Yeltsin took a month more to lose weight, overcome transient anemia from gastrointestinal bleeding, and improve his thyroid function. Reconciled to his fate, he was wheeled into the cardiology center’s operating theater at seven A.M. on November 5. Before going under, he temporarily ceded his constitutional powers, among them those of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, to Chernomyrdin.13 The twelve-member operating team was led by Renat Akchurin, who had spent a sabbatical in Houston and was Chernomyrdin’s surgeon in 1992. DeBakey, four American colleagues, and two Germans watched them on closed-circuit television from an adjoining room, with devices for ventricular assistance at the ready if needed. Yeltsin’s chest was opened and portions of his left internal mammary artery and saphenous vein were transferred to form five grafts on the heart. The painstaking work took seven hours. For sixty-eight minutes, heartbeat was stopped and his blood was circulated by a heart-lung machine. The muscle restarted on its own without chemical stimulation.14
The operation was a lifesaver. Yeltsin’s coronary ejection fraction rose to 50 percent, still subnormal but not menacing. In gratitude, he was to have the Presidential Business Department quietly allocate larger apartments to Akchurin and six anesthesiologists and nurses.15 But rehabilitation was long and uncertain. Yeltsin was taken off the ventilator on November 6 and initialed a decree taking authority back from Chernomyrdin, twenty-three hours after giving it away. He pestered the doctors into moving him on November 8 to the TsKB, where the VIP suite had secure communication lines. On November 20, the sutures removed, he was allowed a stroll in the hospital park. The yard “was dank, quiet, and cold. I went slowly along the path and looked at the brown leaves and the November sky. It was autumn, the autumn of a president.”16 On November 22 he was taken to the Barvikha sanatorium to rest.
Yeltsin went home on December 4. Home until 2001 was not Barvikha-4, which came under renovation that summer, but Gorki-9, a state dacha in Usovo, just upriver on the Moskva. (The household kept the apartment in Krylatskoye as a Moscow address, but Yeltsin seems not to have stayed one night there in his second term.) His medical condition would force him to spend far more time at Gorki-9 than he had at Barvikha-4. The house had been built in the late 1920s for Lenin’s successor as chairman of the Soviet government, Aleksei Rykov; it was Vyacheslav Molotov’s country place for twenty-five years and Nikita Khrushchev’s from 1958 to 1964. After then, it was used mostly as a governmental guest manor. Gorki-9 was nondescript, with narrow Grecian columns in front and a hotel-style layout; long corridors on two floors opened left and right onto small rooms. It was rather dilapidated ; in 2000 part of the second-floor ceiling was to fall in.17 To regain his strength, Yeltsin perambulated the extensive grounds where Khrushchev, who fancied himself an agriculture expert, had in his day planted vegetables, flowers, and berries. Khrushchev liked the path around the property because it was level, and this no doubt was an attraction to Yeltsin.18
Yeltsin was restricted to thirty minutes of business conversation daily, signing decrees and bills (a facsimile signature was used for protocol decisions), and meeting several times weekly with Chubais.19 On December 23 he finally made it to his Kremlin desk for an hour or two. He was on top of the world. “I had a palpable sensation of impatience, a desire to work. . . . I was another person. I could deal with any problem.”20 On December 31 he attended the mayor’s annual tree-trimming party in the Kremlin. Several days later he went to a steambath. It had not been properly heated, and he caught cold. He was hospitalized on January 7 with double pneumonia and could not drag himself back to the office until the last week of the month. One of his first foreign visitors, on February 21, was the new U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. She found him “like a figure made of wax,” his face pasty and his body “startlingly thin” (he was sixty pounds lighter than at his inauguration). Nonetheless, “Yeltsin’s voice was strong and his blue eyes sparkled.”21
Healthwise, 1997 was the best year of Yeltsin’s second term. He made rapid strides that spring. Foreign statesmen saw it in Paris on May 27, at the signing of the “founding act” that formalized Russia’s begrudging acceptance of the eastward expansion of the NATO bloc. In the grand ballroom of the Élysée Palace, he gave an earthy reminder of the Yeltsin of old:
When Yeltsin joined the sixteen allied leaders and [Secretary General] Javier Solana at the podium, he behaved as though he were a famous comic actor listening to testimonials before accepting a lifetime achievement award: He knew that the occasion required solemnity, but he couldn’t help giving the fans a little of what they’d come to expect from him. Yeltsin’s expression kept changing. One minute he was beaming with pleasure as the other dignitaries, one by one, praised his statesmanship as well as his credentials as a reformer and democrat; the next he was screwing up his face in exaggerated concentration on the weightiness of the moment. When it came time for him to sign the Founding Act, he took a huge breath, wrote his name with a flourish, then gave Solana a bear hug and a big kiss on both cheeks.22
Yeltsin was in similarly fine fettle at the G-8 meeting in Denver in June, when the G-7 club of industrial powers was enlarged to include Russia. On his summer vacation at Shuiskaya Chupa and Volzhskii Utës in July and August, which Russian television cameras were allowed to show, he was tanned and relaxed. He did not have another setback until December, when he had to be treated for a respiratory infection.
