Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  75 Mikhail Rostovskii, “Mutatsiya klana” (Mutation of the clan), Moskovskii komsomolets, December 3, 2002 (citing a conversation with Korzhakov).

  76 Talbott, Russia Hand, 202, 204. Clinton was furious when Yeltsin lectured him in front of the press for the excesses of American foreign policy and Yeltsin left the room before Clinton could reply.

  77 Alan Friedman, “James D. Wolfensohn: World Bank and Russian Reform,” International Herald Tribune, May 27, 1996.

  78 Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 407.

  79 Baturin et al., Epokha, 658.

  80 The revelations about the assassination threat and the white lie to his wife are in “Boris Nemtsov—Yevgenii Al’bats o Yel’tsine” (Boris Nemtsov to Yevgeniya Al’bats about Yeltsin), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007.

  81 FOM, Rezul’taty, June 5, 1996, 3. Earlier polls had shown that Chechnya was the single biggest strike against Yeltsin in public opinion and that 70 percent of citizens favored either a pullout or a cessation of hostilities without a pullout.

  82 Ibid., April 22, 1996, 2.

  83 Ibid., May 10, 1996, 2 (italics added). The bifurcation or polarization gambit is well drawn in McFaul, Russia’s 1996 Presidential Election; and Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), chap. 13.

  84 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 234–38.

  85 Alessandra Stanley, “With Campaign Staff in Disarray, Yeltsin Depends on Perks of Office,” New York Times, May 13, 1996. Stanley wrote in another story (“A Media Campaign Most Russian and Most Unreal,” ibid., June 2, 1996) that the “indirection and goosebumpy emotional tug” of the ads recall General Electric advertising in the United States (“We bring good things to life”). Among the foreign consultants were Sir Tim Bell of the British firm Bell Pottinger (once a counselor to Margaret Thatcher), several media advisers to California governor Pete Wilson, and Richard Dresner, a former business partner of Dick Morris. See Kramer, “Rescuing Boris”; Sarah E. Mendelson, “Democracy Assistance and Political Transition in Russia,” International Security 25 (Spring 2001), 93–94; and Gerry Sussman, Global Electioneering: Campaign Consulting, Communications, and Corporate Financing (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 139–40.

  86 Source: the survey data used in the writing of Colton, Transitional Citizens.

  87 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 35. See Timothy J. Colton, “The Leadership Factor in the Russian Presidential Election of 1996,” in Anthony King, ed., Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 184–209.

  88 In the survey (as detailed in Colton, Transitional Citizens), 2,456 Russians were interviewed in the weeks after the election runoff and were asked to rate Yeltsin and four of his defeated rivals as possessing or not possessing the five praiseworthy traits. Sixty-four percent reckoned Yeltsin to be intelligent and knowledgeable, 55 percent thought him to have a vision of the future, 45 percent deemed him strong, and 39 percent saw him as decent and trustworthy. Only 28 percent felt he really cared about people, dwarfed by the 63 percent who rejected this statement. Of respondents who thought the Russian economy was in good shape, 75 percent said Yeltsin cared about people like them; among those who thought the economy to be in bad or very bad shape, only 22 percent agreed. Among persons whose family finances had improved in the past year, 58 percent perceived the president as empathetic; that figure was down to 17 percent in the much larger group whose finances had deteriorated.

  89 Daniel Treisman, “Why Yeltsin Won,” Foreign Affairs 75 (September–October 1996), 67. This article is the best analysis of what Treisman calls the Tammany Hall dimension of the campaign. As Treisman points out, the distribution of benefits preceded the main media campaign, which began only when Yeltsin had already drawn even with Zyuganov in the polls.

  90 Baturin et al., Epokha, 569.

  91 The regiment’s “elite soldiers, selected for their Slavic blond looks and sixfoot stature, were refitted with pre-revolutionary dress uniforms. Heavy on gold braid and peacock colors, the uniforms were designed by the Bolshoi Theater’s costume designers and are meant to evoke the martial splendor of imperial Russia.” Alessandra Stanley, “Stripped of Themes, Yeltsin Wraps Himself in Flag,” New York Times, April 19, 1996.

