Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  Decree No. 1761, his last, took effect at twelve noon sharp. Around one P.M., citizen Yeltsin returned to the president’s office from the farewell lunch and toasts. An adjutant slipped on his overcoat. As they waited for the private elevator of Building No. 1, he presented Putin with the fat fountain pen with which he had signed decrees and laws. He put on his sable hat at the front door. “Take care of Russia,” he said to Putin as the flashbulbs popped. He walked to the car in a light snowfall and was gone out the Kremlin gates.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Aftermath

  Boris Yeltsin’s expectations for life after power were uneven. He looked forward to the peace and quiet but “had no illusions.” “People were not going to love or worship me. I even had some doubts. If . . . I made a public appearance or went to the theater, would they jeer at me?” What would become of him “when the old Russian tradition requires that all misfortunes and sins are heaped upon the departed chief”?1

  The remaining stages of the handover of power went by without a hitch. Vladimir Putin, acting president since December 31, was elected president on March 26, 2000, in the first round of voting, without really campaigning for the job. He was sworn in on May 7. Yeltsin, standing beside him in the renovated Grand Kremlin Palace, gave remarks in which he repeated the injunction to take good care of Russia. He delivered them “slowly and with one pause so long that a handful in the audience applauded, thinking the speech was over.”2 When he was done, Putin spoke as president and the shift from one leader to the next was complete.

  Yeltsin’s days now centered on his country residence—Gorki-9 in the first year, the more pleasant Barvikha-4 for the duration. The feared personal indignities did not come about. He was never jeered at or made a spectacle of. No one went after him for his actions in government or tried to do him harm through his family.

  Aside from the evils avoided, retirement brought with it two good things, in particular. For one, it did wonders for Yeltsin’s physical condition. “Immediately after my departure from the post of president, an enormous, unbelievably heavy load fell from my shoulders and I began to breathe easy”; “the constant pressure that . . . saps the health of the strongest organism” was behind him.3 Health problems did nag at Yeltsin. He submitted to surgery for eye cataracts in 2000 and 2005. He came down with double pneumonia in January–February 2001 and spent his seventieth birthday in the hospital. In December 2001 he had an angioplasty at the German Heart Center in Berlin. A virus kept him away from Putin’s second inauguration in May 2004. Except for the bout with pneumonia—when the doctors warned the family he might have only days to live—these were pinpricks compared to what he endured from 1996 through 1999.4 Yeltsin still awoke at dawn.5 Under Naina Yeltsina’s watchful eye, he trimmed his waistline, ate a wholesome diet, and kept his drinking to a minimum. His overall condition took a turn for the better in 2002. Acquaintances thought he looked ten years younger.

  The other great bonus from relinquishing office was the time and freedom to pursue interests he had long put on the back burner. Yeltsin saw a fair amount of his old Sverdlovsk friends and in May 2005 hosted a fiftieth reunion of his UPI class at a mountain spa in Kislovodsk. Of high-ranking coworkers from his presidential years, he renewed acquaintances with almost every one from whom he had parted amicably and with many from whom he had not—Aleksandr Korzhakov being the outstanding exception.

  Yeltsin’s deepest interest was in a family circle that continued to swell. His daughter Tatyana, who ceased all political activity, married Valentin Yumashev in 2001 and bore Yeltsin his sixth grandchild, Mariya. Tatyana Yumasheva moved out of Boris and Naina’s home, but she and Yelena Okulova came around to see their father almost every day. The marriage of Yumashev’s daughter, Polina, to aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, one of the richest men in Russia, assured that segment of the Yeltsin clan financial security. 6 A first great-grandchild, a boy, had been born in late 1999; a second and third, also boys, arrived in 2005 and 2006.7 In September 2006, Boris, Naina, and brood celebrated the couple’s golden wedding anniversary.