Memories of the cover-up of his June 1996 heart attack and of his long nonappearance at the Kremlin were fresh, though, and more than anything explain the subsidence of Yeltsin’s approval ratings to the depths they had hit before the 1996 campaign.23 Aleksandr Korzhakov, elected to the Duma in a February by-election, came out with his voyeuristic book about Yeltsin in August 1997; it gave details on his health problems and first-term drinking extravagances.24 Armchair diagnoses of some untreatable condition circulated in the press and the Moscow rumor mill—that he suffered from Alzheimer’s, diabetes, Parkinson’s, dropsy, a brain tumor, or cirrhosis of the liver. All were false, but suspicions lingered. Aleksandr Salii, a KPRF legislator, claimed in June to have evidence that Yeltsin was so far gone that a body double had been standing in for him, and demanded that the procurator general’s office investigate. This featherbrained line of questioning would go on for years, reaching a low point in a potboiler published in 2005 whose thesis was that Yeltsin died during a heart-transplant operation in 1996, before the election, and was replaced by an imposter on the payroll of the CIA.25
The fact remained that Yeltsin was getting on in years, was in compromised general health, and was prone to emergencies and indispositions, which were to recur with greater frequency and harshness in 1998 and 1999. He put back on most of the girth he lost in 1996. The last flecks of gray in his mane had given over to snowy white and his voice had deepened from baritone to a raspy bass. His walk was stiff. Staff plotted itineraries at home and overseas that got around high staircases; three or four doctors, one of them a cardiologist, flew with him on all his foreign travels (this practice was begun in the first term); a larger medical area was built into the new presidential jet, an Ilyushin-96, delivered in 1996.26 By this age, political leaders in societies with far higher levels of well-being and healthcare than post-Soviet Russia may be hard-pressed to discharge their duties. Yeltsin had marked his sixty-sixth birthday shortly before returning to the Kremlin in 1997, which made him one year older than Dwight Eisenhower when he was felled by his big heart attack in 1955—and only one year younger than Yeltsin’s father when he had a devastating stroke in 1973.
Gone were the swagger and stamina that had been Yeltsin trademarks in Berezniki, Sverdlovsk, and Moscow. His beloved tennis and cold-water swims had to be put aside, and there were no more road shows or boogeying à la Ufa or Rostov.27 He was left with tame leisure pursuits like swimming, in heated pools, trout fishing, driving powerboats and snowmobiles, and billiards, in which he could still run the table and shoot from behind his back. And he was somewhat more given to
verbal faux pas and dizzy spells. In Paris for the NATO confab in May 1997, for example, he proclaimed that Russian forces were going to take the nuclear warheads off their strategic missiles; they were not, and aides spent the rest of the meeting doing damage control. His visit to Stockholm in December 1997 brought stray claims about nuclear weapons and momentary confusion about whether he was in Sweden or Finland. A highlight of his call on Pope John Paul II in February 1998 was his declaration during a Vatican banquet of his “undying love for Rome, Italy, and Italian women.” Yeltsin referred to glitches like these by the abstruse Russian word zagogulina, which stands for “curlicue,” “squiggle,” or “bit of mischief.” The mishaps sometimes had a physical aspect. At a news conference at Stockholm city hall, for instance, his knees buckled and press secretary Sergei Yastrzhembskii had to prop him up, “trying to make it appear as if he were handing Yeltsin some important pieces of paper.”28
Russian journalists reported these occurrences in gory detail, as they had every right to. Memories were short, for there had been malapropisms when Yeltsin was healthy, too, and some observers had thought them endearing at the time (and this is not to mention those made over the years by leaders in other countries—think no further than the forty-third president of the United States).29 The misstatements and also the stumbles were interpreted much less charitably in the altered Russian context.