  92 Malashenko interview. The visit was to the Annin Flag Company in Roseland, New Jersey, on September 19, 1988. Malashenko related it to me as having been made by Ronald Reagan, but it hardly matters which U.S. politician he ascribed the scene to in his conversation with Yeltsin.

  93 Ibid.

  94 Medvedev interview.

  95 Lee Hockstader, “Invigorated Yeltsin Hits Hustings,” The Washington Post, June 1, 1996. The Yeltsin twist can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d90JtMP2J0Y.

  96 Medvedev interview.

  97 Alessandra Stanley, “Spendthrift Candidate Yeltsin: Miles to Go, Promises to Keep?” New York Times, May 4, 1996.

  98 Quoted in Treisman, “Why Yeltsin Won,” 70.

  99 In RFE/RL Newsline, May 27, 1996.

  100 The quite unbelievable scene with Denisyuk is captured in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 2. Yeltsin listens to her request and says, “OK, I will give you a car” (Ladno, podaryu mashinu). He kisses her on both cheeks and assures her that documentation will arrive with the machine. The car came through, and Denisyuk never complained.

  101 Baturin et al., Epokha, 462.

  102 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 296.

  103 Ibid., 489.

  104 “Yeltsin’s earlier television spots were largely upbeat testimonials from average citizens, but those aired today were some of the harshest blasts of the campaign. The ads begin with short statements from Russian men and women saying they do not want to go back to communism; then the announcer, harking back to the Bolshevik Revolution, intones: ‘No one in 1917 thought there could be famine.’ Grainy black-and-white film shows starving children from Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture, which killed millions. Also pictured are Russians of the late 1970s lining up at stores whose shelves are empty. The tagline for this and other ads is: ‘And the communists didn’t even change their name. They won’t change their methods.’” David Hoffman, “Yeltsin, Communist Foe Launch TV Attack Ads,” The Washington Post, June 27, 1996.

  105 In the transcript of an intercepted telephone conversation with her husband the morning of June 20, Tatyana is quoted as saying Russians had formed the impression that “these people [Korzhakov and his confrères] are governing the country and not he [Yeltsin].” A bit later, she converses with her mother about the president’s options and Naina Yeltsina warns, incorrectly, that Yeltsin would never remove Korzhakov. Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), 392, 394.

  106 Malashenko interview.

  107 Yeltsin himself described the scene in Marafon, 45.

  108 Moroz, 1996, 459–60.

  109 Statistical details here taken from the survey data used in Colton, Transitional Citizens. The big change after June 16 was the shift of Lebed voters toward Yeltsin. Oslon’s polls as late as the first week of June showed only 27 percent of Lebed supporters intending to support the president in a second round. FOM, Rezul’taty, June 13, 1996, 1.

  110 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 48.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1 Korzhakov in his memoirs counts the June 26 attack as Yeltsin’s fifth, but this includes September 29–30, 1994, when Yeltsin was a no-show for the meeting with Albert Reynolds in Ireland. Most of the medical experts do not classify that event as a full-flown myocardial infarction. Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), 405–6, gets to five by counting the incident in Kaliningrad on June 23 as a separate heart attack. The physician Vladlen Vtorushin is cited as the source of this information.


  2 The text of the letter is in Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 451 (italics added). Yeltsin reproduced it in Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 49, saying that Korzhakov “did not conceal” the content of the letter but several times told Tatyana Dyachenko “that if something happened to me she would be guilty.”

  3 Author’s interviews with El’dar Ryazanov (May 30, 2001) and Irena Lesnevskaya (January 24, 2001).

  4 The chain was instituted in 1994 but Yeltsin’s decree specifying its use in the inauguration came out only on August 5, 1996. It consists of a Greek cross, seventeen smaller medals, and links of gold, silver, and white enamel.

  5 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 575. Yeltsin wrote later (Marafon, 50), “Never in my life had I been so tense” as on August 9.

  6 Yeltsin had offered the job to Igor Malashenko of NTV, who pleaded personal circumstances. But it would appear that he made the suggestion first to Chubais and returned to him after Malashenko’s refusal.

