Yeltsin
Page 83
84 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 312, 315. Yeltsin mentioned in that account not revealing his plan to Putin. Tatyana Yumasheva (Dyachenko) told me explicitly in our third interview that her father did not ask her opinion on the selection of Putin.
85 Sergei Stepashin, interview with the author (June 14, 2001).
86 Fifth Yumashev interview.
87 A number of accounts of Yeltsin’s last months in power, citing no sources, mention Berezovskii as giving Putin a helping hand. But a journalist who spoke with Berezovskii in British exile in 2002 reports him as being a detractor of Putin even then: “Berezovsky said he first began to have his doubts about Putin in 1999, when the little-known FSB director was promoted by Yeltsin to prime minister.” John Daniszewski, “Former Russian Rainmaker Tries Role of Dissident,” Los Angeles Times, March 3, 2002.
88 Decree No. 1763, on provisions for retired presidents, was Putin’s second as acting president. It provided for retirement pay, security, healthcare, transportation, a state dacha, and other services for all former presidents; one article gave an ex-president lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution and administrative discipline. There was no mention of family members. It was dated December 31 and published on January 5, 2000. Drafts of some parts had been prepared earlier by lawyers in the Kremlin administration, the guards service, and elsewhere. “Naturally, [Yeltsin] and Putin never discussed this question in their meetings before the president’s retirement. Boris Nikolayevich would have considered this improper. As far as I know, they never discussed it after his retirement. . . . [Yeltsin considered himself] completely above all this.” Valentin Yumashev, personal communication to the author (October 30, 2007). The Putin decree lost effect when it was replaced by a federal statute in February 2001.
89 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 254 (italics added). Earlier in the memoir (79), Yeltsin writes of thinking that the generals and security officials with whom he had contact in the first half of the 1990s were inadequate. “I waited for a new general to appear, unlike any other general, or rather one who was like the generals I read about in books when I was young. . . . Time passed, and such a general appeared . . . Vladimir Putin.”
90 The plotters were associated with Lev Rokhlin, a retired general and Duma member who was murdered, evidently by his wife, in early July. Rumors of a conspiracy in the Moscow Military District circulated at the time and were confirmed in my fifth interview with Valentin Yumashev.
91 Fifty-two KPRF deputies voted against Putin but thirty-two voted for him. If seven of those thirty-two had voted against, the nomination would have failed.
92 Ot pervogo litsa: razgovory s Vladimirom Putinym (From the first person: conversations with Vladimir Putin) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 131.
93 “Prezident Rossii Boris Yel’tsin: Rossiya vstupayet v novyi politcheskii etap” (The president of Russia Boris Yeltsin: Russia is entering into a new political phase), Rossiiskaya gazeta, August 10, 1999.
94 Ot pervogo litsa, 133, 135.
95 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 367.
96 See Timothy J. Colton and Michael McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2003), 173.
97 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 387–88.
98 See ibid., 9–21, and Ot pervogo litsa, 185–86. Putin’s impression that Yeltsin would not be departing until the spring (conveyed to Dyachenko and Yumashev in a conversation after December 14) is referred to in the communication from Yumashev. Yeltsin met with Putin a second time, on December 29, to discuss a year-end departure.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 397.
2 Michael Wines, “Putin Is Made Russia’s President in First Free Transfer of Power,” New York Times, May 8, 2000.
3 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya khotel, chtoby lyudi byli svobodny” (Boris Yeltsin: I wanted people to be free), Izvestiya, February 1, 2006.
4 Comment about the pneumonia in 2001 from Naina Yeltsin, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007).
5 He proudly told a journalist a year after resigning that he was getting up these days at four A.M. “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ni o chëm ne zhaleyu” (Boris Yeltsin: I am not complaining about anything), Komsomol’skaya Pravda, December 8, 2000. In later interviews, he gave the time as five or six.
6 The net worth of Deripaska, born in 1968, was estimated at $13.3 billion in 2007, putting him fortieth on Forbes magazine’s annual world list of wealthy individuals and fifth in Russia. His United Company Rusal is the largest producer of aluminum in the world.
