Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  26 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 270.

  27 Robert S. Strauss, interview with the author (January 9, 2006).

  28 Of the German, Yeltsin wrote (Marafon, 164), “Kohl and I always found it easy to understand each other psychologically. We resembled one another in terms of our reactions and style of communication and saw the world from the same generational bell tower.” Yeltsin used the word “friend” (drug) to describe Kohl, Jiang, and Jacques Chirac of France (born in 1932), and mentioned how much he liked speaking Russian with Jiang, who lived in Moscow in the 1950s. He did not discuss Strauss in his memoirs. By contrast, Yeltsin’s relations with François Mitterrand, the president of France until January 1996 (born in 1916), were always chilly.

  29 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 250.

  30 Details from Korzhakov interview. The Sakha visit was in December 1990, when Yeltsin was still parliamentary chairman.

  31 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 391.

  32 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 9.

  33 The masculine side of comradeship has been revealed in studies of Soviet propaganda, literature, and art. See Eliot Borenstein, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

  34 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 198–99.

  35 Conversation with Naina Yeltsina during my third interview with Boris Yeltsin (September 12, 2002).

  36 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 458, 19.

  37 Viktor Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000). Chernomyrdin is one of Moscow’s most accomplished swearers, and thus had to suppress that habit as well as any chumminess.

  38 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 176–77; Aleksandr Rutskoi, interview with the author (June 5, 2001).

  39 This congruity was stressed in my interviews with Boris Nemtsov.

  40 Yegor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Days of defeats and victories) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 106.

  41 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:372. Gorbachev throws in archly that many Soviet builders lied about project completion and made believe that half-finished buildings were ready for occupancy.

  42 Other than Yeltsin, the construction engineer who soared highest in Russian politics in the 1990s was the Sverdlovsker Oleg Lobov. Lobov was a level-tempered administrator with none of Yeltsin’s quirks.

  43 Georgii Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh (With leaders and without them) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 376.

  44 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 305.

  45 Oleg Davydov, “Yel’tsinskaya trekhkhodovka” (The Yeltsin three-step), in A. N. Starkov, ed., Rossiiskaya elita: psikhologicheskiye portrety (The Russian elite: psychological portraits) (Moscow: Ladomir, 2000), 65–80.

  46 See, for example, “Altered Statesmen: Boris Yeltsin,” http://www.discoverychannel.co.uk/alteredstatesmen/features5.shtml. The Wikipedia online encyclopedia now reports as established fact that Yeltsin, along with Winston Churchill, was cyclothymic. Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), provides what purports to be analysis of other mental conditions, including paranoia, persecution mania, schizophrenia, and “hysterical psychopathy.” This text reports a few useful anecdotes, mostly from Korzhakov, but the discussion of Yeltsin’s mental state is pure character assassination. Never saying directly that he had most of these conditions, let alone adducing evidence, it prints stylized descriptions of them in boldface in the midst of narration of incidents in his life, leaving it to the reader to draw conclusions. It is also full of basic factual errors. For more responsible discussion of select themes, see Martin Ebon, “Yeltsin’s V.I.P. Depression,” http://www.mhsource.com/exclusive/yeltsin.html.

  47 Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 151; Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 87; Baturin et al., Epokha, 367; Sergei Filatov, second interview with the author (January 25, 2002).

  48 Tarpishchev interview.

  49 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 85–86.

  50 Muzhskoi razgovor.

  51 Baturin et al., Epokha, 504.

  52 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 304–5.

  53 Ibid., 239.

  54 Ibid., 293.

  55 Ibid.; Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 203.

  56 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 203.

  57 This event is reported only in the revised edition of Korzhakov’s memoir: Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata; poslesloviye (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk; epilogue) (Moscow: Detektiv-press, 2004), 245–46. He told me about it in our interview in 2002. The other men present were reportedly Viktor Ilyushin and Mikhail Barsukov, neither of whom has contradicted Korzhakov’s account. Korzhakov knew Yeltsin would not be able to put a bullet in his head but feared, nonetheless, that he might have a heart attack due to the strain.

