Yeltsin’s tennis teacher and friend until 1996, Shamil Tarpishchev, recalls that on the court his understudy “rallied his nervous system” and went all-out only at the breakpoint in a game, when the server risks losing his serve and the opposing player or team stands to go back on offense. “He was the same in politics,” Tarpishchev notes. “The direr the situation, the more he concentrated.” 48 About his decision to go outside and face the crowd and the tanks on August 19, 1991, Yeltsin once observed, “I sorted everything out. I am an athlete and I know very well how it happens. All of a sudden, you are jarred and feel that the game is on, that you can boldly take the initiative into your hands.”49 He approached in the same frame of mind shock therapy in 1992, the 1993 conflict with parliament, Chechnya in 1994, and eventually his re-election campaign in 1996. El’dar Ryazanov interrogated him, weeks after the bombardment of the White House, about his métier being do-or-die situations. “Yes,” Yeltsin responded, “I know myself too well not to agree with this. . . . I constantly have to keep myself in fighting trim. . . . Even in sport, when I played volleyball in my student years . . . you would not see much of me in the main part of the game. . . . But if the match is on the line I am able to work miracles.”50 In suspenseful situations, Yeltsin’s habit was to ratchet up the sense of crisis, and ergo the demand for decisive action to defuse it, by playing wait-and-see as long as he could. It was in his nature, as his former aides put it well, “to bide his time as things percolated, until the situation presented a danger to him and his power”—until the match was on the line.51 Procrastinating up to the split second his intuition whispered was the right one, it was then into the breach, the adrenalin surging.
“Am I a strong or a weak person?” Yeltsin asked in Notes of a President. “In exigent situations, I am usually strong. In routine situations, I am sometimes limp.” There are also “times when I do not look like the Yeltsin people have grown used to seeing,” including times when “I fly off the handle in stupid ways, like a child.”52
Yeltsinesque torpor was of two basal types, although the line smudged some. The first, and the easier to grasp, was the emotional blowback from failure. Several of the traumas that actuated such feelings during perestroika have been discussed in earlier chapters: the overload of governing the capital city, the secret speech, the attacks on him during his political resurrection. The psychodrama continued after 1991. In writing of it in Notes, he started with economic shock therapy:
The first one who was in for shock, and repeatedly—with pained reactions, having to strain every resource—was me, the president. Enervating bouts of depression, agonizing reflections late at night, insomnia and headaches, despair at the grimy and impoverished look of Moscow and other Russian cities, the criticism that billowed out every day in the newspapers and on the television screen, the badgering at sessions of the congress, the weight of the decisions made, the people close to me who did not support me when I needed it, who did not hold up, who deceived me—all this I had to brook.53
Yeltsin reacted in pain to the general flow of negative news and to specific events. In the spring of 1992, he was despondent for weeks over the unexpectedly high rate of inflation and the nonarrival of recovery in production. Bad tidings in the economy were a constant during his first term, but the degree of awfulness varied, with “Black Tuesday”—October 11, 1994, when the ruble lost one-quarter of its value in a single day—taking the cake. As an afterclap of Black Tuesday, the Duma initiated but did not approve a vote of no-confidence in the government.
The constitutional turbulence of 1992–93 afforded a series of precipitating events. The blows of Ruslan Khasbulatov and the deputies at the congress in December 1992 produced, Yeltsin recalls, “a relapse of the psychological wretchedness” that had plagued him when he was demoted by Gorbachev.54 He was wretched enough to think of ending it all. On December 9, 1992, the day the congress refused to accede to Gaidar as prime minister, he came home to Barvikha-4 “in a complete trance” and locked himself in the steambath. There he was lost in “very bad” thoughts (Yeltsin’s phrase, from Notes) until Korzhakov broke into the bath and took him to his wife. “I was just in time,” Korzhakov asserts, “to stop him from taking the ultimate step”—connecting the dots, that step would have been killing himself through scalding and suffocation in the steam. Korzhakov, who depicted the rescue in his anti-Yeltsin memoir, is a hostile witness. It is instructive, though, that Yeltsin’s wording implies he was in truth suicidal and that he did not contest Korzhakov’s account in Presidential Marathon in 2000. This affair is thus a far cry from the feigned suicide attempt of November 9, 1987.55 A week after locking himself in the steambath, Yeltsin was in a blue funk while on a visit to China and broke the trip off with a complaint of numbness in his extremities. Korzhakov blithely mentioned to him that Franklin Roosevelt ran the U.S. government from a wheelchair.56
Yeltsin recovered from this low-water mark, but as parliament moved toward impeachment in the spring of 1993 he “fell into a depression,” Korzhakov reports, and began to lose the thread of conversations. His mother’s death, a week before the March 28 vote on the resolution, intensified the gloom. Security Minister Viktor Barannikov had made him a birthday present of an imported handgun and a carton of ammunition, which Yeltsin stashed in an office cabinet. Alerted by an informant, Korzhakov had one of the Kremlin chefs boil the cartridges in water to disable them. Days before the roll was called, Yeltsin, with Korzhakov and two other officials looking on, took out the pistol, cocked it, and threatened to shoot himself. He let himself be talked out of pulling the trigger, unaware that the bullets had been doctored. Korzhakov says he eventually removed the firing pin.57
Chechnya brought further torture the next year. The president “was greatly afflicted by the tragedy” of the storming of Grozny, which began on December 31, 1994. For several days he cut himself off from the telephone and refused to receive even Korzhakov.58 A secondary effect of the intervention was the breakdown in relations with political liberals who had once been at his side. When Yelena Bonner criticized Yeltsin for his praise of Defense Minister Grachëv, Naina Yeltsina, with whom she had maintained social contact since Andrei Sakharov’s death, phoned to give her a tearful talking to, and the two stopped speaking.59 A schism broke out in the pro-reform Russia’s Choice movement, where Yegor Gaidar came out against the war while Boris Fëdorov, the former finance minister, left the organization in search of a more “patriotic” one. Yeltsin had arrived at “almost complete political isolation” because of the war and other issues. “I could no longer feel the support of those with whom I had begun my political career.” 60 The hostage-taking at Budënnovsk, introducing Russia at large to terrorism, sent him into a tailspin in June 1995. He announced to a meeting of the advisory Security Council on June 30 that he planned to resign the presidency, since he had initiated an unsuccessful war. Council members asked him not to, and he withdrew the threat. “I don’t think this was playacting on Yeltsin’s part,” writes Yevgenii Primakov, who attended as director of Russian foreign intelligence. “He suffered over everything connected with Chechnya.”61