7 A fourth great-grandson was born two months after Yeltsin’s death in 2007. Two of the boys were born to Yelena’s daughter Yekaterina and two to Yelena’s daughter Mariya.
8 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002). Naina Yeltsina took me through the library during our second interview. It held five or six thousand volumes at the time, and at least that many older books were stored in the Yeltsins’ Moscow apartment.
9 “Russian Tennis Remembers Yeltsin,” http://leblogfoot.eurosport.fr/tennis/davis-cup/2007/sport_sto1160667.shtml. Yeltsin first displayed his barrier-leaping technique at the Kremlin Cup tournament in Moscow in October 2003. He rushed out onto the court and embraced Anastasia Myskina, who won the women’s single title, with parental pride.
10 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 405–6.
11 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ni o chëm ne zhaleyu.”
12 Among the foundation’s other projects have been help for a Russian-language university in Kyrgyzstan, musical training in orphanages, a pianists’ contest in Siberia, a nursing home for army veterans, a clinic for juvenile cancer patients, small war memorials, a film series on “Freedom in Russia,” and construction of a tennis and sports complex in Yekaterinburg.
13 Kirill Dybskii, “Ot pervogo litsa: vsë pravil’no” (From the first person: everything is fine), Itogi, January 30, 2006.
14 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ni o chëm ne zhaleyu” (italics added).
15 Ibid.
16 The new lyrics were written by Sergei Mikhal’kov, now eighty-seven, the author of children’s books who wrote the original words for the Soviet anthem in 1944. Successive pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian anthems can be downloaded from http://www.hymn.ru/index-en.html.
17 Mikhail Kasyanov (born in 1957), Putin’s prime minister from 2000 to 2004, had been Yeltsin’s last finance minister in 1999. Aleksei Kudrin, the new minister of finance (born 1960), was first deputy minister from 1997 to 1999. The minister of industry and trade, German Gref (born 1964), was first deputy minister of state property from 1998 to 2000.
18 The phrase “restrained support” is from “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ni o chëm ne zhaleyu” and was specifically applied to changes in the federal system. Yeltsin in that interview (December 2000) expressed no reservations about the move against Berezovskii, who he said “did more harm than good.” He did not comment on Gusinskii, who had spent several days in jail in May 2000.
19 Yeltsin’s rethinking of the first war is apparent in Dybskii, “Ot pervogo litsa.” Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, who negotiated the 1996 cease-fire with Yeltsin and was then acting president of Chechnya, went into exile during the second war and was assassinated by Russian agents in Qatar in 2004. Federal forces killed Aslan Maskhadov, who signed the 1997 peace treaty and was president of the republic until the second Russian invasion, in Chechnya in 2005. Shamil Basayev, the organizer of the 1995 raid on Budënnovsk and the 1999 incursion into Dagestan, was killed in 2006.
20 These actions are well analyzed in Andrew Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2008).
21 “Gusinsky’s cynical brilliance throughout the campaign against him was to cloak his commercial interests and political ambitious in the language of freedom of speech.” Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia, 155. Berezovskii was less cynical, and had always tr
eated ORT as a source of influence, not a money maker.
22 Boris Nemtsov, third interview with the author (April 12, 2002). Instead of Yeltsin, Yevgenii Primakov headed up the new board. The station was soon converted into a sports channel and went off the air in 2003.
23 Yegor Gaidar, “On ne khotel nasiliya, no tol’ko on ne byl slabakom” (He did not want to use force, but he was no weakling, either), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007.
24 Details of the interaction from interviews with family members.
25 Author’s conversation with Putin on the sidelines of the Valdai Discussion Club, Bocharov Ruchei residence, Sochi, September 14, 2007.
26 Dybskii, “Ot pervogo litsa.”
27 Andrei Kolesnikov, “Boris Yel’tsin poproshchalsya so svoyei epokhoi” (Boris Yeltsin said good-bye to his epoch), Kommersant-Daily, February 6, 2006.
