Yeltsin was in good company. Among modern leaders whose biographies were studied by the psychiatrist Arnold M. Ludwig, the lifetime rate for episodes of depression or melancholia lasting several weeks or more is 14 percent (as compared to 6 percent in the population of the United States), and under a more catholic definition would be about 30 percent. Ludwig found visionary statesmen who try to reshape society, and politicians whose power is crumbling, to be most susceptible to the problem.62
Yeltsin, however, was also prone to a second type of withdrawal that is not well captured by the usual typology. It came, ironically, in the backwash of heady victory as opposed to jarring defeat.
Late Soviet occurrences of this complex—his flight from Moscow after the 1989 and 1990 elections and the 1991 putsch—have been discussed in earlier chapters. The pattern reared its head again in the first several months of 1992, when Yeltsin left Gaidar and the cabinet to prosecute economic reform with little guidance from him. In 1993, after the successful referendum of April 25, Yeltsin was dilatory in following up and took a long summer holiday at Valdai. After he did take decisive steps against the parliament in September–October, he honored a promise to pay a visit to Tokyo, worked on the constitution for several weeks, and then was hard for most of his ministers and staffers to reach until after the December election and plebiscite. The pressure of those months “was so powerful that I still do not understand how my organism got through it, how it coped,” Yeltsin recollects.63
With his presidentialist constitution, and hence his supremacy in Russian politics, in the bag, one might have predicted that Yeltsin would be in a glowing frame of mind in 1994. His mood, though, was indolent for the first half of the year. Write his former aides, “The presidential timetable for that year logs Yeltsin’s numerous and often lengthy absences, attesting to the fact that he was going through a protracted crisis.” He took two weeks in Sochi in March and did not travel publicly in the provinces until his visit to Kazan at the end of May. His annual list of presidential objectives was finalized only in late April, when he initialed it but declined to set priorities among them. A staff memorandum attributed falling approval ratings to “the president’s passivity and lack of clarity over goals and policy.”64
These events are harder to make sense of than the straightforwardly dysphoric episodes in the first category. Why would Yeltsin’s very triumphs, the thrashing of his political rivals, weigh on him? There was, first, an exhaustion factor. When I questioned him about it in 2002, Yeltsin acknowledged it as a form of letdown (spad) or breather (peredyshka), not of depression (depressiya), and as a natural way for him to unwind after the battle.65 It is an admissible point. Even revolutionaries and warriors need a vacation every now and then, and Yeltsin after a victory was usually languid and distracted rather than morose. At his hideaways, he would make himself unavailable by telephone and spent much of the time in the fresh air.
Considerations other than fatigue were involved. Draining as his Nietzschean moments were, Yeltsin felt in his element in them. When they had passed, he sagged. He was hardly the only leader to have had that tendency: Witness the Duke of Wellington’s famous statement the day after Waterloo in 1815 that, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.” What’s more, a post-crisis hiatus, as Aleksandr Muzykantskii observed of Yeltsin’s victory in the 1989 USSR election (see Chapter 7), put the onus on potential allies to come to him with proposals for joint action and gave him the opportunity to look them over. Most important, Yeltsin needed an intermission after a victory because it gave him the chance to consider his options. His moratorium after the attempted coup in 1991 was one of the more fruitful ones. The rolling time-outs in 1993 and 1994 were accompanied by reflection on the future.
There were reasons tangible and intangible why winning was less fun after 1991. The battles won were more ambiguous, for one thing. In the transitional setting, even the alpha leader did not have an inexhaustible storehouse of political capital, and advances could come at a terrible price. Progress achieved put him up foursquare against a fresh set of choices, often more troubling than the last. In the summer of 1993, for example, after Yeltsin had won the April referendum, he backed out of meetings with officeholders, literati, and journalists. It was quite plain to press secretary Vyacheslav Kostikov that the president was shunning contact because he lacked the answers to some of the questions he knew were to be flung at him. Kostikov found the indisposition more pronounced in 1994. Even though the new constitution made Yeltsin’s legal position airtight, Kostikov got used to coming across the superpresident seated pensively at a bare desk. Yeltsin, Kostikov felt, “found himself without his internal pivot” as he came to understand that solutions to Russia’s key reform problems would take five, ten, or more years to resolve. The political system he had constructed left him and only him to answer for problems. “It was my impression,” says Kostikov, “that Yeltsin was getting lost as he faced up to the magnitude of the responsibilities he had arrogated to himself in his constitution.”66 Meantime, personnel turnover and defections had deprived Yeltsin of the most creative minds from his first months in government. Many decisions could be shunted to the trustworthy Chernomyrdin, but the prime minister was not an ideas man, and Yeltsin knew it. What discommoded him the most, as his ghostwriter Valentin Yumashev has noted, was “not psychological loneliness but intellectual loneliness.” “He had begun to feel, I don’t know what to do and I don’t have people around who can supply me with ideas that I can go forward with.”67
One should not imagine that Yeltsin’s depressions and intermissions, in all their multifariousness, went on uninterruptedly from his first to his second inauguration. One by one, he kicked them off. He returned from Sochi to appoint Gaidar and decree shock therapy in 1991; he adjusted the market reforms and accepted Chernomyrdin as his head of government in 1992; he upended the Supreme Soviet and imposed his constitution in 1993; he resumed traveling and politicking and eased Viktor Gerashchenko out of the central bank after Black Tuesday, in 1994, and that same year he picked up the tempo of privatization; he moved crabwise toward negotiations with the Chechen rebels in 1995; in 1996 he decided to run for a second term. The point is not that he failed to accomplish these things but that he did it in a stuttering fashion, which often dragged out the length of time required and intruded on the building of political coalitions to accomplish the task.
The parsing of Yeltsin’s psychodynamics would be incomplete without reference to the substance with which his name is most often linked—alcohol. Until the second half of the 1980s, drinking had a subsidiary function in his life. For the next ten years, until he had to give it up, it loomed larger and took a toll politically, physically, and reputationally.
Although doctors noted at the time that Yeltsin’s consumption increased when he moved to Moscow, and although there were some signs of it interfering with decision making, until 1991 he kept it under control. A Democratic Russia activist who saw him fifty to sixty times between 1989 and the end of 1992 never observed him affected by alcohol. Jack Matlock, the second-to-last U.S. ambassador to the USSR, saw him have drinks but never too many; his successor, Robert Strauss, reports the same. Aleksandr Korzhakov, whose exceedingly unfavorable memoir about Yeltsin, published in 1997, has served as a main source about Yeltsin’s drinking, says that when Yeltsin was chairman of the Russian parliament and under constant watch by the KGB, in 1990–91, he drank relatively little. At Yeltsin’s sixtieth birthday party in February 1991, at a children’s camp near Moscow, he sipped champagne with merrymakers and was the last to retire from the campfire.68