The “letter to the sultan” was better late than never. But Yeltsin and Russia would have been better served if more people had taken a stand, earlier, and put their positions on the line if that was what it took. Even the Berlin signatories did not have the temerity to speak to him about their handiwork. Yeltsin asked Pikhoya why she signed the letter but had not once brought up the issue in person. “There are situations,” she said sotto voce, “where it is easier to write than to speak.”82 This was one of them. “I was not going to make excuses for myself in front of my assistants,” Yeltsin says of the epistle. “I doubt whether any of them would have been able to help me. The distance between us was too great.”83 The author of that distance was Boris Yeltsin, whose personality cowed those who might have helped.
Yeltsin was not the first modern statesman to have a soft spot for Bacchus. One study of modern rulers estimates 15 percent of them abused alcohol at one time or another, or about the same proportion as in the American population. 84 Kemal Atatürk of Turkey and Winston Churchill, to mention two great leaders, ingested potables in quantities that would put Yeltsin to shame.85 No sensible historian would reduce Atatürk’s or Churchill’s career to his drinking escapades. None should do that to Yeltsin’s, either.
Yeltsin opponents and haters sometimes tried to link his alcohol use to political outcomes. Gorbachev complained to his staff in November 1991 that Gennadii Burbulis and Yeltsin’s entourage were plying Yeltsin with liquor to get him to concur in their separatist designs and that there was a danger he would be a “blind pawn” of others.86 There is no credible evidence of this ever being the case. Foreign partners found Boris Yeltsin’s drinking to be irrelevant, other than in distracting him and lengthening the communications and negotiations. At the Vancouver meeting with President Clinton in 1993, Yeltsin’s conduct on the first evening “didn’t seem to impair his performance the next morning. The summit was a success.”87 In domestic politics, none of Yeltsin’s crucial actions in his first term, before he swore off drinking, happened because of alcohol or under the influence of alcohol.
But drinking was detrimental to the Yeltsin presidency through more roundabout routes. In the early 1990s, the Russians forgave it, seeing it as secondary to his crusade to improve their lives, and in some cases thinking it connoted soulfulness and the release of inhibitions. When his quiet revolution went sour, it was taken as validation of egocentrism and transmogrified into a political liability.88 It sparked rumors of misbehavior even when there was none, something he resented but was helpless to counter. It disrupted his schedule and his accessibility to interlocutors. In July 1993 Ruslan Khasbulatov arranged for President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan to visit to mediate the affray between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet. A meeting was arranged for the ABTs guesthouse. Yeltsin was not adequate to the task and Nazarbayev had to leave without seeing him. Khasbulatov blamed “the forces behind” Yeltsin for wrecking the plan.89 Lower-ranking political tasks, such as press briefings, were shortchanged as the tennis/steambath/dining cycle waxed in importance. But the greatest harm was that done to Yeltsin’s health.
His medical issues, and his tendency not to look after them, dated back decades. The tonsil infection and rheumatic fever at UPI, when Yeltsin refused the bed rest prescribed, foretold a tendency to slight doctor’s orders, on the assumption that exercise and self-command would see him through. “I take risks with my health,” he said in one of his books, “because I rely heavily on my body’s [strength]. I do not always take special care of myself.” 90 In June 1992 he had his first comprehensive physical examination since 1987. A bulletin signed by a consilium of five doctors pronounced his health good and noted “the staying power of the patient.”91 Yeltsin’s complaints over the next several years were mostly minor, in particular, backache (for which he had an arthroscopic procedure in September 1993), sciatic inflammation of nerves in the legs, and the nasal condition. But his haggard visage and no-shows fueled often scurrilous speculation. The movie director El’dar Ryazanov, who interviewed him in April 1993 and in two sessions in November, found him changed over the seven months. Courtly in April, Yeltsin was perspiring, puffy-eyed, and “programmed” in November and lugged “an enormous burden of guilt” over political developments. Midway through the first November session, he had to interrupt it for a catnap, informing Ryazanov that he was now in the habit of sleeping in the daytime.92 By 1994 Moscow insiders were using the alias Dedushka— Grandpa, or the Old Man—in chitchat about him.
It emerged that the principal problem was cardiovascular illness. Yeltsin is known to have experienced angina pectoris, ascribable to ischemic deterioration of blood flow to the heart, in September–October 1991, January 1992, and September 1994. On the last occasion, on September 30, 1994, he ruffled diplomatic feathers when he was a no-show for a meeting with the Irish prime minister, Albert Reynolds, at an airport layover in Shannon. After Berlin, one month before, the world press ascribed it to drinking, which had indeed triggered the incident. First Deputy Premier Oleg Soskovets greeted Reynolds in Yeltsin’s place. Yeltsin apologized to Reynolds on October 6, saying he had overslept. He was sensitive to those who made fun of his excuse.93 In 1995 his symptoms reached life-threatening dimensions in a rapid-fire sequence of three heart attacks in six months: the first two (on July 10 and October 26) reported in the Russian media, the third (in late December) unreported. 94 He was laid up after each in the TsKB, the government’s premier hospital, in southwest Moscow, spending a total of six weeks there and seven in the sanatorium at Barvikha. At the TsKB in October–November, he for the first time did government business out of a hospital bed for a considerable period. From now on, there would be an ambulance in his motorcade.
Aging, the wear and tear of a lifetime, the high-fat diet common in Russia and the former Soviet Union, and the acute pressures of governing in a decade of troubles made Yeltsin an excellent candidate for the disease. His burning of the candle at both ends made him even more vulnerable. Although he cut back his alcohol intake after Berlin, he was not consistently abstinent. The day of his first coronary, says Korzhakov, he had marked Mikhail Barsukov’s appointment as chief of the Federal Security Service, part of the post-Budënnovsk purge, by sharing two liters of sugary Cointreau liqueur with Barsukov.95 Yevgenii Chazov, the former health minister and head of Russia’s best cardiology hospital, and a consultant on the Yeltsin case, says the patient’s willfulness helped bring on the next crisis. “He decided to show that all the prattle about the state of his health was groundless and took to his previous way of life. He went to Sochi, played tennis, and did some drinking. Of course, it all ended sadly.” The October attack came right after Yeltsin deplaned in Moscow from a trip to the United States. Only following it did he behave more carefully, writes Chazov, although he would not agree to the diagnostic angiogram urged by the Kremlin doctors. The circumstances of the December coronary seem to have been similar to those of the first two.96 In 1996, as he ran to defend his presidential position against the communists, he was more careful.97