Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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