If any consolation is to be taken from the Chechen fiasco, it is that Yeltsin did not put it to use to asphyxiate debate or political liberties. He pats himself on the back in Presidential Marathon: “If during those . . . critical days we had gone for extraordinary measures and had limited freedom of speech, a split would have been unavoidable” between state and society.117 It is no idle boast. At one of the low points of his administration, struggling to keep the state together with the bluntest of instruments, he could have attacked democratic freedoms in the name of protecting the state, but elected not to.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Boris Agonistes
If there is an enduring truism about Boris Yeltsin, it is that he had a colorful personality—a juicy or succulent personality (sochnaya lichnost’) is another idiom one hears Russians use. It was the stuff of countless news stories in his years in power and suffuses the Yeltsin legend.
Human personalities are elusive. The out-of-the-ordinary individual may outdo the ordinary in erecting “identity shields” to mask what is beneath the skin.1 Yeltsin’s carapace as national leader was unusually impenetrable. It differed in degree if not in kind from the reserve he maintained in Sverdlovsk, where he had found himself on familiar and stable terrain. Yeltsin seemed to bring to the metropole a fear of giving himself away, as Sergei Filatov, his chief of staff for three years, says—an unease “that someone would half-open a nook of his personal, secret life or read his inmost thoughts.” Vyacheslav Kostikov, his spokesman from 1992 to 1995, gives up in his memoir on jamming him into a master formula or sobriquet: “In reality, no one knows Yeltsin, and he does nothing to bring clarity to his selfportrait.” A member of the Kremlin press pool remembers Yeltsin as “the substantiation of power on two legs”; what went on inside his head flummoxed her to the end.2
The swashbuckler Man on the Tank from 1991 remains the culminating image of Yeltsin for the ages. Going from maverick to master, he began to project other, competing images. And some of them—lashing out at former parliamentary colleagues in 1992 and 1993, brandishing the notorious conductor’s baton in Berlin in 1994, looking wan after heart attacks in 1995—spoke of disquiet and even anguish. But these were not the only juices that flowed, which makes it important to eschew clichés and pop psychology and establish, as best one can, the actual balance among them. If the private man had not been predictive of the public man, one might not care. Here we can rest easy. As milestone events of Yeltsin’s first presidential term go to show, his interior landscape, inscrutable as it was, was highly relevant to his choices and to the fingerprints he left as leader.
Events were overtaking two of Yeltsin’s life scripts as the curtain lifted on the post-communist era. He had long since sloughed off his sense of political duty to the Soviet Union. His residual sense of filial duty ended on March 21, 1993, with the death of his mother from heart failure. Klavdiya Vasil’evna was eighty-five and had been staying with the Moscow Yeltsins for some months. The evening before, as the raucous conflict with the Supreme Soviet heated up, she took in the television news with them, bussed her son, and said to him, “That’s my boy, Borya,” as she went back to her bedroom. This was the last he heard from her. She was given an Orthodox burial at Kuntsevo Cemetery, with several priests and a choir. Yeltsin held a clod of frozen earth in his hand for some minutes before tossing it on the casket.3
The rebellion scenario now read like diaries stored in a dusty attic. In the August coup, Oleg Poptsov had marveled at his capability for overturning the status quo: “The framework of power has to be adjusted to him. A person with a cunning, deep-set capacity for mutiny, he can smash this framework in a single minute.”4 The framework of power had been not only adjusted to Yeltsin but harnessed to him. There was no one left to rebel against.
Yeltsin never discarded his testing script, with its tinges of strength and competency. At his desk, he used trite policy details as tests. A topnotch speed reader—aided by a pencil, he ran his eye along the diagonal of the page, from upper left to lower right—he would memorize factoids and passages from official documents and retrieve them in discussions weeks or months later, tickled when he could recite the exact page number. Away from the office, exercise and sport remained the main devices. For old times’ sake, Yeltsin might still do a walrus swim in a frigid river or lake. Aleksandr Korzhakov reports one on the Moskva River on a March day in the early 1990s, with ice floes bobbing. Whenever possible, Yeltsin capped a steam bath with a plunge into a snowbank or freezing water; he would submerse himself in the water, ticking off the seconds, for two full minutes, longer than most men half his age could stand the temperature and the oxygen deprivation. 5 With volleyball behind him, Yeltsin had taken up tennis, the racket sport that also has a serve-and-volley structure, while working at Gosstroi. He played it in pairs and had a booming serve, although he was lumbering on his feet and rallied poorly with his mutilated left hand. Shamil Tarpishchev, the professional captain of the Russian national team, was his personal coach, and found him no more genial in the face of a loss than his Sverdlovsk volleyball mates had. One time Tarpishchev thought it would be amusing to offer to play doubles against Yeltsin and Korzhakov by pairing with Yeltsin’s grandson Boris, and to neutralize his advantage by handcuffing himself to young Boris. The manacled Tarpishchev and Boris, Jr., won the first set. “I looked over and the president was exerting himself and glowering at Borya and me. We threw the second set and got out of there.”6
As in almost any leadership career, success was still the script of the most import to Yeltsin. Richard Nixon, who met with him in 1991, 1992, and 1993, saw in Yeltsin “a relentless inner drive that propelled him to the top,” rather like Nixon, who was also raised poor, made it almost to the top in the United States, was set back, and clawed his way back up Everest.7 If getting to be “first” motivated Yeltsin in the good old days, staying first motivated him now, and that was no easier a task, for one had to pedal like mad in this environment just to stand still. And building a better way of life, as he was to say in his retirement speech, was proving to be “excruciatingly difficult” and “exceptionally complicated,” and that realization was never out of his mind. He had always been hard on himself. As his daughter Tatyana said in an interview, “Even when he had made some kind of speech and I would say, ‘Papa, that went fantastically,’ or he had pulled off some kind of deal very well, he would say, ‘No, nonetheless I could have done it better.’ . . . Even when something came out very well, he was always dissatisfied to some extent.” 8 Now he seemed to be such more often and more thoroughly. In one of his several televised dialogues with the president in 1993, the filmmaker El’dar Ryazanov inquired if he was satisfied with his work. Yeltsin’s stygian response prefigured his 1999 valedictory: “I am rarely satisfied with my work. . . . I am satisfied with my work 5 to 10 percent of the time and 90 percent of the time I am dissatisfied. I am constantly dissatisfied with my work, and that is a frightful thing.”9