Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  87 Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 358.

  88 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 24.

  89 Ibid., 78, 256–57.

  90 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 243–46.

  91 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 326.

  92 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 257.

  93 Alena V. Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 11.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1 Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 308; Nikolai Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin: raznyye zhizni (Boris Yeltsin: various lives), 2 vols. (Moscow: OLMA, 2001), 2:465. In the interview, published in Komsomol’skaya pravda, Yeltsin said he favored training a group of twenty leaders from which his successor would be elected. Nothing was done about the suggestion.

  2 Dmitri K. Simes, After the Collapse: Russia Seeks Its Place as a Great Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 139.

  3 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 33.

  4 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 525–30; Georgii Satarov, first interview with the author (June 5, 2000).

  5 There is scathing commentary in Vyacheslav Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom: zapiski press-sekretarya (Romance with a president: notes of a press secretary) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997), 120–21.

  6 Sergei Medvedev, interview with the author (May 28, 2001).

  7 See http://www.fotuva.org/newsletters/fot13.html.

  8 Tatyana Malkina, interview with the author (June 13, 2001).

  9 See Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 329–31; and Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 47.

  10 Malkina interview. She added that Yeltsin now and again acted as if he were in a trance or “not of these parts” (nezdeshnii).

  11 See especially M. Steven Fish, “Russia’s Fourth Transition,” Journal of Democracy 5 (July 1994), 31–42; Marc Morjé Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Henry E. Hale, Why Not Parties in Russia? Democracy, Federalism, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  12 Source: scattered press reports; second interview with Gennadii Burbulis, conducted by Yevgeniya Al’bats (February 14, 2001); Sergei Stankevich, interview with the author (May 29, 2001).

  13 Yevgenii Krasnikov, “Demokraty sozdayut izbiratel’nyi blok” (The democrats create an electoral bloc), Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 17, 1993.

  14 Details here from Yegor Gaidar, second interview with the author (January 31, 2002). Gaidar was bitter that Yeltsin did not tell him man-to-man that he would not show up for the Russia’s Choice congress, but delegated the honor to Viktor Ilyushin. Government minister Aleksandr Shokhin and presidential adviser Sergei Stankevich stood with Shakhrai on the list of his Party of Russian Unity and Accord.

  15 Second Gaidar interview. As it was, Russia’s Choice received 16 percent of the votes in the party-list half of the vote, 7 points fewer than Vladimir Zhirinovskii’s LDPR. Shakhrai’s miniparty received 7 percent, which if added to the Russia’s Choice vote, even without assistance from Yeltsin, would have put it into a dead heat with the LDPR.

  16 Author’s first interview with Sergei Filatov (May 25, 2000) and second interview with Aleksandr Yakovlev (March 29, 2004).

  17 Ivan Rybkin, interview with the author (May 29, 2001); first Satarov interview.

  18 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 382.

  19 Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2000).

  20 Yevgenii Savast’yanov, interview with the author (June 9, 2000).

  21 Viktor Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000). As prime instigators, he mentioned the Korzhakov-Soskovets group and Viktor Ilyushin. See also Baturin et al., Epokha, 541.

  22 Oleg Poptsov, Khronika vremën “Tsarya Borisa” (Chronicle of the times of “Tsar Boris”) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1995), 220.

  23 Fifteen percent of citizens polled by VTsIOM in September 1994 said they would vote for Yeltsin if an election were held tomorrow. This number slid to 6 percent in March 1995. A poll by the same organization in October 1994 revealed that a mere 3 percent had complete trust in Yeltsin, which were fewer than trusted six other politicians. Oleg Moroz, 1996: kak Zyuganov ne stal prezidentom (1996: how Zyuganov did not become president) (Moscow: Raduga, 2006), 10–11.

  24 Lee Hockstader, “Yeltsin, Communist Zyuganov Launch Presidential Bids,” The Washington Post, February 16, 1996. The Russian media reported on January 22 that Gaidar was advising Yeltsin not to run at all, saying any Yeltsin candidacy would be “suicidal” and “the best present that could possibly be given to the communists.” Yeltsin wrote him a letter on February 2 asking him to be governed “not by emotions but by the interests of Russia.” Yegor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Days of defeats and victories) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 357–58.

