Tret’yakov’s editorial came out on May 7. Seventy-five million participating voters had their say on Sunday, June 16. Yeltsin took 26,665,495 votes. It was some 19 million fewer than he had received in 1991 but still put him in first place, with 36 percent of the ballots. Zyuganov had 32 percent, Lebed 15 percent, Yavlinskii 7 percent, and Zhirinovskii 6 percent. Everyone else trailed with less than 1 percent. In his final indignity at Yeltsin’s hands, Mikhail Gorbachev took one-half of 1 percent—386,069 votes. While bleeding strength compared to 1991 in every macroregion of Russia, Yeltsin carried forty-six of the provinces and Zyuganov forty-three. Yeltsin did better than average in the northern and northwestern sections of European Russia, Moscow, the Urals, and Siberia; he was weakest in the red belt south of Moscow and in the North Caucasus.
And so Yeltsin and Zyuganov found themselves in a sudden-death second round, with voting to occur on Wednesday, July 3, a workday. The strategy of the Yeltsin camp, aided by the electoral format, was simple—to distill everything to the toggle choice of forward on the historical continuum or backward. At the level of tactics, it dichotomized the decision as expertly as a fisherman filleting a trout. The choice could not be clearer, he stated on June 17. “Either back, to revolutions and turmoil, or ahead, to stability and prosperity.” 103 National television obliged by airing documentaries about the Gulag, the hounding of dissidents, and economic stagnation under the Soviets.104
Two political melodramas unfolded overtly in the seventeen days between ballots. On June 18, as agreed in May, the third-finishing Aleksandr Lebed issued a statement endorsing Yeltsin. The price had gone up, as he was offered and accepted the position of secretary of the Security Council and assistant to the president for national security. Yeltsin relatedly dismissed his defense minister, Pavel Grachëv, who had once been Lebed’s commanding officer, and replaced him several weeks later with Igor Rodionov, an older general in whom Lebed had confidence. On June 20 a funding scandal pushed relations between Yeltsin and the clique around Aleksandr Korzhakov to the breaking point. The day before, officers in Korzhakov’s guard service had arrested Sergei Lisovskii and Arkadii Yevstaf’ev, two staffers to the Chubais team, on the steps of the White House and confiscated a half-million dollars in cash that was part of the funding stream for the campaign. When Chubais and Tatyana Dyachenko intervened, Yeltsin fired Korzhakov, Oleg Soskovets, and Mikhail Barsukov, a move that accented his decisiveness and innovativeness.105
Another drama, playing out covertly, was about the incumbent’s medical condition, which had been abraded by stress, travel, and twelve-hour workdays. On June 23, midway between the two halves of the election, Yeltsin was hit with chest pains while on a whistle stop in Russia’s Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad. On June 26, resting at Barvikha-4, he was stricken with a fourth heart attack. His presiding physician, Anatolii Grigor’ev, was in the room and revived and medicated him. The seizure was kept secret and Yeltsin’s disappearance written off to a head cold. NTV’s president, Igor Malashenko, knew Yeltsin was in a bad way, if not the details, yet kept information about his condition out of the news. As he told me, he would have preferred “the corpse of Yeltsin” to Zyuganov alive.106 On June 28 Yeltsin somehow bulled ahead with a meeting with Lebed on Chechnya. The klieg lights were shining and television cameras were whirring, but the scene was staged by staffers in a room of the Barvikha sanatorium, with them and the medical attendants edited out of the videotape.107 All campaign appearances were canceled. Viktor Chernomyrdin read out a greeting to several thousand farm workers in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, who had gathered to hear the president. It did not sit well, and by Chubais’s estimate Yeltsin was losing 1 or 2 percentage points in the polls every day.108 On July 3 it was all Yeltsin could do to take several steps with his wife and hand in a ballot slip at the polling station located in the sanatorium.