  7 Ye, I. Chazov, Rok (Fate) (Moscow: Geotar-Med, 2001), 259.

  8 Author’s interviews with Sergei Parkhomenko (March 26, 2004) and Viktor Chernomyrdin (September 15, 2000). The article appeared in the Itogi of September 10, 1996. It was reported in the press that Chernomyrdin had a bypass operation in 1992, but in fact the procedure he had was an angioplasty.

  9 Renat Akchurin, quoted in “Postskriptum” (Postscript), Izvestiya, April 28, 2007.

  10 “Ekslyuzivnoye interv’yu Prezidenta Rossii zhurnalu ‘Itogi’” (Exclusive interview of the president of Russia with the magazine Itogi), Itogi, September 10, 1996.

  11 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 53.

  12 Lawrence K. Altman, “In Moscow in 1996, a Doctor’s Visit Changed History,” New York Times, May 1, 2007. Citing an interview with DeBakey after Yeltsin’s death the previous week, Altman claims that “his Russian doctors said he could not survive such surgery.” But the fullest Russian account, by Chazov, says the Russians had already decided that the bypass was necessary and survivable and that they wanted DeBakey for psychological and strategic support. “And that is what happened. Yeltsin confirmed for himself the correctness of his decision, his family calmed down, and the press and television redirected themselves to DeBakey, leaving us finally in peace.” Chazov, Rok, 262.

  13 Yeltsin had communicated his intent to do the temporary transfer in a decree dated September 19. Chernomyrdin took his provisional duties to heart: “He called military specialists in and acquainted himself in detail with the automated system for controlling [Russia’s] strategic nuclear forces.” Baturin et al., Epokha, 725.

  14 See on this point Chazov, Rok, 271.

  15 Akchurin in “Postskriptum.”

  16 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 57.

  17 Interviews with family members. Khrushchev put up Vice President Richard Nixon at Novo-Ogarëvo in 1959, since at Gorki-9 “it was not possible to provide the conveniences to which guests were accustomed. For example, there was only one toilet for everyone, located at the end of the [first-floor] hall. The bath was there, too. By American standards, only people in the slums lived in such conditions.” Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, trans. Shirley Benson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 352.

  18 See Sergei Khrushchev, Pensioner soyuznogo znacheniya (Pensioner of USSR rank) (Moscow: Novosti, 1991), 69–71.

  19 Anatolii Chubais, first interview with the author (January 18, 2001).

  20 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 58.

  21 Madeleine Albright, with Bill Woodward, Madam Secretary (New York: Miramax, 2003), 253–54.

  22 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 246.

  23 In the VTsIOM tracking poll in April 1997, 3 percent of the electorate gave Yeltsin unqualified support, 7 percent gave him qualified support, 41 percent were opposed to him in one degree or another, and 39 percent were ambivalent. Yu, A. Levada et al., Obshchestvennoye mneniye—1999 (Public opinion—1999 edition) (Moscow: Vserossiiskii tsentr izucheniya obshchestvennogo mneniya, 2000), 100–101.

  24 Korzhakov has said (interview with the author, January 28, 2002) that he was offered $5 million to cancel publication of the book. He thinks the source of the money was a businessman out to protect Yeltsin’s interests. I have no corroboration of this claim.

  25 Yurii Mukhin, Kod Yel’tsina (The Yeltsin code) (Moscow: Yauza, 2005). Like Salii in 1997, Mukhin, a Stalinist and anti-Semite, placed great stock in photographs of hands and other body parts. He has not commented on whether the death and state funeral of the real Yeltsin in 2007 led him to revise his interpretation. One of his other contributions as an analyst is work disclaiming Soviet responsibility for the 1940 massacre of Polish officers at Katyn. A competing version of the trashy tale holds that Yeltsin was an invalid from 1996 until August 6 or 7, 1999, when he died, and that three ringers, controlled by the Yeltsin family and not the CIA, filled in for him before and after his death. “Kozly i molodil’nyye yabloki” (Goats and green apples), http://www.duel.ru/200231/?31_1_3.

