than the straightforwardly dysphoric episodes in the first category. Why would Yeltsin’s very triumphs, the thrashing of his political rivals, weigh on him? There was, first, an exhaustion factor. When I questioned him about it in 2002, Yeltsin acknowledged it as a form of letdown (spad) or breather (p
eredyshka), not of depression (depressiya), and as a natural way for him to unwind after the battle.65 It is an admissible point. Even revolutionaries and warriors need a vacation every now and then, and Yeltsin after a victory was usually languid and distracted rather than morose. At his hideaways, he would make himself unavailable by telephone and spent much of the time in the fresh air.
Considerations other than fatigue were involved. Draining as his Nietzschean moments were, Yeltsin felt in his element in them. When they had passed, he sagged. He was hardly the only leader to have had that tendency: Witness the Duke of Wellington’s famous statement the day after Waterloo in 1815 that, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.” What’s more, a post-crisis hiatus, as Aleksandr Muzykantskii observed of Yeltsin’s victory in the 1989 USSR election (see Chapter 7), put the onus on potential allies to come to him with proposals for joint action and gave him the opportunity to look them over. Most important, Yeltsin needed an intermission after a victory because it gave him the chance to consider his options. His moratorium after the attempted coup in 1991 was one of the more fruitful ones. The rolling time-outs in 1993 and 1994 were accompanied by reflection on the future.
There were reasons tangible and intangible why winning was less fun after 1991. The battles won were more ambiguous, for one thing. In the transitional setting, even the alpha leader did not have an inexhaustible storehouse of political capital, and advances could come at a terrible price. Progress achieved put him up foursquare against a fresh set of choices, often more troubling than the last. In the summer of 1993, for example, after Yeltsin had won the April referendum, he backed out of meetings with officeholders, literati, and journalists. It was quite plain to press secretary Vyacheslav Kostikov that the president was shunning contact because he lacked the answers to some of the questions he knew were to be flung at him. Kostikov found the indisposition more pronounced in 1994. Even though the new constitution made Yeltsin’s legal position airtight, Kostikov got used to coming across the superpresident seated pensively at a bare desk. Yeltsin, Kostikov felt, “found himself without his internal pivot” as he came to understand that solutions to Russia’s key reform problems would take five, ten, or more years to resolve. The political system he had constructed left him and only him to answer for problems. “It was my impression,” says Kostikov, “that Yeltsin was getting lost as he faced up to the magnitude of the responsibilities he had arrogated to himself in his constitution.”66 Meantime, personnel turnover and defections had deprived Yeltsin of the most creative minds from his first months in government. Many decisions could be shunted to the trustworthy Chernomyrdin, but the prime minister was not an ideas man, and Yeltsin knew it. What discommoded him the most, as his ghostwriter Valentin Yumashev has noted, was “not psychological loneliness but intellectual loneliness.” “He had begun to feel, I don’t know what to do and I don’t have people around who can supply me with ideas that I can go forward with.”67
One should not imagine that Yeltsin’s depressions and intermissions, in all their multifariousness, went on uninterruptedly from his first to his second inauguration. One by one, he kicked them off. He returned from Sochi to appoint Gaidar and decree shock therapy in 1991; he adjusted the market reforms and accepted Chernomyrdin as his head of government in 1992; he upended the Supreme Soviet and imposed his constitution in 1993; he resumed traveling and politicking and eased Viktor Gerashchenko out of the central bank after Black Tuesday, in 1994, and that same year he picked up the tempo of privatization; he moved crabwise toward negotiations with the Chechen rebels in 1995; in 1996 he decided to run for a second term. The point is not that he failed to accomplish these things but that he did it in a stuttering fashion, which often dragged out the length of time required and intruded on the building of political coalitions to accomplish the task.
The parsing of Yeltsin’s psychodynamics would be incomplete without reference to the substance with which his name is most often linked—alcohol. Until the second half of the 1980s, drinking had a subsidiary function in his life. For the next ten years, until he had to give it up, it loomed larger and took a toll politically, physically, and reputationally.
Although doctors noted at the time that Yeltsin’s consumption increased when he moved to Moscow, and although there were some signs of it interfering with decision making, until 1991 he kept it under control. A Democratic Russia activist who saw him fifty to sixty times between 1989 and the end of 1992 never observed him affected by alcohol. Jack Matlock, the second-to-last U.S. ambassador to the USSR, saw him have drinks but never too many; his successor, Robert Strauss, reports the same. Aleksandr Korzhakov, whose exceedingly unfavorable memoir about Yeltsin, published in 1997, has served as a main source about Yeltsin’s drinking, says that when Yeltsin was chairman of the Russian parliament and under constant watch by the KGB, in 1990–91, he drank relatively little. At Yeltsin’s sixtieth birthday party in February 1991, at a children’s camp near Moscow, he sipped champagne with merrymakers and was the last to retire from the campfire.68
But the rules changed once the Kremlin was his. Korzhakov saw to it that the trunk of the presidential limousine held a satchel containing drinks, shot glasses, and appetizers, renewed daily. Yeltsin’s levels of use, family members testify, went up steadily from 1991 through 1994. His mother’s death removed a watchful parent who had always looked askance at personal excess. 69 Yeltsin switched in 1993 from brandy to Gzhel’ka and grass-flavored Tarkhun vodka; he also liked a cocktail of champagne laced with cognac. Vodka, removed by Gorbachev and Yegor Ligachëv from the Kremlin menu in 1985, was reintroduced in 1993. Yeltsin’s afternoon tennis matches would often lead to the sauna and then to a meal rife with toasts. Nips were common at his private luncheons, and Yeltsin squirreled away a rainy-day supply in his office suite.