  25 The most thorough tracking polls on degrees of support were done by the VTsIOM organization, but it did none of this kind between April 1994 and March 1996. Not much seems to have changed through the end of 1995, and so we can take the April 1994 results as indicative. They showed a mere 4 percent of citizens unreservedly supporting Yeltsin and 4 percent supporting him “as long as he is leader of the democratic forces.” Thirty-one percent were opposed to him in varying degrees, while a plurality of 42 percent indicated ambivalence. In March 1996 supporters of Yeltsin, by this measure, still came to only 12 percent, with 41 percent opposed and ambivalent citizens coming to 38 percent. Yu, A. Levada et al., Obshchestvennoye mneniye—1999 (Public opinion—1999 edition) (Moscow: Vserossiiskii tsentr izucheniya obshchestvennogo mneniya, 2000), 100–101.

  26 Author’s interviews with family members, which directly and persuasively contradict the assertion in Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 316–17, that the family pushed him to run in order to preserve their style of life. Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 23, notes Naina’s opposition.

  27 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 25.

  28 Mark Urnov, interview with the author (May 26, 2000).

  29 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 24–25.

  30 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 362.

  31 Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 389.

  32 L. N. Dobrokhotov, ed., Ot Yel’tsina k . . . Yel’tsinu: prezidentskaya gonka-96 (From Yeltsin . . . to Yeltsin: the 1996 presidential race) (Moscow: TERRA, 1997), 94.

  33 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 26. In my interview with him (March 31, 2004), Soskovets would say only that he and Yeltsin had several conversations about the succession question. But Korzhakov (interview with the author, January 28, 2002) and Andranik Migranyan (interview, June 8, 2000) explicitly recalled Yeltsin saying in their hearing that he wanted Soskovets to be president after him.

  34 Tat’yana D’yachenko, “Yesli by papa ne stal prezidentom . . . ” (If papa had not become president), Ogonëk, October 23, 2000.

  35 Korzhakov (Boris Yel’tsin, 323) notes that she “did not like Soskovets’s tone.” If she had known more about her father’s work as a party functionary, he claims, she would have known that “Soskovets’s style was close to that of the early Yeltsin.”

  36 Irina Savvateyeva, “Boris Yel’tsin predlozhil rossiiskim bankam sotrudnichestvo” (Boris Yeltsin suggests cooperation with Russia’s banks), Izvestiya, September 1, 1995.

  37 Both Soskovets (interview) and Chubais (second interview with the author, March 30, 2004) stressed the role of Soskovets in getting Yeltsin on board for the law. Potanin (interview with the author, September 25, 2001) said Yeltsin took no interest in the auction process. “[He felt that] this wa
s not the king’s business, it was very dirty stuff. There are dividing some things up over there—so what? I let them go to work, let them figure it out themselves.”

  38 The book contract and sponsorship for the club were first revealed in Korzhakov’s memoirs and were confirmed in broad outline in my interview with Berezovskii (March 8, 2000).

  39 The cars are mentioned in Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin, 284. Some details from an interview with Korzhakov are provided in Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 201. Berezovskii denied having made the gifts in his interview with me. In my second interview with Tatyana (September 11, 2006), she was adamant that she never received them. She purchased a Niva herself in 1992, she said, before ever meeting Berezovskii, and never owned or drove a Blazer.

  40 The other partners in Ogonëk were Oleg Boiko and Aleksandr Smolenskii.

  41 The timing is important here. Some accounts of the meeting date it in February but others in early to late March. The actual time—the week of Shrovetide—is established by the recollection by Smolenskii that they ate a Shrovetide repast, since this was the time of year. Sergei Agafonov, “Maslenitsa 1996 goda” (Shrovetide in 1996), Ogonëk, March 20, 2006. In the Orthodox calendar in 1996, Shrovetide (Maslenitsa, in Russian), the feast before the Lenten fast, went from February 19 to February 25.