  26 See Vladimir Shevchenko, Povsednevnaya zhizn’ Kremlya pri prezidentakh (The everyday life of the Kremlin under the presidents) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2004), 106, 138.

  27 Yeltsin’s office told reporters he played tennis for about ten minutes on July 11, 1997, at Shuiskaya Chupa. That seems to have been the last time.

  28 Yelena Tregubova, Baiki kremlëvskogo diggera (Tales of a Kremlin digger) (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2003), 53. Yeltsin in Stockholm was tired after a trip to Beijing. He advised the Swedes to wean themselves from coal and sign a contract with Russia for natural gas deliveries, apparently thinking back to background notes for the China visit. Sweden burns almost no coal; half of its power needs are met by atomic reactors and one-third by hydroelectric stations.

  29 For a full early report, see Nikolai Andreyev, “Prezident Rossii postoyanen v svoyei nepredskazuyemosti” (The president of Russia is constant in his unpredictability), Izvestiya, May 6, 1992. Compare with Jacob Weisberg, “The Complete Bushisms,” www.slate.com/id/76886.

  30 See Tregubova, Baiki kremlëvskogo diggera, 117.

  31 Yelena Dikun, “Yel’tsin v Gorkakh” (Yeltsin in Gorki), Obshchaya gazeta, April 2, 1998. Kukly, the satire program on the NTV television network, had broadcast a cruel skit comparing Yeltsin to the immobilized Lenin in January 1997.

  32 Of recent presidents, Jimmy Carter took the fewest vacation days, seventynine over four years. Bill Clinton took 152 over eight years.

  33 Anatolii Kulikov, who replaced Viktor Yerin as interior minister in 1995, says that after his operation Yeltsin misaddressed some hand-written notes. “My accurate and delicate attempts to correct the president were not well taken,” writes Kulikov. “He would look at me and continue to write.” Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 416–17. But most former high officials whom I interviewed, including four second-term prime ministers (Chernomyrdin, Kiriyenko, Primakov, and Stepashin), emphasized his mental acuity and exceptional memory. Primakov and Stepashin, whose tenure was in the second half of term two, also emphasized the limits on his energy. Both felt he was at his full powers for two to three hours per workday. But neither, of course, knew this from direct experience, and family members insist that days this short were the exception rather than the rule.

  34 Sergei Stepashin, interview with the author (June 14, 2001).

  35 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 350.

  36 Tatyana Yumasheva, third interview with the author (January 25, 2007). The dilution of the wine was done with Yeltsin’s consent. Aleksandr Korzhakov claims that in 1995 he had kitchen staff secretly water down some bottles of vodka to half strength, and that Yeltsin fired several of them for the ruse. Korzhakov, Boris
Yel’tsin, 303–5.

  37 Chazov asserts that Yeltsin violated the restrictions less than a year after his operation, but that in the late 1990s “he finally came to observe the regime and recommendations of the doctors.” Chazov, Rok, 277. When Yeltsin met with Bill Clinton in Helsinki in March 1997, he was distracted the first evening and consumed a number of glasses of wine; come morning, he “had regained his color and vigor” and seized the initiative in negotiations. At their next meeting, in Birmingham in May 1998, Yeltsin gave, “in both senses of the word, his most sober performance to date.” Talbott, Russia Hand, 237–38, 269. Talbott records no drinking on Yeltsin’s part after Helsinki, and even there the amount was hardly huge and some of it may have come in the form of adulterated wine.

  38 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 350.

  39 Third Yumasheva interview.

  40 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 82.

  41 Vladimir Potanin, interview with the author (September 25, 2001).

  42 Those adjustments rarely included strikes or other collective action, mostly because ordinary people could not sort out which culprits to blame for their troubles. See Debra Javeline, Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). See also Padma Desai and Todd Idson, Work without Wages: Russia’s Nonpayment Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).

  43 Kulikov made his allegations about the Russian Legion in a press conference on October 16. There are more details in Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 469–75. Chubais took the charges seriously and was taken by Lebed’s statement to the media that he expected to be president of Russia before 2000, the year the second Yeltsin term was to expire. He communicated his views to Yeltsin by memorandum, since the president did not feel well enough to meet with him. First Chubais interview.