Irrespective of the fears, voting in the runoff went very much as planned. Yeltsin received 40,208,384 votes, about five million fewer than in 1991 but enough to outpoll Zyuganov by 54 percent to 41 percent. He carried fifty-seven of eighty-nine provinces, bettering his 1991 numbers in scattered oblasts and a number of the minority republics, losing strength in the red belt and the Muslim republics of the North Caucasus, and holding his own elsewhere. In between rounds, Yeltsin’s share of the popular vote went up 19 percentage points and Zyuganov’s by only 8 points. Division around the question of returning to communism or escaping it was more complete than in the opening round: 90-plus percent of those who favored the new political system voted for Yeltsin; 80 percent of those who wanted to re-create the communist system went for Zyuganov. Healthy majorities of the first-round supporters of the non-communist candidates other than Zhirinovskii went for the president now that their top choices were out of the game: 57 percent of the Lebed voters, 67 percent of Yavlinskii voters, 30 percent of Zhirinovskii voters, and 57 percent of those who had voted for the lightweight candidates.109
Yeltsin had rejuvenated himself politically just as he was failing corporeally. He entered his second term as Russia’s leader under contradictory stars, one of them encouraging and the other pointing in a discouraging direction. The night of July 3, family and friends gave him teary hugs and flowers. He had accomplished “a fantastic, surprising victory.” He wished he could dance a jig, and one suspects he would not have been averse to some liquid refreshment, but these were beyond him: “I lay in my hospital bed and gazed tensely at the ceiling.”110 Right he was to be tense. The game hereafter was about Yeltsin trying to resume Russia’s progress while grappling with grievous physical limitations and with power parameters that had changed subtly and unsubtly from those of his first term.
Exchanging pens with George H. W. Bush after initialing a strategic arms pact, Washington, June 17, 1992. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)
Members of Yeltsin’s governing team, autumn 1992. Left to right: Yegor Gaidar, acting prime minister; Yurii Skokov, secretary of the Security Council; Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi; Aleksandr Korzhakov, chief of the Presidential Security Service. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)
With Ruslan Khasbulatov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, in 1992. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)
With long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, January 1996. (AP IMAGES.)
Wielding the tennis racket, June 1992. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)
With his mother, early 1990s. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
A quiet moment with Naina in Sochi, summer 1994. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)
With Chancellor Helmut Kohl on the Berlin visit during which he attempted to conduct a police band, August 31, 1994. (AP IMAGES/JOCKEL FINCK.)
Walking beside the Kremlin wall in May 1995 with three of his most influential ministers. Left to right: Interior Minister Viktor Yerin; First Deputy Premier Oleg Soskovets; Defense Minister Pavel Grachëv. Aleksandr Korzhakov can be seen in the background. At right is Vladimir Shevchenko, chief of presidential protocol. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)
The Russian White House billowing smoke after army tanks shell it on order from Yeltsin, October 4, 1993. (AP IMAGES/ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO.)
Negotiating with Chechen rebels, May 27, 1996. With Yeltsin, left to right: Viktor Chernomyrdin; Doku Zavgayev, head of the pro-Moscow administration in Chechnya; Tim Guldimann of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, head of the Chechen delegation. (AP IMAGES/YURI KADOBNOV.)
Signing a cease-fire decree on an armored vehicle in Grozny, May 28, 1996. Yeltsin’s national security adviser, Yurii Baturin, is second from the left. Interior Minister Anatolii Kulikov (in the beret) is two persons behind. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)
Comforting an elderly woman at a campaign stop in the Klyaz’ma district near Moscow, May 1996. (DMITRII DONSKOI.)
Shaking it up with rock singer Yevgenii Osin at an election rally in Rostov, June 10, 1996. (AP IMAGES/ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO.)
Embracing the crowd in downtown Kazan, June 9, 1996. Tatarstan’s president, Mintimer Shaimiyev, a key Yeltsin ally, is third from right. (RIA-NO
VOSTI/ VLADIMIR RODIONOV.)
With Viktor Chernomyrdin and Chernomyrdin’s new first deputies, Anatolii Chubais (left) and Boris Nemtsov, after a cabinet shuffle, March 26, 1997. (AP IMAGES.)