  42 Quotation from Yel’tsin, Marafon, 30.

  43 Mikhail Khodorkovskii, interview with the author (June 7, 2001); Agafonov, “Maslenitsa 1996 goda.” There are also good descriptions of the meeting in David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002), 331–33; and Moroz, 1996, 196–97, which corrects Hoffman on some details but gets the timing wrong.

  44 Berezovskii had made Naina Yeltsina’s acquaintance in 1993 when a mutual friend asked him to host a benefit reception for a childcare center Yeltsina patronized ; Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007). In an interview with David Hoffman in 2000 (Oligarchs, 333), Berezovskii said he approached Mrs. Yeltsin with a request for help to speak to Yeltsin privately after the Kremlin meeting. He reminded Yeltsin of the request and they met for several minutes.

  45 Some of them, desiring to inflate their influence, were to claim later that it did. Berezovskii, for example, told Hoffman (Oligarchs, 333) that Yeltsin reorganized his campaign headquarters “the very next day.” This is rubbish. The reorganization occurred on March 19, almost a month later.

  46 Baturin et al., Epokha, 555–56.

  47 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 170.

  48 It had been in the making for some time. Soskovets told an American campaign consultant on February 27 that one of his tasks would be to advise “whether we should call it [the election] off if you determine that we’re going to lose.” Michael Kramer, “Rescuing Boris,” Time, July 15, 1996. Nikolai Yegorov, the chief of Yeltsin’s executive office and an ally of Korzhakov and Soskovets, broached the possibility of postponing the election with governors in a provincial tour in early March, and prevailed on one of them to write to the chairman of the Federation Council in support of the idea. See Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 181–82. The fear that Yeltsin would die in a hard-fought campaign played into the calculations of the Kremlin conservatives. If Soskovets were already prime minister, he would have become acting president and presumably would have an excellent chance of winning an election. Chernomyrdin would have that advantage if Yeltsin died while Chernomyrdin was still premier.

  49 Baturin et al., Epokha, 562.

  50 Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 396–402; Sergei Shakhrai, third interview with the author (June 1, 2001).

  51 Talbott, Russia Hand, 195; James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2003), 153.

  52 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 33; D’yachenko, “Yesli by papa”; Anatolii Chubais, first interview with the author (January 18, 2001). Yeltsin describes the meeting as Tatyana’s idea. But Chubais revealed that the idea was his and that he prevailed upon her to get Yeltsin to agree. Yeltsin dates the key meetings on March 23. There is good evidence in other sources that they were held on March 18.

  53 Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 402. Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 513, write of the incident: “Contrary to all the wishful thinking in the West about Russian democracy, ‘Tsar Boris’ had no qualms about throwing the constitution out the window.” But he did have such qualms, and he did act on them.

  54 Aleksandr Oslon, interview with the author (January 25, 2001). Tatyana’s older sister, Yelena Okulova, played a minor advisory role in helping to arrange Naina Yeltsina’s campaign schedule.

  55 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 361–69. According to Korzhakov, Chernomyrdin offered to take up the suggestion with Yeltsin; there is no record of him having done so. Korzhakov says that without Chernomyrdin’s permission he taped the conversation, which lasted from seven P.M. until almost two A.M., and that the quotations are “almost verbatim” from the transcript.

  56 Second Yeltsina interview.

  57 David Hoffman, “Yeltsin Vows No Delays in Election,” The Washington Post, May 7, 1996. Korzhakov gave the interview to the British newspaper The Observer. It quickly circulated in Russia.

  58 Oslon interview.

  59 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 165–69.

  60 An eleventh candidate, Aman-Geldy Tuleyev, the governor of Kemerovo province in west Siberia, withdrew on June 5 and threw his support to Zyuganov.

