But the rules changed once the Kremlin was his. Korzhakov saw to it that the trunk of the presidential limousine held a satchel containing drinks, shot glasses, and appetizers, renewed daily. Yeltsin’s levels of use, family members testify, went up steadily from 1991 through 1994. His mother’s death removed a watchful parent who had always looked askance at personal excess. 69 Yeltsin switched in 1993 from brandy to Gzhel’ka and grass-flavored Tarkhun vodka; he also liked a cocktail of champagne laced with cognac. Vodka, removed by Gorbachev and Yegor Ligachëv from the Kremlin menu in 1985, was reintroduced in 1993. Yeltsin’s afternoon tennis matches would often lead to the sauna and then to a meal rife with toasts. Nips were common at his private luncheons, and Yeltsin squirreled away a rainy-day supply in his office suite.
Foreign partners had to work around Yeltsin’s habit. When Bill Clinton got him on the telephone several days after Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993, Yeltsin’s speech was slurred and “he seemed barely listening to what Clinton had to say,” after which Clinton chuckled that he was “a candidate for tough love, if ever I heard one.” Clinton was to have about fifty phone conversations with Yeltsin over the seven years. To be on the safe side, his aides placed most calls before the dinner hour in Moscow.70 At his first summit meeting with Clinton in Vancouver on April 3–4, 1993, Yeltsin tossed back drinks on the warm-up day, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other American officials began the unbecoming practice of keeping a tally.71 First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, often seated next to Yeltsin at official banquets, found him “delightful company” and that, “as is often apparent, he enjoys a drink or two.” On the Clintons’ first official visit to Moscow, Yeltsin provided a running commentary on the food and drink, “informing me in all seriousness that red wine protected Russian sailors on nuclear-powered submarines from the ill effects of strontium 90.”72
Domestic players were more aware of the syndrome. On April 22, 1993, three days before the national referendum on approval of his policies, Yeltsin made a scheduled appearance at a large rally and rock singalong next to St. Basil’s Cathedral. He was far from sober, and Yelena Bonner took the microphone away.73 Yeltsin did not drink alone, a saving grace that may have kept him from worse problems. But drinking with confederates in the first half of the 1990s often closed him off from them, rather than open him up. He would sometimes fall silent, in his “sleeping crocodile” pose, as some called it, while continuing to watch the company. At one such event, a minister of the government offered a lewd bottoms-up. Warned that Yeltsin would not stand for such talk, he made a comment about the chief not hearing. The next morning, Yeltsin signed a decree dismissing the minister, who never reclaimed so high a post.74
Yeltsin’s overindulgence was elevated from an open secret to a public issue in 1994. On August 31 he was in Berlin to represent the country at ceremonies with Chancellor Kohl to mark the departure of Russian forces from the former East Germany. He had gotten a head start the night before by bending elbows at the hotel with Defense Minister Pavel Grachëv. On that day, in baking heat, he imbibed enthusiastically. After lunch, on the square in front of the High Renaissance city Rathaus, where a brass band from the local police was serenading the troops with march music, Yeltsin motioned for the stick from the conductor. Bent at the waist, he woozily stabbed the air with it for several minutes as the band played on gallantly. Minutes later, he took up a microphone to lead the assembled Russians through unmelodious couplets from the folk song “Kalinka-Malinka” (Juniper-Raspberry), concluding with a whoop, a thumb-up sign, and kisses blown to the tittering crowd.75
Yeltsin’s political advisers, a gaggle of whom were there, considered resignation and decided against it. Kostikov inserted vocal articles about the pratfall in Berlin into his daily media reviews. Yeltsin knit his brows upon seeing the material but did not comment. They then tried to convince Korzhakov to level with Yeltsin. He declined, saying he had tried to reason with Yeltsin in the past, but suggested they write the president a letter, something assistant Viktor Ilyushin, who had worked with him since the 1970s, at first opposed as counterproductive. The supercautious Ilyushin came around, and Kostikov cobbled together a collective letter. It was signed by seven people: Kostikov; Ilyushin, who gave it a final edit; Korzhakov and his colleague from the security services, Mikhail Barsukov; Vladimir Shevchenko, the long-suffering chief of presidential protocol; speechwriter Lyudmila Pikhoya; and Dmitrii Ryurikov, Yeltsin’s foreign-policy assistant. Korzhakov delivered the missive by hand on September 10, on a presidential flight to Sochi. The document—wags in the press, which got wind of it, named it “The Letter of the Aides to Their Sultan,” after a nineteenth-century painting by Il’ya Repin—took the president to task for his hermetic tendencies; his complacency and “tsarist” airs; his aversion to planning, which left too many decisions to hang on “irrational factors, chance, and even caprice”; and his separation from past and prospective allies. The authors did not trace all or most of Yeltsin’s problems to alcohol. But, using code to spare his feelings, they stated clearly that in their estimation his dependency—“the well-known Russian vice”—was dragging him down. The signals he had sent in Berlin were “impossible to ignore and difficult to correct.” He needed, they said, “to reassess once and for all your attitude toward your health and your harmful habits,” halt “unexpected disappearances and periods of rehabilitation,” and find ways of decompressing other than “athletics followed by a banquet.” No ruler of Russia before or since has seen the likes of it.76
Yeltsin sulked. He would not shake hands with the messengers for weeks, excluded several of them from a trip to London and Washington, and did not speak to Pikhoya for six months. Kostikov in November was to be handed the honeyed exile of the Russian ambassadorship to the Vatican. Walking the beach in Sochi in mid-September, Yeltsin meditated on his behavior and, he says, made a resolution “to revive [his] strength” and set limits.77 So the message was in a way received, although the incidents, including documented ones abroad, did not stop.78
Yeltsin had progressed from convivial social drinking to drinking with abandon as a balm for a battered ego—to lighten the weight of the world in a period of extreme personal tension. Only in Presidential Marathon, the memoir volume published after his retirement, did Yeltsin begin to concede what had happened: “At a certain time, I sensed that alcohol is a means that rapidly relieves stress.” In Berlin he had been beset by the emotion of the moment and by the onerousness of his office. “The load eased after several glasses, and then, in that light-headed condition, it was possible for me to conduct an orchestra.” Yeltsin wrote it up with a self-pitying slap at those who harped on the theme: “If it was not the blasted alcohol, it would have been something else, they would found some other vulnerable point.”79
Drinking in moderation and on his own time might have been good for Yeltsin’s mental health and equanimity. Drinking immoderately and on the government’s time was a self-inflicted wound that brought no good to anyone. While he must bear responsibility, it is only fair to observe that others tolerated and even condoned his behavior. Naina Yeltsina did her best to restrain her husband and chided associates who did not. She and her daughters blamed Aleksandr Korzhakov for feeding the alcohol habit so as to maintain his personal access to the president. By 1995 Naina was avoiding social contact with Korzhakov for this reason.80 Korzhakov denies the charge, and is half-right in doing so. As the authors of The Yeltsin Epoch point out, he “knew how to ‘regulate the process’” and could be either an enabler or a restrainer. And Korzhakov was but one of those around Yeltsin who saw benefit to them in lifting a glass with the president. For the Berlin incident, the inciter was Pavel Grachëv: “Every shot of vodka taken with Yeltsin was like a star on his general’s epaulets.”81