Words to the wise from his daughter and adviser, Tatyana Dyachenko, June 1997. (CORBIS/SHONE VLASTIMIR NESIC.)
Bowing during the interment ceremony for Tsar Nicholas II and the last Russian royal family, St. Petersburg, July 17, 1998. (RIA-NOVOSTI/ VLADIMIR RODIONOV.)
With business oligarchs, September 15, 1997. Left to right: Mikhail Khodorkovskii, Vladimir Gusinskii, Aleksandr Smolenskii, Vladimir Potanin, Vladimir Vinogradov, Mikhail Fridman. Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev, is beside him. (AP IMAGES.)
Boris Berezovskii, November 1997. (AP IMAGES/MISHA JAPARIDZE.)
Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko, July 1998. (AP IMAGES/MISHA JAPARIDZE.)
With Prime Minister Yevgenii Primakov and the presidential chief of staff, Nikolai Bordyuzha, February 1999. (AP IMAGES.)
Sergei Stepashin, Yeltsin’s second-last prime minister, June 1999. (AP IMAGES/ MIKHAIL METZEL.)
With Vladimir Putin at his presidential inauguration, May 7, 2000. (AP IMAGES/ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO.)
Cheering the Russian team’s victory over France in the Fed Cup women’s tennis tournament, Moscow, November 28, 2004. (AP IMAGES/MIKHAIL METZEL.)
A celebratory toast with Vladimir Putin, Lyudmila Putina, and Bill Clinton at Yeltsin’s seventy-fifth birthday, St. George’ Hall, the Kremlin, February 1, 2006. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
Yeltsin’s coffin being carried out of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, April 25, 2007. (RIA-NOVOSTI/MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV.)
Boris Yeltsin: The Man Who Broke Through the Wall, by the MishMash Project (Mikhail Leikin and Mariya Miturich-Khlebnikova), a semifinalist in the Yeltsin memorial competition, August–October 2007. (COURTESY OF THE MISHMASH PROJECT.)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Autumn of a President
President Yeltsin’s fourth proven heart attack, on June 26, 1996, was the most invasive to date and came on the heels of indication after indication that he was at the end of his rope.1 The consilium of ten physicians watching over him during the campaign had sent a letter to Aleksandr Korzhakov on May 20 warning of “changes of a negative character” in his state of health, the result of “the mounting burdens on him, physically and emotionally,” and of his sleep allotment dwindling to three or four hours a night. “Such a work regimen poses a real threat to the health and life of the president.” The Yeltsins were apprised of the findings, although Korzhakov inexplicably withheld the letter.2 El’dar Ryazanov, filming a conversation for broadcast, found Yeltsin on June 2 “a whole other man” than the last time they spoke, in November 1993: sallow-complected, careworn, and churlish. Had a rival obtained the unedited footage of the interview, Ryazanov is sure Yeltsin would never have been re-elected. “When I left, I was disheartened. I thought to myself, My God, if he wins, in whose hands will Russia find itself?”3 He still voted for Yeltsin.
The second inauguration, on August 9, was low-key, in contrast to July 1991. Plans for another inaugural address went by the boards. The event was moved indoors into the Kremlin Palace of Congresses instead of Cathedral Square, in the sunlight. Onstage, looking pudgy but frail, Yeltsin swore the oath in forty-five seconds, his hand on a bound copy of the constitution and his eyes on a teleprompter primed to help him notice the pauses. The speaker of the upper house of parliament, Yegor Stroyev, slipped the presidential chain of office around his neck.4 It was done within sixteen minutes:
Knowing his condition, Boris Yeltsin was extremely nervous. But once awareness set in that it was all behind him, that he been installed in office again, it was as if he had gotten a second wind. After the official ceremony, attendees at the state reception were surprised to see quite a different person. He entered the hall briskly, made a brief but animated toast, and even chatted up several guests. After about a half hour, he left. It was obvious to everyone who witnessed the official start to Yeltsin’s second presidential term that the ill-health of the leader was now a basic factor in Russian politics.5
On July 16 Yeltsin appointed Anatolii Chubais, his campaign mastermind, as presidential chief of staff, sending Nikolai Yegorov, a political soulmate of the demoted Korzhakov, back to Krasnodar as governor.6 The press dubbed Chubais Russia’s “regent.” For prime minister, Yeltsin stayed with the old pro Viktor Chernomyrdin, whom the State Duma confirmed uncomplainingly on August 10.