  61 Lebed had climbed in the Russian polls shortly after retiring from the army in May 1995. He ran for the Duma in December 1995 on the list of the Congress of Russian Communities, a nationalist organization formed by Yurii Skokov, and was elected in a district in Tula province.

  62 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 363.

  63 McFaul, Russia’s 1996 Presidential Election, 25–26, 109; Baturin et al., Epokha, 571.

  64 Grigorii Yavlinskii, second interview with the author (September 28, 2001). Yavlinskii’s demands were contained in a letter to Yeltsin published in Izvestiya and Nezavisimaya gazeta on May 18. Korzhakov told Chernomyrdin in mid-April of a conversation Yavlinskii had a few days before with the former vice president of the United States, Dan Quayle—a conversation we must assumed was taped by officers of Korzhakov’s guard unit. Yavlinskii is said to have remarked that Zyuganov was his enemy while Yeltsin was a relative, “But you will understand that sometimes a relative is worse than any enemy.” Quayle is said to have answered, “I understand.” Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 366–67.

  65 The Korzhakov-Soskovets group also put an oar in. According to Korzhakov (Boris Yel’tsin, 364), Nikolai Yegorov summoned governors to his office in Moscow and “battled in the localities” with holdouts.

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

  67 Sara Oates and Laura Roselle, “Russian Elections and TV News: Comparison of Campaign News on State-Controlled and Commercial Television Channels,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 5 (Spring 2000), 40–41. Korzhakov and his Presidential Security Service complained throughout the campaign that NTV was continuing to criticize the Chechen war, and implicitly Yeltsin’s leadership of it, and to refer to Korzhakov and his group as “the party of war.” See Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata; poslesloviye (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk; epilogue) (Moscow: Detektiv-press, 2004), 420–21.

  68 Our Home Is Russia got 18 percent of the mentions on the ORT nightly news (Oates and Roselle, “Russian Elections and TV News,” 38) but only 10 percent of the popular vote. The KPRF got 13 percent of the mentions and 23 percent of the votes. Russia’s Democratic Choice, the liberal party headed by Gaidar, got 12 percent of the mentions and 4 percent of the popular vote.

  69 Timothy J. Colton, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them
in the New Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 61.

  70 FOM (Fond “Obshchestvennoye mneniye”), Rezul’taty sotsiologicheskikh issledovanii (Results of sociological research), June 13, 1996, 1. The complete run of this in-house bulletin of Aleksandr Oslon’s Public Opinion Foundation was supplied to the author by Oslon.

  71 See Ellen Mickiewiecz, Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 178–84. Even on NTV, though, news anchors opined in the final weeks of the first-round campaign, and reporters subjected Zyuganov’s promises and claims to searching questioning while largely sparing Yeltsin.

  72 FOM, Rezul’taty, June 19, 1996, 1. Surveys by the VTsIOM group show a similar trend. See Stephen White, Richard Rose, and Ian McAllister, How Russia Votes (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1997), 258. VTsIOM data show Yeltsin fifth among intended voters in the second half of January, behind Zyuganov, Lebed, Yavlinskii, and Zhirinovskii.

  73 Yeltsin led Zyuganov among individuals thirty-five and younger from the beginning; he overtook Zyuganov among persons aged thirty-six to forty-five on April 21, among those forty-six to fifty-five on May 18, and among those older than fifty-five on June 1. He surpassed Zyuganov in March in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in early April in cities of over 1 million in population, in mid-May in other cities and towns, and in the villages of Russia in the first half of June. He won majority support among men and women at about the same time. Poorly educated and low-paid Russians rallied to Yeltsin, and by a narrow margin, only in June; those with a college-level diploma and higher incomes were on his side from the start. FOM, Rezul’taty, June 19, 1996, 1–3.

  74 Talbott, Russia Hand, 161–62; Goldgeier and McFaul, Power and Purpose, 196–97. The request had been made by Russian diplomats before Yeltsin discussed it with Clinton in May 1995. Yeltsin first tried to sell Clinton on a delay until after the two of them left office at the end of the decade.