Foreign partners had to work around Yeltsin’s habit. When Bill Clinton got him on the telephone several days after Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993, Yeltsin’s speech was slurred and “he seemed barely listening to what Clinton had to say,” after which Clinton chuckled that he was “a candidate for tough love, if ever I heard one.” Clinton was to have about fifty phone conversations with Yeltsin over the seven years. To be on the safe side, his aides placed most calls before the dinner hour in Moscow.70 At his first summit meeting with Clinton in Vancouver on April 3–4, 1993, Yeltsin tossed back drinks on the warm-up day, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other American officials began the unbecoming practice of keeping a tally.71 First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, often seated next to Yeltsin at official banquets, found him “delightful company” and that, “as is often apparent, he enjoys a drink or two.” On the Clintons’ first official visit to Moscow, Yeltsin provided a running commentary on the food and drink, “informing me in all seriousness that red wine protected Russian sailors on nuclear-powered submarines from the ill effects of strontium 90.”72
Domestic players were more aware of the syndrome. On April 22, 1993, three days before the national referendum on approval of his policies, Yeltsin made a scheduled appearance at a large rally and rock singalong next to St. Basil’s Cathedral. He was far from sober, and Yelena Bonner took the microphone away.73 Yeltsin did not drink alone, a saving grace that may have kept him from worse problems. But drinking with confederates in the first half of the 1990s often closed him off from them, rather than open him up. He would sometimes fall silent, in his “sleeping crocodile” pose, as some called it, while continuing to watch the company. At one such event, a minister of the government offered a lewd bottoms-up. Warned that Yeltsin would not stand for such talk, he made a comment about the chief not hearing. The next morning, Yeltsin signed a decree dismissing the minister, who never reclaimed so high a post.74
Yeltsin’s overindulgence was elevated from an open secret to a public issue in 1994. On August 31 he was in Berlin to represent the country at ceremonies with Chancellor Kohl to mark the departure of Russian forces from the former East Ger
many. He had gotten a head start the night before by bending elbows at the hotel with Defense Minister Pavel Grachëv. On that day, in baking heat, he imbibed enthusiastically. After lunch, on the square in front of the High Renaissance city Rathaus, where a brass band from the local police was serenading the troops with march music, Yeltsin motioned for the stick from the conductor. Bent at the waist, he woozily stabbed the air with it for several minutes as the band played on gallantly. Minutes later, he took up a microphone to lead the assembled Russians through unmelodious couplets from the folk song “Kalinka-Malinka” (Juniper-Raspberry), concluding with a whoop, a thumb-up sign, and kisses blown to the tittering crowd.75
Yeltsin’s political advisers, a gaggle of whom were there, considered resignation and decided against it. Kostikov inserted vocal articles about the pratfall in Berlin into his daily media reviews. Yeltsin knit his brows upon seeing the material but did not comment. They then tried to convince Korzhakov to level with Yeltsin. He declined, saying he had tried to reason with Yeltsin in the past, but suggested they write the president a letter, something assistant Viktor Ilyushin, who had worked with him since the 1970s, at first opposed as counterproductive. The supercautious Ilyushin came around, and Kostikov cobbled together a collective letter. It was signed by seven people: Kostikov; Ilyushin, who gave it a final edit; Korzhakov and his colleague from the security services, Mikhail Barsukov; Vladimir Shevchenko, the long-suffering chief of presidential protocol; speechwriter Lyudmila Pikhoya; and Dmitrii Ryurikov, Yeltsin’s foreign-policy assistant. Korzhakov delivered the missive by hand on September 10, on a presidential flight to Sochi. The document—wags in the press, which got wind of it, named it “The Letter of the Aides to Their Sultan,” after a nineteenth-century painting by Il’ya Repin—took the president to task for his hermetic tendencies; his complacency and “tsarist” airs; his aversion to planning, which left too many decisions to hang on “irrational factors, chance, and even caprice”; and his separation from past and prospective allies. The authors did not trace all or most of Yeltsin’s problems to alcohol. But, using code to spare his feelings, they stated clearly that in their estimation his dependency—“the well-known Russian vice”—was dragging him down. The signals he had sent in Berlin were “impossible to ignore and difficult to correct.” He needed, they said, “to reassess once and for all your attitude toward your health and your harmful habits,” halt “unexpected disappearances and periods of rehabilitation,” and find ways of decompressing other than “athletics followed by a banquet.” No ruler of Russia before or since has seen the likes of it.76
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