28 “A Conversation with Billy Graham,” http://www/midtod.com/9612/billygraham.phtml.
29 Father Georgii Sudenov in “Ushël Boris Yel’tsin” (Boris Yeltsin has departed), Izvestiya, April 24, 2007. Sudenov, the deacon of the church in the Moscow suburb of Troparëvo, was sometimes invited to dine with the Yeltsins. Before eating, he always said grace and Yeltsin joined him in singing the Slavic hymn “Mnogaya leta” (Many years).
30 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya khotel, chtoby lyudi byli svobodny.”
31 Second Yeltsina interview.
32 Aleksandr Gamov, “Utraty” (Losses), Komsomol’skaya pravda, April 25, 2007.
33 Second Yeltsina interview.
34 Andrei Kolesnikov, “Poslednii put’ pervogo prezidenta” (The first president’s last road), Kommersant-Daily, April 26, 2007. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were both at Putin’s first inauguration and a few other ceremonial events but studiously avoided one another. Another notable attendee at the funeral was Aleksandr Rutskoi, the vice president Yeltsin put in jail during the constitutional conflict of 1993. Ruslan Khasbulatov, Rutskoi’s ally against Yeltsin, skipped the funeral, as did Aleksandr Korzhakov.
35 The press reported as fact or rumor that Naina’s handkerchief contained an icon or a cross. One journalist claimed that the crucifix from Yeltsin’s christening in 1931 had been saved all these years and was buried with him. These stories were all untrue.
CODA
1 Mikhail Gorbachev, who attended the funeral, took a moderate but still critical position when he said in a statement that Yeltsin would be remembered for his “tragic fate” and misguided policies. He softened his response in a press interview in which he noted that he and Yeltsin had both set out to improve life for the people.
2 Quoted at http://gazeta.ru/politics/yeltsin/1614107.shtml.
3 Quoted in Yekaterina Grigor’eva and Vladimir Perekrest, “Provodili po-khristianski” (He was given a Christian sendoff), Izvestiya, April 26, 2007.
4 Viktor Shenderovich, “Yel’tsin,” at http://www.shender.ru/paper/text/?file=154.
5 Commencement address at Washington University, St. Louis, May 19, 2006, at http://www.olin.wustl.edu/discovery/feature.cfm?sid=668&i=30&pg=8.
6 “Boris Yeltsin and His Role in Russian History,” at http://bd.english.fom.ru/report/map/dominant/edomt0718_2/ed071820.
7 The latest survey for which data are available was done by the Public Opinion Foundation in February 2006. The question was whether Gorbachev had done more good or more harm to the nation, and a middle category, for good and harm in equal measure, was available. Eleven percent of Russians thought Gorbachev had done more good than harm, 23 percent that he had done them in equal measure, 52 percent that he had done more harm than good, and 14 percent found it hard to answer. “Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the USSR,” at http://bd.english.fom.ru/report/cat/societas/rus_im/rus_history/gorbachev_m_s_/etb060812.
8 Sidney Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (New York: Humanities Press, 1943), 156–57. The Russian Lenin was the only one of Hook’s examples about whom he wrote an entire chapter. The prevalent image in many recent studies of social and political change is that of “path dependency,” whereby positive reinforcement, short time horizons, and inertia keep things on the same track over extended periods of time. See in particular Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 1. Before a path can be established, however, it has been pointed out that relatively small factors, such as choices by leaders or bargains struck among different groups, may push things down one of several competing paths, so that the pattern is one of “periods of relative (but not total) openness, followed by periods of relative (but not total or permanent) stability.” Ibid., 53. Yeltsin made his mark in a period of relative openness in which Hook’s metaphor of a fork in the road holds up well.
9 Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: Norton, 1969), 113, 402.
10 Gorbachev, of course, addressed these same issues in his own way, and, unlike Yeltsin, he also made conceptual breakthroughs on issues of war and peace. But Gorbachev’s reassessments on domestic issues were less thorough than Yeltsin’s, which explains why, in the radical climate of the times, Yeltsin consistently outbid him.