  58 Baturin et al., Epokha, 632.

  59 Yelena Bonner, interview with the author (March 13, 2001).

  60 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 23.

  61 Yevgenii Primakov, Vosem’ mesyatsev plyus . . . (Eight months plus) (Moscow: Mysl’, 2001), 93.

  62 Ludwig, King of the Mountain, 233–40. Ludwig (233) includes combinations of the following symptoms: “a melancholy mood, a sleep disturbance, increased or decreased appetite, lack of energy, excessive tearfulness, a sense of dread or futility, social withdrawal, morbid thoughts, or suicidal preoccupation.”

  63 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 348.

  64 Baturin et al., Epokha, 505, 507.

  65 Third Yeltsin interview.

  66 Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom, 301, 306–7.

  67 Valentin Yumashev, fourth interview with the author (January 22, 2007).

  68 Author’s first interview with Vladimir Bokser (May 11, 2000) and interviews with Jack Matlock (September 1, 2005), Robert Strauss (January 9, 2006), Valerii Bortsov (June 11, 2001), Aleksandr Rutskoi (June 5, 2001), and Yurii Ryzhov (June 7, 2000); and Aleksandr Korzhakov, “Yel’tsin ne pozvolyal, chtoby v yego kompanii sachkovali s vypivkoi” (Yeltsin did not allow people to goof off because of drink in his company), http://news.rin.ru/news///130889.

  69 A reporter in 1991 asked her about Yeltsin’s upbringing, and she brushed off reports that he was a drinker: “I know, a lot of rumors are circulating. But I am his mother, I know my son.” She then related the story, reported in Chapter 2, of Yeltsin as a teenager in Berezniki pouring another boy’s glass of vodka on the ground. Izabella Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov ot Belogo doma” (Thousands of kilometers from the White House), Vechernyaya Moskva, October 2, 1991.

  70 Talbott, Russia Hand, 44–45; Strobe Talbott, interview with the author (January 9, 2006). Given the eight-hour time difference between Washington and Moscow and Clinton’s dislike of early-morning appointments, coordination of the two presidents’ schedules was no easy task.

  71 By evening’s end, Yeltsin’s skin was stretched across his cheeks and a Clinton adviser knew what people meant when they described someone who had too much to drink as “tight.” George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), 140.

  72 Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 411–12, 217.

  73 Vladimir Bokser, second interview with the author (May 11, 2001); and Bonner interview.

  74 Andrei Kozyrev, second interview with the author (September 18, 2001). Kozyrev declined to name the minister.

  75 The performance can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAr0MgGrwHA.

  76 The letter is reproduced in Baturin et al., Epokha, 521–23. Korzhakov writes that Pavel Grachëv also signed; the other sources deny it. Yeltsin assistants Yurii Baturin and Georgii Satarov took part in the composition but did not sign, since they had been with him for only a year. The Repin painting in question is the tableau Reply of the Zaporozh’e Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey, completed in 1891.

  77 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 349.

&
nbsp; 78 On his visit to Britain in the last week of September, undertaken after his return from Sochi, Yeltsin spent a night at Chequers as a guest of John Major. He and the prime minister called on an English pub in the village of Great Kimble, knocking on the door to get the owner to open up (Yeltsin said he was the president of Russia and the proprietor replied that he was the kaiser of Germany). That evening at the residence, Yeltsin “came downstairs visibly drunk, and took an immediate dislike to his placement. He picked up his own table card, next door to that of Princess Alexandra, and deposited both the card and himself next to John Major, with whom he chatted amiably, if incoherently, all evening.” Max Hastings, Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers (London: Macmillan, 2002), 205.

  79 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 348–50.

  80 “When she caught sight of Korzhakov, she shook” (Pri vide Korzhakova, yei sotryaslo). Valentin Yumashev, third interview with the author (September 13, 2006).

  81 Baturin et al., Epokha, 515.

  82 Ibid., 524; Lyudmila Pikhoya, interview with the author (September 26, 2001).

  83 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 349.