The theme of the next half year was apolitical—Yeltsin’s fight for elementary survival and recovery. Injections of a clot-dissolving drug eased unstable angina in July. After the induction, a battery of tests, beginning with the coronary angiogram he had refused in 1995 (an X-ray of the heart arteries, using iodized liquid), was done at the Moscow Cardiology Center. German surgeons tapped by Helmut Kohl advised from afar that the Russians consider an arterial bypass and have it done abroad. The conferences with the family were awkward, as Yevgenii Chazov, the director of the Moscow center, was the one who, as USSR health minister, had supervised Yeltsin’s care on behalf of the Politburo after the 1987 secret speech. Some of the medicos feared Yeltsin would not withstand a multiple bypass operation and were hopeful he could get away with balloon angioplasty. Chazov thought the risk was “colossal” but Yeltsin had to chance it.7 The blood ejection fraction from the left ventricle, a standard index of operating efficiency, was 22 percent; a healthy person’s is 55 to 75 percent. Without an intervention, Chazov and his deputies gauged the life expectancy of someone with these symptoms to be one and a half to two years. The choice, they told the family, was either bypass surgery or curtailment of Yeltsin’s activities to several hours a day and an end to most exertion and travel—diminution from governing president to a figurehead.
Yeltsin was apprehensive of the dangers of open-heart surgery and the loss of control it would entail. His daughter Tatyana took Sergei Parkhomenko, the editor of the newsmagazine Itogi, into her confidence. In late August she came into possession of a draft of an article Itogi was about to print on the pros and cons of an operation; she thought it would help ease his fears, provided she and her mother could share it with him before publication. Parkhomenko delayed the piece by one week and was rewarded with a written interview with the president. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, a former heart patient, also sang the therapy’s praises to Yeltsin.8
Sifting through the not very good alternatives, Yeltsin decided to go under the knife. He revealed to Russian television on September 5 that he had a sick heart and would submit to an unspecified procedure at the end of the month, and in Moscow: “The president is supposed to have operations at home [in Russia].” In that he had been noncommittal in his last meeting with the doctors, his statement was to them “like a thunderclap in an unclouded sky”—a vintage Yeltsin surprise.9
Acting in character, Yeltsin put a brave face on the situation to Itogi and posed it as a test of his abilities and self-command: “Some say to me, Take care of yourself, don’t go to any special difficulty, spare yourself. But I can’t spare myself! A president should not allow himself this. . . . Russians didn’t vote for me so that I would spare myself.”10 If consenting to the surgery could be rationalized as an affirmative act, it was also a blow to Yeltsin’s ego, as he was to admit in his memoirs:
For so many years, I had kept the sensation of myself as a ten-year-old boy: I can do absolutely anything! That is right, absolutely anything! I could climb a tree or float on a raft down the river. I could hike across the taiga. I could go days on end without sleeping or spend hours in the steambath. I could defeat any opponent. You name it, I could do it. But a person’s omnipotence can disappear in a flash. Someone else—the doctors, destiny—acquires power over his body. [I asked myself] was this new “I” needed by his loved ones? Was he needed by the country as a whole?11
He was admitted to the TsKB, the central Kremlin hospital, on September 12. The Yeltsins took Chazov’s advice to
bring in a group of consultants from Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, headed by the pioneering cardiac surgeon Michael E. DeBakey, whose professional contacts with Soviet and Russian peers went back to the 1950s. The Americans came to the conclusion that his heart was failing and the bypass operation was the patient’s only hope. DeBakey delivered his verdict on September 25. He informed Yeltsin the bypass should let him live comfortably for ten to fifteen years. “I’ll do what you say if you can put me back in my office,” Yeltsin replied, which DeBakey told him was doable.12
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