At the middle of the heaving sea that was Boris Yeltsin’s life in his presidential years there sat an atoll of domestic tranquility. As he had except at UPI and in his first year as an engineer, he based himself in, and drew succor from, a traditional household—“a patriarchal Urals family” arrayed around “a supreme authority, the grandfather.”10 Yelena Okulova and her husband and children (a boy, Ivan, was born in the late 1990s) had an apartment midtown and then in the Krylatskoye block, a floor below the in-laws’ piedà-terre. Yeltsin’s second daughter, Tatyana, and her family resided in Boris and Naina’s home, dividing their time between Moscow and Barvikha-4. She went from the military institute to a position in the Dawn of the Urals Bank, a small firm based in Perm, in 1994, and then onto maternity leave when her second son, Gleb, was born in August 1995. (Tatyana’s first son, Boris, studied at Winchester, an English boarding school, from 1996 to 1998.) The Dyachenkos and Okulovs had dachas of their own. Callers at the Yeltsin home often remarked on the prevalence of females, children, bicycles, and toys.
While Boris Nikolayevich may have been the patriarch, the stabilizer in the family unit was its warmhearted, retiring, and boundlessly patient matriarch. Now a homemaker full-time, she devoted herself to a demanding spouse. Naina Iosifovna, an aide of hers, Natal’ya Konstantinova, observed in a memoir, “carries her husband like a crystal vase,” seeing him through toil and trouble.11 She overcame the claustrophobia about vehicles and airplane cabins that she had been subject to in Sverdlovsk. In 1993, after eight years in the capital, she declared that she did not yet feel “at home” there and spent long hours on the telephone with friends and kin in Yekaterinburg and Orenburg. “Life here has not treated us kindly,” she said to Ryazanov. “They have poured so much filth on us. In my entire life before, I never had even one drop of this.”12 Her widowed mother, Mariya Girina, lived in Yekaterinburg; she was buried in Shirokorechenskoye Cemetery next to Yeltsin’s father in 1994. Naina attended religious services with greater regularity in the 1990s and hung several painted icons on the walls of Barvikha-4. Without fanfare, she took up small-scale philanthropy. She sponsored maternity homes, pediatric hospitals, and orphanages and arranged food and medical aid for elderly female stars of the Soviet stage and screen who had fallen upon hard times. Boris did not make a habit of discussing politics with her, but they consulted on the personal fallout of political matters and she had a voice on staff she saw daily (such as drivers, cooks, and photographers). “Without her,” he confided mawkishly but truthfully, “I would never have borne up under so many political storms . . . not in 1987, not in 1991, not later.”13
Boris and Naina Yeltsin “generally do not worry about material things,” as Konstantinova wrote. 14 Although it would be absurd to say he was against the good life, Yeltsin did not go into post-communist politics, and did not stay in it, for mercenary purposes. Had he so wished, he could have left the government and ridden the new free-enterprise economy to riches. He continued to be partial to plain Russian food. In Paris on an official visit in February 1992, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev invited him to dine in one of the city’s three-star restaurants, where he could try out nouvelle cuisine concoctions. Leaving Kozyrev to go out on the town, Yeltsin stayed behind at the embassy and had the kitchen cook him meat patties and potatoes. 15
President Yeltsin handed Naina his pay envelope every Friday, as he had in Sverdlovsk, and she gave him back an allowance. He was at a loss about consumer prices, did not recognize ruble notes by denomination, did not have credit cards, and needed to be shown how to swipe a debit card at one of the automated teller machines that were cropping up in Moscow.16 His ruble salary was worth five hundred to a thousand dollars a month, varying with the exchange rate. Extra income came from several hundred thousand dollars in book royalties, mostly from his second memoir volume, Notes of a President, published in Russian and many foreign languages in 1994. Upon retirement, the couple owned, he said in Presidential Marathon, a 1995 BMW automobile (7-series), home furnishings, and personal articles (he listed guns, tennis rackets, costume jewelry, and electronics); they held no stocks, bonds, or foreign bank accounts. 17
If Yeltsin came into any bonanza, it was in the real estate market. The presidential manse at Barvikha-4 (and Gorki-9, where the family lived in the second term) was under what is today the Federal Protection Service or FSO, known up to 1991 as the Ninth Directorate of the KGB. The house was never Yeltsin’s personal property, his to sell for monetary benefit or to transmit to heirs. On two lesser holdings, the English edition of Presidential Marathon mistranslates Yeltsin. “I own some real estate jointly with my wife,” it says, referring to the Krylatskoye flat and a 4,900-square-foot dacha on ten acres in Odintsovo district, a few miles from Barvikha-4.18 In this context, the verb vladeyu means “dispose of,” “have occupancy of,” or “have exclusive use of.” Neither the apartment nor the Yeltsin dacha, which is in the Gorki-10 compound, was owned by Boris and Naina. Both were on the books of the Presidential Business Department, another arm of the government. Under Russian legislation dating to 1991, the Yeltsins could have privatized the Krylatskoye unit by filling out a few forms but, unlike some neighbors, did not. The Gorki-10 getaway was built in 1995–96 by troops from the protection service, on the grounds that it needed to be a secure site. Yeltsin paid for the materials himself out of book revenues and, ignorant about prices, was so mortified by the cost that he considered giving up on the project. Only in 2006–7, making use of a Putin–period law on vacation homes, did he privatize the Gorki-10 dacha. It must be worth some millions of dollars, and represents Yeltsin’s main financial gain—a second-order, delayed (he took ownership just before his death), and legal effect.19
With the signal exception of his drinking, Yeltsin as president retained the tastes and mannerisms of his stiff-necked Urals ancestors. He did not use tobacco and would not abide it around him. On one presidential visit to Germany, seated at a dinner next to Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s wife, Hannelore, he removed a cigarette from her fingers and stubbed it out in an ashtray.20 Unlike Gorbachev, who cursed like a trooper, Yeltsin did not use profanity and forbade it in his hearing: He first came to question his selection of Aleksandr Rutskoi as vice president in 1991 when Rutskoi and his wife, Lyudmila, used expletives at the post-election victory party.21 Yeltsin threw no tantrums and almost never raised his voice. He spoke to officials, again in contrast to Gorbachev, in given name and patronymic, not given name only or diminutive, and in the decorous second person plural. This applied even to his sidekick Korzhakov, whom he hailed as Aleksandr Vasil’evich unless they had been speaking one-on-one for a time, when he might say Aleksandr or, infrequently, Sasha.22 Yeltsin still had his shoes buffed to a gossamer sheen and in gaps in the conversation would scan them for scuffs. The wardrobe was updated some: He switched from Russian to more debonair foreign-tailored suits and footwear and brought in tuxedos and black ties for formal Kremlin affairs, for the first time since Lenin.23
In addressing the core features of Yeltsin’s personality, we must address the incongruities raised in the Introduction to this volume. In human relations, many contemporaries saw in him a mating of antipodes: He was at once too forward and too mistrustful, too brash and too wary. And his mood presented sharp contrasts over time. Some moments found him the epitome of energy and activism; at others, he was unexpressive and withdrawn. These divergences were a joint product of the mercurial setting and of Yeltsin’s idiosyncrasies.