Anxiety over the condition of his circulatory system persisted after the operation. Yeltsin was bothered by insomnia, as before 1996, and used prescription sleeping pills. He took analgesics for pain in his back and asked doctors whether the pangs were connected with his heart condition; the doctors said they were not. Conspiracy buffs hypothesized that illness excused Yeltsin from answering tough questions about policy and was helpful as a loyalty test, in clarifying who was willing to stand by him and who was not.30 Maybe there was something to these theories, but Yeltsin on any given day was more apt to feel caged in by his limitations. Family members say that the one great regret of his second term was the failure to recover bodily vigor, as he had trusted he would when he consented to the surgery.
Yeltsin’s medical situation necessitated a substantial reduction in his time at official workplaces. He was still an early bird (rising for a freezing shower at five A.M.), but many days he stayed at home and his spokesmen told the media he was “working with documents.” When he did come to the office, it was usually at 9:00 or 9:30, and stays after the midday meal around two P.M. were the exception rather than the rule. In January, February, and March of 1998, for instance, Yeltsin lasted after four P.M. on only seven or eight days; on two of them, it was for state dinners (for the king of Belgium and the Ukrainian president). The correspondent who disinterred this information titled her exposé “Yeltsin in Gorki.” Russian readers would have seen the double entendre. Gorki (not to be confused with Gorki-9 or Gorki-10) is a former nobleman’s estate south and west of Moscow where Vladimir Lenin lived as an invalid from his cerebral hemorrhage in May 1922 to his death in January 1924. A photo of a sunken-eyed Lenin in a rattan wheelchair, a blanket draped over his knees, was reprinted in many Soviet history texts.31
While it was patent that Yeltsin was not his former self, some of the coverage of his condition was misleading. He was acutely ill in hospital eight times between November 1996 and December 1999, and while on vacation he was out of touch with most staff for one or two weeks a year. The rest of the time, if and when his departure from the Kremlin was on the early side, he would indeed work “with documents” at Gorki-9. Yeltsin went on long, restful vacations, true, but so do many other world leaders with fewer health concerns. Ronald Reagan, for example, took 436 vacation days in eight years, or an average of fifty-five days a year, spending many of them at his ranch in Santa Barbara, California. George W. Bush had taken 418 days by mid-2007, or sixty-four a year, mostly in Crawford, Texas, and President Eisenhower is said to have spent 222 days playing golf in Augusta, Georgia.32 Yeltsin’s vacation time after 1996 was of the order of thirty or forty days a year. When in the country near Moscow, he made more use of the telephone than in the past. Politicos and bureaucrats were expected to come to him when invited, which a handful were on most workdays. Unlike Lenin in the 1920s, he was not dying, was not a shut-in, and had not lost cognitive capacity.33
The bottom line politically was that when the second-term Yeltsin rationed his effort and expended it purposefully, he still had the last word in national affairs. As it was put by Sergei Stepashin, who filled a number of positions in the second administration and was his next-to-last prime minister, Yeltsin made “all decisions about goals and strategy” in his government.34
One fortuitous byproduct of worsened health was that it prompted a near cessation of Yeltsin’s drinking. Consuming alcohol in volume, daily or almost daily, stopped for him in 1996. The craving diminished greatly during his reclusiveness before and after surgery. Self-preservation supplied the most hardheaded of motives: Akchurin and Chazov told him bluntly that not to give the habit up would be the death of him, and Yeltsin took their word for it. He was instructed to hold himself to a glassful of wine a day—advice he followed to the letter, he wrote in Presidential Marathon.35 The fall of Aleksandr Korzhakov and the faction around him removed the small-group medium in which Yeltsin had found drinking most congenial. Naina Yeltsina’s say over his diet and routine increased markedly. For state receptions and dinners, the family had the Kremlin kitchen lay in red wine adulterated with colored water, specially prepared for the president’s table. On social occasions, according to his daughter Tatyana, he might allow himself one, two, or, rarely, three glasses of dry red wine or champagne, but he knew when to stop.36 These restraints seem to have been breached on a limited number of occasions, although even domestic and foreign observers who record them note the contrast with the first term.37 Alcohol had ceased to be the part of Yeltsin’s life that it was in the first half of the 1990s, and no longer figured significantly in his relations with others.