  The biggest claim on Yeltsin’s leisure hours was reading. He had the children’s nursery on the first floor of Barvikha-4 converted into a library with a writing desk and armchair. Tatyana had a box of about a dozen books delivered to him each week. They were put on a sorting table and stored on floor-to-ceiling shelves only when he was through with them. With a target of three hundred pages a day, Yeltsin plowed through memoirs, biographies, historical novels, foreign literature in translation, detective and spy thrillers, science fiction, military history, and the poetry of Pushkin. He read the multivolume works of the great Russian historians Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), Nikolai Kostomarov (1817–85), Sergei Solov’ëv (1820–79), and Vasilii Klyuchevskii (1841–1911). When I last conversed with him, in 2002, he had just finished a number of classic and recently released books about Peter the Great. He was appalled by the evidence of his hero’s cruelty and imbalanced mind: “I have come to view him with great realism, although I remain a defender of Peter.”8

  Yeltsin on pension went for a walk and a swim in the pool daily and hunted at Zavidovo several times a year. Unable to take to the tennis court, he played it vicariously by being an ardent fan of the professional game. He attended every big match in Moscow and rented a satellite dish that pulled in broadcasts from every continent—he sometimes watched them live at all hours of the night. Another luxury within reach was extensive travel. In addition to domestic destinations across Russia and the former Soviet Union, he and Naina paid visits to Israel, Germany, China, Japan, France, Britain, Norway, Alaska, Ireland, and Italy. He was in Paris on December, 1, 2002, when Russia won its first major team trophy in tennis, the Davis Cup. Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, Yeltsin-style, Mikhail Youzhny came back from a two-set deficit to edge a French player in the deciding match. “Yeltsin sat in the VIP box along with French President Jacques Chirac during the entire three-day encounter, cheering wildly at every winning point for Russia. In the most dramatic moments of the tie [on December 1], Yeltsin, the self-proclaimed team mascot, punched the air in delight. The moment Youzhny clinched the title, Yeltsin climbed over a courtside barrier to bearhug him and the rest of the squad.”9 He made it to Paris again for the French Open in June 2004, to Wimbledon on the same trip, and back to the French Open in June 2006.

  Whereas private life after power had many joys, Yeltsin had to withdraw from the public realm, and this process brought the sting of disappointment as well as relief that somebody else was making the decisions. On January 10, 2000, back from an excursion to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Yeltsin opened the door of his study at Gorki-9 and found the desk empty of papers. The handset of the secured government telephone line had no dial tone. “There was absolutely nothing for me to do in this office. I sat in the chair for a time and then picked up and left.” The phone connection was quickly re-established—the interruption had been a technical hiccup—but for some days Yeltsin experienced “an engulfing emptiness.” He had been a boss at one level or another since the 1950s and had held senior political positions since the 1970s. Now a psychological adjustment was needed. He would have to accept that he was not in charge of anything outside the grounds of his home, and even they belonged to the state. While people might come to him with questions and comments, he had to “contain my . . . leader’s reflex” and get used to expressing no more than an opinion.10 In a press interview a year after bowing out, he conceded that he was sometimes subject to melancholy (toska). “It happens. After all, I have been used to a stormy life, to seething effort.” What did he do when he felt that way? asked the correspondent. “Then I struggle with myself,” Yeltsin replied.11

  Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, who after his involuntary retreat set up a large philanthropic foundation and gave numerous lectures, Yeltsin chose to keep out of the public eye. He abstained from formal speeches in Russia and abroad and gave only about ten newspaper and television interviews in seven years. A Yeltsin
Foundation was established in November 2000, with his daughter Tatyana as president and headquartered in a modest building across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. It concentrated on nonpolitical, youth-oriented work, spending several million dollars a year. Among the beneficiaries were the village school in Butka, the Pushkin School in Berezniki, and Urals State Technical University (the former UPI) in Yekaterinburg. There were national programs for sick children, young athletes, and tennis and volleyball tournaments in the hinterland. The organization opened a Urals branch in Yekaterinburg in 2006.12 A presidential library, announced by the Kremlin as a government project in 2000, was funded only after his death in 2007—in the form of a library named after Yeltsin in St. Petersburg, dedicated to the history of the Russian state. Yeltsin dictated and edited Presidential Marathon, the third installment of his memoirs, in the months after stepping down. It came out at the end of 2000. All invitations to write more were turned down. “To be honest,” he said in 2006, “I am in no mood to try to recollect events from ten or fifteen years ago. What is the sense in digging up the past?”13

