Bringing back the Soviet bugbear was impossible, and it was impossible to get along on differing from Gorbachev, for Gorbachev had been marginalized. Yeltsin forced him to vacate his Moscow apartment and country residence, together with the Kremlin offices, and to scale down his demands for pension and staff, but granted his request to start a Gorbachev Foundation with property deeded by the Russian administration.15 Gorbachev went on the transatlantic lecture circuit, learned to be a fundraiser (he would even appear in a Pizza Hut commercial in 1997), wrote his memoirs, and established Green Cross International, an environmental organization. He never spoke with Yeltsin after December 23, 1991, and as before looked down on him as a shifty megalomaniac.16 Yeltsin matched Gorbachev’s lack of humility with a lack of magnanimity, making him persona non grata in official Moscow. As Yeltsin planned his first state visit to Washington, D.C., in June 1992, one criterion he gave his hosts for the beyond-the-beltway portion was that it be at a place Gorbachev had never seen—which led him midway across the country to the state of Kansas.17 (He toured Wichita, rode a farm combine in a wheatfield, and took home a plastic bear filled with Grannie’s Homemade Mustard, from a family business in Hillsboro.) In August, convinced that comments by Gorbachev violated a promise made to him in December 1991 of noninterference in politics, Yeltsin had Interior Minister Viktor Yerin carry out a “financial and legal inspection” of the foundation. “Naturally, ‘abuses’ were uncovered, in particular, participation in trading operations.”18 In September Gorbachev was barred from foreign travel for refusing to testify at the hearing by the new Russian Constitutional Court into the legality of Yeltsin’s decrees banning the Communist Party—he would not participate, he said, even if brought into the courtroom in handcuffs. The ban was lifted within weeks, and Gorbachev was fined 100 rubles (the price of a hamburger and cola drink) for contempt of court.19 Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin eased off, and the dust settled.20
If time had passed by the battle with Gorbachev, it had done the same with the levers Yeltsin used to unseat Gorbachev. Foremost among them was the campaign against elite privilege.
In the last few years of the communist regime, Yeltsin lived decently yet not sumptuously, which gave him some standing to cast stones. In June 1991 the vice president–elect, Aleksandr Rutskoi, acting on his wife’s counsel, decided Yeltsin needed sartorial upgrade and procured him a smart suit, shoes, and some white shirts with coupons issued to Rutskoi as a military officer. Yeltsin accepted graciously but paid Rutskoi for the apparel.21 For a barbecue at Arkhangel’skoye-2 the weekend after the defeat of the putsch, press secretary Pavel Voshchanov splurged on a suckling pig he found in a Moscow peasant bazaar. “Naina Iosifovna was touched, because they could not permit themselves this.”22 At their Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya apartment, Naina bid a guest to be careful of the sofa, as the springs poked out through holes and they might rip his trousers: “When Boris Nikolayevich sits on it, first he puts on a little cushion, and then it’s okay. Here is a cushion for you.”23
Once in power, though, Yeltsin came to bask in the same creature comforts as Gorbachev and Leonid Brezhnev before him. He kept his Moscow residential registration at Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya until 1994, when he shifted it to the sixth floor of a new concrete building block on Osennyaya Street, in the Krylatskoye development, on the western outskirts of the capital. Yeltsin saw the building from his limousine and fell in love with it, much to the mystification of his family and of his security detail, who thought it too close to the windows of other houses. They objected, but, recalled his daughter Tatyana, “Papa said we were going to live here, and that was that.”24 Most nights from 1992 through 1996 Yeltsin actually spent at the state dacha Barvikha-4, a three-story river-front mansion in the settlement of Razdory, which was a ten-minute drive farther out the same westward radius from the Kremlin. The army built Barvikha-4 for Gorbachev in Second Empire style and equipped it with the latest communications and security gadgetry. Yeltsin as president took again to hunting, unwinding every several months by shooting deer, stag, wild boar, duck, and wood grouse at the bucolic Zavidovo. He made stops at other provincial retreats left by the Soviets: Valdai, in the northwest near Novgorod, where the big dacha was built for Stalin; Bocharov Ruchei in Sochi, on Russia’s semitropical Black Sea coast; Volzhskii Utës, on a crook in the lower Volga; and Shuiskaya Chupa in Kareliya, refurbished with the northernmost roofed tennis court in Europe.25
With a bang, the door had shut on Yeltsin’s populism. In an interview in retirement, he was unrepentant for using it. “It was necessary to do some undermining, to take things away from the nomenklatura. I did it and I did it correctly. It was not right for the big shots to puff up their privileges that way.” But it was “a stage” in his development, he added, and he and Russia outgrew it.26
The incongruousness with his recent past required some rationalization. Yeltsin gave it mostly in Notes of a President. He had, he says, a brainstorm in 1990, shortly after he was elected speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet and he asked to be allotted a government dacha at Arkhangel’skoye-2:
When I was a deputy in the [USSR] Supreme Soviet, I had refused the perks of a chauffeured car and a dacha. I refused to go to a special polyclinic and signed up in my neighborhood one. But now I ran up against the fact that I needed to push for such things and not to reject them. It was not because the leader of Russia needed “privileges” but because he needed normal working conditions, which at that moment he was without. This revelation was so startling that I fell to thinking. Would people understand me correctly? For so many years, I had maligned privileges, and here I was asking for them. Then I decided that the people were as smart as I was. They had realized without me that the struggle was not against the privileges of the [Communist] party; it was against the party’s unbridled, all-enveloping power.27
And so, once the CPSU was no more, it was appropriate to exchange the unostentatious Arkhangel’skoye-2 for tony Barvikha-4 and Aeroflot for Gorbachev’s Ilyushin-62 jetliner, a “ROSSIYA” logo glued to its skin. The replacement for Aleksandr Korzhakov’s Niva was a ZIL, and in 1992 a sleek, armor-plated Mercedes limousine from Germany—an “office on wheels,” in Yeltsin’s words.28
Many Russians wondered about the justice of it all. Yurii Burtin, a former dissident active in the shriveling Democratic Russia movement, took aim in an essay in March of 1992 at “the brassiness [that] lets our new leaders take the same offices and drive around in the same luxurious armored limousines that members of the Politburo used to help themselves to.”29 In a television interview in 1993, shot at Gorki-9, an estate where Soviet leaders had lived, El’dar Ryazanov, a director of movie comedies and a Yeltsin supporter, personalized the question. What was it like for someone who had ridden the crest of a moral wave of the downtrodden to glean these benefits, and had he found that power “corrodes the soul”? “Some things inside me have changed,” Yeltsin said jumpily, giving Gorki-9 as a barometer: “Earlier, I would never have moved into such a residence. I guess I have come to take a more blasé attitude toward the morality of various privileges than I used to.”30 He squirmed not because his perquisites were so atypical for the leader of a large country but because he had denounced his predecessors for enjoying them and had implied that in power he as people’s president would deny himself them.31