  84 Ludwig, King of the Mountain, 453.

  85 For Churchill in the 1930s, “A typical day’s imbibing would begin in midmorning with a whisky and soda and continue through a bottle of champagne at lunch, more whisky and soda in the afternoon, sherry before dinner, another bottle of champagne during dinner, the best part of a bottle of brandy after dinner, and would end with a final whisky and soda before going to bed. On occasions he drank even more than this.” Clive Ponting, Churchill (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 388.

  86 Anatolii Chernyayev, 1991 god: dnevnik pomoshchnika Prezidenta SSSR (The year 1991: diary of an assistant to the president of the USSR) (Moscow: TERRA, 1997), 265.

  87 Stephanopoulos, All Too Human, 140. Of the correspondence between alcohol consumption and performance in government, Ludwig (in King of the Mountain, 230) reports being “astounded by how well certain rulers were able to run their countries and accomplish impressive deeds” despite their periodic abuse of alcohol. He gives Churchill and Atatürk as examples. A counterexample is Harold Wilson, the British prime minister of the 1960s and 1970s who suffered alcoholic dementia by age sixty.

  88 I first heard this interpretation of mass attitudes toward Yeltsin’s use of alcohol from the pollster Aleksandr Oslon (interview, January 25, 2001).

  89 Ruslan Khasbulatov, interview with the author (September 26, 2001).

  90 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 156.

  91 “Sostoyaniye zdorov’ya Borisa Yel’tsina khorosheye” (The state of Boris Yeltsin’s health is good), Izvestiya, July 10, 1992.

  92 Author’s interview with El’dar Ryazanov (May 30, 2001); Muzhskoi razgovor.

  93 Korzhakov’s firsthand account stresses Yeltsin’s heart pains, but the group had drinks on the ground and in the air. During the 1996 election campaign, Boris Nemtsov, the governor of Nizhnii Novgorod region, who had made cracks about Shannon, was to accompany him on a snap trip to Chechnya. Nemtsov polished off a quart of vodka on the return flight—Yeltsin had almost none—and was incoherent in front of the press at the Moscow airport. Back in Nizhnii, a telephone call from Yeltsin awakened him the next morning at six A.M., and the president taunted him with the similarity to his mishap in Ireland. “Boris Nemtsov—Yevgenii Al’bats o Yel’tsine” (Boris Nemtsov to Yevgeniya Al’bats about Yeltsin), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007.

  94 The dates of the first two attacks were publicized in 1995. The third was kept secret and is mentioned, without an exact date, in Chazov, Rok, 250–51; Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 319; and Yel’tsin, Marafon, 22. Chazov speaks of an attack in September 1995, but seems to confuse it with the event of October 26. Yeltsin implies in his memoir that his first full-fledged heart attack (a myocardial infarction, which causes permanent damage to muscle cells) was in December; Chazov, a cardiologist, does not make this distinction.

  95 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin . . . poslesloviye, 325–26.

  96 Chazov, Rok, 248–50. In the United States in October, Yeltsin was busy at the bar at the United Nations and the summit with President Clinton in Hyde Park, New York. It was after Hyde Park that Clinton made his oft-quoted one-liner to Strobe Talbott that “Yeltsin drunk is better than most of the alternatives sober.” Yeltsin was to claim in Marafon, 49, that he was never shown the physicians’ report that recommended the angiogram.

  97 See the comments on Yeltsin drinking faux vodka toasts with water in Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 450.

  98 Drafts of Article 3 contained a guarantee of “freedom of the means of mass communication.” Liberal aides preferred the grander “freedom of mass communication,” and won the president over.

  99 Quotations from Baturin et al., Epokha, 494.

  100 Vyacheslav Kostikov, interview with the author (May 28, 2001). Journalists sometimes got phone calls from Yeltsin about particular stories. In September 1992, for example, Yeltsin rang up Izvestiya’s diplomatic correspondent and told him his stories about Russian-Japanese relations were “too ironic,” but his tone was warm and he did not demand any change. Konstantin Eggert, interview with the author (September 12, 2006).

  101 Yakovlev had broadcast a documentary about ethnic relations in the North Caucasus that inflamed local officials; Poptsov was accused of anti-government bias in news coverage. Both moved on to other successes.