  The new head of state treated Yeltsin with respect, if not affection or deference. On June 12, 2001, the tenth anniversary of his election as president, Putin made Yeltsin the first Russian recipient of the Order for Services to the Fatherland, First Grade (established by Yeltsin in 1994), and pinned the badge on his lapel at a Kremlin reception. In Yeltsin’s first year out of office, the two met, usually at his residence, an average of once a month. The meetings were sometimes arranged at his initiative and sometimes at Putin’s. “A new president,” Yeltsin professed, “is obliged to periodically hear out the opinions of his predecessor.” He was content on the whole with Putin, but “I tell him frankly about his mistakes and . . . that he has to live up to people’s hopes.”14

  Yeltsin let loose with some of his opinions in the open. In August 2000, when Putin was slow to interrupt a vacation and respond to the sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, Yeltsin made it known that Putin had been insensitive. That December he took Putin to task for siding with parliamentarians who wanted to bring back the musical score of the pre-1991 Soviet anthem, with updated lyrics. “For me, the old hymn has only one association—the [Communist Party] congresses and party conferences at which the power of the party bureaucrats was confirmed and strengthened.” Yeltsin scoffed at Putin’s report that Russian athletes at the Summer Olympics in Sydney were not inspired by the nineteenth-century Glinka melody that Yeltsin instituted as the national anthem in 1993, and to which words had not yet been set. The athletes would adapt to whatever music the country required, Yeltsin said, and in any case they were young people who looked “to the future and not to the past.” On symbolic matters, he continued, “The president should not blindly follow the people’s mood; on the contrary, it is up to him to actively influence it.”15 Three weeks after Yeltsin spoke out, Putin signed the anthem bill into law.16

  Putin in power at first combined economic liberalism with vigorous and often brutal prosecution of the second Chechen war and a moderate tightening of political controls. Yeltsin was in full agreement with the economic changes, which were mostly designed and implemented by younger technocrats whom he had promoted in his second term, and were pushed through the Duma by Putin’s coalition there.17 For the first wave of political changes, he expressed “restrained support.” They included new central levers over the regions and a squeeze on the more forward of the oligarchs, prompting both Vladimir Gusinskii and Boris Berezovskii to flee the country in 2001.18 Yeltsin was fully behind the drive for a military solution in Chechnya. Most of the surviving warlords from 1994 to 1996 were killed in the Russian operation, and he came to believe he had erred when he ended that first conflict on the separatists’ terms.19

  With the passage of time, though, the authoritarian flavor of many of Putin’s choices in the political arena, made and executed in concert with fellow products of the security services, was increasingly at odds with Yeltsin’s more liberal outlook.20 A tender point was the curbing of media autonomy, starting with Gusinskii’s NTV network and ORT, which had been in Berezovskii’s orbit. Gusinskii and Berezovskii defended their assets more out of financial interests and power concerns than out of democratic principle, 21 but the net effect was the narrowing of the sphere in which officialdom’s behavior could be held up to scrutiny. In March 2002 Yeltsin gave his consent to a suggestion by Boris Nemtsov that he chair a new supervisory board for TV-6, a small for-profit channel, previously owned by Berezovskii, that had begun to carry news programming and to which some of the journalists from NTV migrated when Gusinskii and Igor Malashenko were ousted there. Putin heard of it and insisted that Yeltsin pull out of the arrangement before it could be announced.22

  The Putin administration crossed a threshold in October 2003 with the arrest of billionaire businessman Mikhail Khodorkovskii. He was put on trial for fraud and tax evasion and sentenced in 2005 to nine years in a Siberian prison camp; his oil company, Yukos, was broken up and the pieces acquired by state-dominated firms. The affair was motivated in part by Khodorkovskii’s political independence. In September 2004 Putin took advantage of a horrific hostage-taking by Chechen and pro-Chechen guerrillas in the town of Beslan, North Ossetiya, to introduce legislation ending the popular election of oblast and republic leaders and authorizing him in effect to select them from above. The Beslan tragedy and the fall of a pro-Moscow government in neighboring Ukraine in December 2004 were also followed by the imposition of stiffer restrictions on opposition groups, human-rights activists, and nongovernmental organizations. Yeltsin disapproved of these retrograde changes and others. As Yegor Gaidar, who had several searching conversations with him, summarized it the week of Yeltsin’s death, Yeltsin “was very disconcerted by much of what was going on in Russian politics.”23