More’s the pity that he received no political dividends from this sobriety. Most Russians did not know his conduct had changed, and most analysts of those years write as if it had not. Yeltsin’s privacy fetish and embarrassment over past miscues deterred him from providing any kind of explanation. It would have been undignified, as he put it in his final memoir volume, to “beat my breast” about the issue, and many would never have taken his word for it anyway.38 He was in a when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife trap: He could not say he had licked the vice without admitting he had it in the first place, which he was not willing to do until after retirement. Without a signal from him, no one in the government or the Kremlin could talk about the subject, and the press corps, for its part, considered it taboo.
Another change for the better was in psychological humor. The truncated second term was on the whole, his daughter said in an interview, “a calmer period” mentally for Yeltsin than the first.39 He was less subject than back in the day to the mood swings between sleeping giant and snarling tiger. Physical debilitation precluded the spikes of supercharged effort, and the letdowns in their wake, that punctuated the first term: “I had endured a lot and, you could say, I had returned from the dead. I could not solve problems as I used to, by mustering all my physical strength and charging headon into frontal clashes. That wasn’t for me anymore.”40 Objectively, Russia’s “reformist breakthrough,” as Yeltsin termed it in October 1991, was behind him. The foundations of a post-communist order had been laid, for better or worse, and his re-election ruled out a communist restoration for now. Although there would be political exigencies—the 1998 financial crash and the 1999 attempt to impeach him stand out—nothing would measure up to the initiation of shock therapy, the constitutional donnybrook of 1993, the first Chechen war, or the 1996 election. About his own role, Yeltsin seems to have been more philosophical following his second inauguration, more accepting that his main work was done and judgment of it would be up to history. And, in his presidential autumn, th
e end of his time at the top, and the transfer of power to friend or foe, were on the horizon. Someone else would soon be opening the color-coded files in Building No. 1.
From the summer of 1996 to the spring of 1997, Yeltsin’s leadership was in reactive mode. Besides weathering his parlous recovery and enforced leave, he was limited to tying up loose ends from the campaign. Promises that were affordable or whose costs could be deferred until better times were satisfying to return to. Small-change works projects and giveaways authorized during the campaign went ahead, at considerable expense to the budget. The cities of Ufa and Kazan used federal and provincial resources to start tunneling their subways in 1997; they opened to riders in 2004 and 2005 and are supposed to be under construction until the year 2040.
Cleaning up unpaid wages and social allowances was like rolling a boulder up a steep hill again and again. To give the government the wherewithal to make good on claims, Yeltsin in October 1996 appointed a Temporary Extraordinary Commission for Strengthening Tax and Budgetary Discipline. Chaired by the prime minister, it went colloquially by the name VChK, a contraction of three of the Cyrillic letters in its tongue-twisting title—the very same acronym as the first version of the Soviet secret police in 1917, and taken as instilling the Kremlin’s seriousness of purpose. Yeltsin thought the problem well on the way to solution until he met with the commission in January 1997 and learned there was no timetable for catching up in the state sector. He threatened to issue a decree mandating full back payment of pensions by April 1 and then settled grumpily for a July 1 deadline.41 There was no fix by July 1. Only strenuous effort got the total nonpayments in the economy by year’s end down to the level of about $8 billion where they had stood in January, and they were to rise in the first half of 1998. Individuals and Russian families made adjustments on their own, as well as they could.42
Yeltsin Page 52