  102 Ellen Mickiewiecz, Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Ivan Zassoursky, Media and Power in Post-Soviet Russia (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 2004).

  103 Mayor Anatolii Sobchak of St. Petersburg was involved in the negotiations over its creation, because it initially broadcast on Channel 5, the national station out of the northern capital. NTV moved to Channel 4 in 1994 and was allowed to broadcast the full day three years later. The first private station in Russia was TV-6, which started in January 1993. Originally partnered with Ted Turner, TV-6 mostly broadcast entertainment.

  104 Igor Malashenko, interview with the author (March 18, 2001).

  105 Viktor Shenderovich, interview with the author (February 26, 2004); Shenderovich, Kukliada (Puppet games) (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Fonda Russkoi poezii, 1999), 21–44; David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002), 291–94. The script for “Lower Depths” is in Shenderovich, Kukly (Puppets) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 137–44. Hoffman emphasizes Korzhakov as the instigator of the formal charge, but Shenderovich (interview) said it was made at the request of Chernomyrdin.

  106 Shenderovich interview. The Hamlet skit is in Shenderovich, Kukly, 6–15.

  107 Shenderovich, Kukly, 121–22.

  108 I am grateful to John Dunn of the University of Glasgow for the total number of Yeltsin roles. See his “Humour and Satire on Post-Soviet Russian Television,” in Lesley Milne, ed., Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 181–222.

  109 Shenderovich, Kukly, 136.

  110 Author’s interviews with family members.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1 The nickname for the route when Stalin was driven up and down it daily was the amerikanka, “American way,” in reference to its satin-smooth blacktop. Stalin’s two main dachas were located off of it, which was one of its attractions to the communist elite. The area it ran through had little industry, was upwind and upriver of Moscow and its pollution, and contained many villas and gentry estates from tsarist times that were adaptable to new needs.

  2 As noted in Chapter 10, Yeltsin was in Building No. 14 for about eighteen months in 1994–96. During the reconstruction of Building No. 1, the focal fireplace in the president’s ceremonial office was also redone in malachite at his request. Ivan Sautov, director of the Tsarskoye Selo estate near St. Petersburg, supervised the renewal. “Yeltsin was very satisfied and personally thanked many of the builders and subcontractors. He is after all a construction engineer and understands
this kind of thing.” “U nas tut vsë nastoyashcheye” (Everything here is genuine), interview with Pavel Borodin in Kommersant-Daily, March 24, 1999. Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev all had their Kremlin offices in Building No. 1, though in different rooms than Gorbachev; Brezhnev’s place was in Building No. 14.

  3 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 166.

  4 Quotations from ibid., 167–68.

  5 Examples here would be American presidential theory, France’s dual executive, and German federalism and electoral legislation.

  6 “My mozhem byt’ tvërdo uvereny: Rossiya vozroditsya” (We can be certain that Russia will be reborn), Izvestiya, July 10, 1991.

  7 “Obrashcheniye Prezidenta Rossii k narodam Rossii, k s”ezdu narodnykh deputatov Rossiiskoi Federatsii” (Address of the president of Russia to the peoples of Russia and the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation), Rossiiskaya gazeta, October 29, 1991.

  8 Stalin told a relative in the 1930s that the Russians “need a tsar, whom they can worship and for whom they can live and work.” He compared himself to Peter the Great, Alexander I, Nicholas I, and the Persian shahs. Georgia, his birthplace, was for centuries part of the Persian empire. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Random House, 2003), 177.

  9 Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001); Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999).

  10 Boris Nemtsov, Provintsial (Provincial) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997), 81–82. The incident in Nizhnii Novgorod is more fully described in Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (Toronto: Doubleday, 2000), 38–40.

  11 These are the components of the regal bearing given in Arnold M. Ludwig, King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 179–80.

  12 The appellation ignored Boris Godunov, whose life was fictionalized in Alexander Pushkin’s play and Modest Mussorgsky’s opera. Godunov reigned from 1598 to 1605, during the Time of Troubles preceding the Romanov dynasty.