  The Yeltsin-Putin relationship inevitably deteriorated under these strains. Their face-to-face meetings became less frequent in 2001, occurring only every second or third month. The first three years, the Yeltsin and Putin families had a social gathering on New Year’s Eve to mark the anniversary of the transfer of power; there was none in December 2003 or any subsequent year. From late 2002 on, the leaders visited only on Yeltsin’s birthday and for chats on protocol occasions. They did not talk substance until two confidential conversations they had in Yeltsin’s final months.24 When I had a chance to ask Putin in September 2007 how it had been between them, the first thing he volunteered was that they had seen little of one another in recent years. His attitude was courteous and correct but markedly cool. Yeltsin, he said, had been satisfied with the “general course”; they were at variance on “particular problems.”25

  Yeltsin, although he was more displeased with the particulars than before, was also more discreet in passing judgment on them. One reason this was so was that Putin took care not to go at him ad hominem and even to praise him on occasion for liberating Russians from the dead hand of the communist past. Yeltsin continued to trust Putin’s good intentions. If the new president was acting in error, time would heal the wounds. But the key basis for Yeltsin’s acquiescence was situational realism. It derived from the weariness with politics that had led him to leave the Kremlin ahead of schedule, his candid acknowledgment in 1999 that he had let many Russians down, the recognition that it was he who put Putin on the throne and that he bore a certain moral responsibility for Putin’s behavior, and a practical awareness of the limits of his influence as ex-president. The economic boom and the perception that order had been restored made Putin, year in and year out, as popular as Yeltsin had been during his romance with the electorate in 1990–91. He swept the 2004 presidential election with 70 percent of the popular vote, double what Yeltsin took in the first round of his 1996 re-election bid. Putin was not an easy leader to challenge.

  The constraints that kept Yeltsin on the sidelines came through in his interview with Kirill Dybskii of Itogi magazine in January 2006:

  DYBSKII: Does everything in current Rus
sian politics suit you?

  YELTSIN: I always have reproofs to make. It would be strange if I didn’t. But the main thing is the strategic course, and I support it and consider it the right one.

  DYBSKII: But how about tactical differences?

  YELTSIN: I don’t discuss these in the press. I can talk about them one on one with Vladimir Vladimirovich, but in public, as they say in the West, no comment. Don’t forget, I’m not a public politician any more.

  DYBSKII: But knowledgeable people say it is impossible to get out of politics entirely.

  YELTSIN: Perhaps [you can keep at it] if you have the force of will and the brains. But you need to figure out that there is a time to leave, to make way for the young, to stop interfering. Of course, in my inner thoughts I constantly analyze what is going on in the country and try to guess what I would have done in this or that context. But here’s where I have to stop myself and say, “Hold on! Today the president of the country is named Putin and not Yeltsin. . . .” I hope I had the intelligence and the selfmastery to depart the proper way. So you’re not going to hear any critical comments from me. Why sow discord? This is of no use to the country or its leader. I am the one who put Putin forward and I ought to support him. . . .

  DYBSKII: But it used to be that you criticized openly. For example, you complained about the new Russian anthem and said it was just the old Soviet one dressed up.

  YELTSIN: I grumbled a little, and then I calmed down. And what came of it? The anthem stayed in place.26

  Matters of state were forgotten when Yeltsin on February 1, 2006, accepted Putin’s hospitality for a seventy-fifth birthday party in the Kremlin palace. It was his last hurrah before a political audience. Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl, Patriarch Aleksii II, and Mstislav Rostropovich, and all of Yeltsin’s prime ministers headed the guest list of three hundred. They were treated to champagne and canapés in Alexander Nevsky Hall, chamber music in St. Andrei’s Hall, and a dinner of pheasant, sturgeon, and veal in St. George’s Hall. He had been a free man since 2000, Yeltsin said in his toast to the company, and would not trade it for anything. For the first time in a thousand years a past leader of Russia “did not have his head chopped off ” and got to enjoy an evening in his honor in the Kremlin. During the response toasts, he sat with a microphone in hand, “like at a production meeting,” prepared “to give a piece of his mind to subordinates,” which he did several times. Viktor Chernomyrdin drew the loudest applause. Yeltsin had been hard to work with and was no angel, “But angels are not able to govern the state.”27