11 Isaiah Berlin, “On Political Judgment,” New York Review of Books, October 3, 1996, 26–30.
12 Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Knopf, 2002), xx.
13 Sergei Stankevich, interview with the author (May 29, 2001). Stankevich by the time of the interview had no use for Yeltsin and could not be suspected of bias in his favor.
14 Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 410 (italics added).
15 The significance of negative as well as positive choices is clearly drawn in Richard J. Samuels, Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 19.
16 Martin Gilman, “Becoming a Motor of the Global Economy,” Moscow Times, November 14, 2007.
17 Quotations from Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13 (January 2002), 10, 12. Carothers was writing generally of countries that have lost their way in the transition, and not specifically about Russia.
18 Even Putin’s treatment of lower-level officials brings to mind Yeltsin’s early reputation as boss for the bosses. One observer has called him “the people’s czar who reins in ministers, bureaucrats, tycoons, and even the politicians of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party.” Peter Finn, “In a Russian City, Clues to Putin’s Abiding Appeal,” The Washington Post, November 24, 2007.
19 Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), xi.
20 Henry Yasas, quoted in Tatyana Gershkovich, “Remembering Yeltsin,” Moscow Times, September 14, 2007. Some pictures are available at http://www.art4.ru/ru/news/news_detail.php?ID=2994&block_id=28.
21 Gershkovich, “Remembering Yeltsin.” Kavarga’s own description of the work in materials distributed at the gallery places more emphasis on the chaos depicted, “without which an absolutely new creation would be impossible.” Yeltsin’s name, he said, should be read as “fixing in memory either the formation or the crushing of our latest illusion.”
22 Gukova’s description from the exhibit.
23 Description at the exhibit by Tavasiyev.
24 Description at the exhibit by Leikin and Miturich-Khlebnikova.
Index
Abramovich, Roman
Achalov, Vladislav
Aeroflot
Afanas’ev, Viktor
Afanas’ev, Yurii
Against the Grain. See Confession on an Assigned Theme
Ageyev, Gelii
Agrarian Party
agricultural collectivization
Yeltsin’s critique of
Akayev, Askar
Akchurin, Renat
Aksënenko, Nikolai
Albright, Madeline
Alekperov, Vagit
Aleksi
i II (Orthodox patriarch)
on Yeltsin as believer
Alma-Ata accord
Amiel, Barbara
Andreas, Dwayne
Andropov, Yurii
and planned transfer of Yeltsin to Moscow
anti-Semitism
Arbatov, Georgii
Arkhangel’skoye-2
army
attempted reform of
disarray of
impeachment charge over
arrears. See nonpayments
Atatürk, Kemal
Avakov, A. V.
Aviastroi
Ayatskov, Dmitrii
Badge of Honor
Bakatin, Vadim
Baker, James A.
Baklanov, Oleg
Baltym
Barannikov, Viktor
Barsukov, Mikhail
Barvikha
Basayev, Shamil
Bashilov, Sergei
Bashkirs
Bashkortostan (Bashkiriya)
Basilashvili, Oleg
Basmanovo
Batalin, Yurii
Baturin, Yurii
Bayev, Vyacheslav
Belarus (Belorussia)
proposed union of Russia with
Belovezh’e Forest accord
impeachment charge over
renounced by State Duma
Belyakov, Yurii
Belyakovka River
Beregovaya
Berezniki Potash Combine
Berezniki
Yeltsin family in
Yeltsin family’s move to
Berezovskii, Boris
exile of
and 1996 election campaign
political influence of
Berlin, Yeltsin drinking incident in
Berlin, Isaiah
Bezrukov, Sergei
Bichukov, Anatolii
biography, neglect of in Russia
Black Tuesday
Bobykin, Leonid
Bocharov Ruchei. See Sochi
Bocharov, Mikhail
Bogdanov, Vladimir
Bogomyakov, Gennadii