He had always kept an affective distance from almost all professional and political collaborators. The trait was probably handed down from the Urals village. A Butka acquaintance who had known Nikolai Yeltsin told a journalist, “Boris Nikolayevich . . . had an attitude that if he developed a friendship with someone, that would mean that he couldn’t demand as much from them. So he kept everyone at an arm’s length. He was just like his father.”24 The dog-eat-dog medium of the CPSU apparatus reinforced this attitude. As Sverdlovsk party boss, Yeltsin did not camouflage it. At his elk and duck shoots, “He relaxed in the outdoors and permitted himself to greet [people] in hail-fellow-well-met fashion. All the same, he always kept his detachment.” 25 About his years in the obkom and after that the Moscow party committee, Yeltsin said, “Number ones as a rule have no close friends. There arises a complex of insularity, and your caution in communicating with others grows. All of this in time made its appearance in me—unreachability, a nervousness about socializing with new acquaintances.”26 Another person might have responded by reaching out to like spirits and not to recoil from them. Not Yeltsin: In him, being number one bred Chekhovian solitude. And it did so with greater intensity once he was leader of all Russia, in conditions of uncertainty and flux.
Yeltsin did open himself up to close connections with the odd foreigner. One was Robert S. Strauss, the last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and the first to Russia. “He neither liked nor trusted most people,” Strauss recalled years later, “but he did me.” Strauss could only explain it in terms of fellowship—each saw the “twinkle” in the other—and by the facts that they were of the same generation and Strauss did not want anything of him.27 Yeltsin’s making friends with Helmut Kohl, the first world leader he called on in 1991, and with President Jiang Zemin of China, would be other examples. All three are of Yeltsin’s age group or older (Strauss was born in 1918, Kohl in 1930, and Jiang in 1926).28
Symptomatic of the very different pattern with Russians, where the tie was severed when suspicions set in, was the relationship with Gennadii Burbulis (born in 1945), the ex-academic from Sverdlovsk who had Yeltsin’s ear at the beginning of his administration. After they got to know one another in the Soviet parliament, Burbulis was right-hand man to Yeltsin in the Russian congress, ran his 1991 election campaign, was the first choice to establish his presidential office (an invitation he foolhardily declined), advised on the recruitment of Yegor Gaidar, and was given the titles of first deputy premier and state secretary. Before 1992 was rung out, as we have seen, Burbulis and Yeltsin were estranged. There was an interpersonal dynamic as well as a political one:
I won’t hide the fact that at a certain point I began to feel an impalpable, cumulative fatigue. I got tired of seeing the same face every day in my office, at meetings and receptions, at the dacha, on the tennis court, in the steambath. It is possible and necessary for someone to try to influence the president—to get things done, to carry through on one’s ideas. But there has to be some limit. As freely as Gennadii Burbulis had walked into any meeting he felt like, he started coming to see me in person all the time. He overstepped some boundary in our personal relations. Well, it happens.29
Yeltsin’s one intimate friendship of any duration with a public figure was with Aleksandr Korzhakov, the beefy security officer whom he made head of the Kremlin’s praetorian guard. Through the first half of the 1990s, they were inseparable: They commuted, worked, broke bread, played games, and vacationed in one another’s company. On a visit to the republic of Sakha, Yeltsin accidentally nicked Korzhakov with a knife he had received as a gift; at Yeltsin’s suggestion, Korzhakov reciprocated and they mingled their blood. They repeated the rite several years later in Moscow.30 In 1994, hearing from Yeltsin his fears about surgery for a deviated septum in his nose—a condition Korzhakov also had—Korzhakov volunteered to have his operation first, “as a guinea pig.” He did, and Yeltsin repeated the procedure later that year.31 Korzhakov had his in-town apartment in the Krylatskoye building, on the sixth floor next door to the Yeltsins, and was apportioned a dacha plot in Gorki-10, again next to Yeltsin. When travel forced Yeltsin to miss the wedding of Korzhakov’s daughter Galina in 1994, the family repeated it upon his return. In 1995 Korzhakov was godfather to Yeltsin’s fourth grandchild, Gleb Dyachenko.
In Notes of a President, published in 1994, Yeltsin wrote that Korzhakov’s position “forces him to be next to me twenty-four hours a day.”32 But it was his disposition, and its fit with Yeltsin’s, that won the president over. They were, in Russian argot, tovarishchi, comrades, of the nonpolitical variety, who had achieved sympathy and trust. They shared plebeian origins—Korzhakov, born in 1950, was the son of a Moscow textile worker and lived until age seven in a flyblown barracks—although Yeltsin was considerably better educated. Comradeship, political as well as nonpolitical, was mostly a manly phenomenon in the Soviet Union, going back to the Bolsheviks, and so it was with Yeltsin and Korzhakov.33 Korzhakov was Yeltsin’s drinking companion, safety blanket, and confessor. Yeltsin in his book remembered unwinding at the Korzhakov cottage when he was out of favor with the Politburo. “We did not stay in the house but bivouacked beside it, angled for fish, went for a dip in the creek.” As head of state, he still relied on Korzhakov: “Korzhakov never leaves my side, and when we are traveling we sit up at night unless we are asleep. He is a very decent, shrewd, strong, and courageous person, although outwardly he seems quite simple.”34 While Naina Yeltsina always had her doubts about Korzhakov, she considered him “almost a member of our family.” She once asked his wife, Irina, over a meal if he would ever give away confidences. Irina said the Korzhakovs loved the Yeltsins so much that they would take their secrets to the grave, and Korzhakov repeated these words.35
However, Yeltsin wearied of Korzhakov and Korzhakov of him: Twenty-four hours a day of togetherness was too much. The age difference mattered more as Yeltsin’s health declined, and Korzhakov alarmed Yeltsin by expanding his Kremlin role into all-round aide-de-camp and gatekeeper. The blood brothers parted over Korzhakov’s affiliation with the clique of high-level conservatives who favored postponement of the 1996 presidential election and who scuffled with liberals for control of the electoral campaign. A funding scandal on June 20, 1996, in between the two rounds of the voting, was the final insult. Yeltsin was to fire Korzhakov for insubordination, saying he and his group “took much for themselves and gave little.” The jilted retainer, who was not offered another job, made the separation irreparable by publishing a vengeful memoir, Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn to Dusk, brimming with unflattering stories and photos of Yeltsin with tousled hair, in baggy swim trunks, or with glass, fishing rod, or rifle in hand. Yeltsin thenceforth considered Korzhakov a traitor to him, and with some reason: For bodyguards, like clergy, valets, and physicians, circumspection is the golden rule. Yeltsin was never to exchange a word with him again. To Korzhakov, Yeltsin was the traitor. In a letter on June 22, 1996, he said the people would hold the dismissal against Yeltsin: “They take everything at face value and are coming to the judgment, ‘He betrayed his own and now he will betray us.’” Korzhakov quotes Irina as saying she saw “the smile of Judas” on Yeltsin’s face when he spoke on television about the firing.36