Students of human nature more astute than Burbulis and Korzhakov were alive to the risks in overfamiliarity with number one or in giving him the sense that he was in someone’s debt. Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russia’s prime minister from 1992 to 1998 (and born in 1938), went to Zavidovo and had some holiday meals with the president, yet knew enough to respect his wish for autonomy: “Even when we were hunting together, I never allowed myself to try to make use of the proximity. . . . I saw that anyone who did, haha, would end up [paying the price].”37
More polar to the Yeltsin presidency than his hot-and-cold relations with people is the question of phasing and consistency over time. In the organization of his everyday docket, he was as ever a stickler for promptness. Family members teased by getting him to guess the time of day without checking his watch—and usually he could do it down to the minute, he says. Yeltsin valued protocol officer Vladimir Shevchenko for his good judgment and for being “fanatically punctual,” and said to Aleksandr Rutskoi that one reason for picking him as running mate was his military devotion to schedule.38 A subordinate a minute late for an appointment would find Yeltsin tapping his foot irascibly. At Russian-American summits, he was irked by the tardy Bill Clinton. The only times Yeltsin was late for organized events were when he wanted to indicate displeasure. An example would be the 1991 negotiations at Novo-Ogarëvo, before and after the August coup, at which he often arrived after Gorbachev had called the meeting to order.
Fastidiousness about the hands of the clock makes it all the more noticeable that in the sweep of the process of national reconstruction Yeltsin displayed his marked political arrhythmia. In the event-packed first term, he often wove puzzlingly between assertive activism and sluggish quiescence.
Where did this cadence come from? A plethora of answers rooted in external factors—none of them particularly believable—have been floated. Several acquaintances have seen a similarity to Russia’s national mascot, the brown bear, which hibernates in winter and prowls the forest in the warm weather.39 Gaidar saw Yeltsin as a latter-day Il’ya Muromets, the knighterrant of Slavic folk poems.40 Lame since his youth, Il’ya is restored to health by two psalm-singing pilgrims and gallops off to smite evil serpents and barbarian hordes. Every Russian schoolchild knows the tale; it is commemorated in paintings, in a symphony by Reinhold Glière, in the name of the country’s first bomber aircraft (built in World War I by Igor Sikorsky), and in Aleksandr Ptushko’s film from the 1950s, the first widescreen movie made in the USSR. In a more real-life vein, Mikhail Gorbachev has pointed to Yeltsin’s career in the Soviet construction industry, with its ethos of “storming” and “hurry up and finish” after intervals of idleness.41
These zoological, folkloric, and occupational analogies do not hit the bull’s-eye. Yes, Yeltsin might have been said to be ursine in visual aspect and gait, but any parallel across species can be no more than lightheartedly allegorical, and his highs and lows did not issue forth in the seasonality of a hibernating mammal. The mythic Il’ya Muromets roused himself from his pallet only once, at the age of thirty-three, and never revisited it. Soviet civil engineers, unlike Yeltsin as president, functioned in an orderly temporal framework laid down by the monthly, quarterly, and yearly planning calendars. And, since Russian politicians with this professional past differed in their styles and predilections, labor in construction could not have been determinant.42
Others, meanwhile, have looked to Yeltsin’s psyche for a totally internal explanation—less than compellingly, in my view. Gorbachev, while citing Yeltsin’s background in the construction industry, has also belabored him for an innate preference for confrontation. “In his human qualities,” Gorbachev claims in his memoirs, “he was better suited to an epoch of Sturm und Drang” than to “normal work.” “He contains a volcanic mixture and is capable only of destruction.”43 Gorbachev and some Moscow pundits have also insinuated that Yeltsin stirred tumult so as to rouse himself to action and look the hero while he was at it. The charge that Yeltsin was a purely destructive factor is a red herring, inconsistent with many chapters in his life. Yeltsin denied that he manufactured artificial emergencies: The obstacles to easy accomplishment “have always found me,” and not he them.44
The Moscow psychologist Oleg Davydov finds Yeltsin’s rebuttal flawed because it deals only with the conscious incitement of crisis and not with the subconscious. Yeltsin’s bent for getting into tight spots was subliminal, Davydov thinks, and was matched by an almost mystical belief in his ability to escape unscathed. Yeltsin, he said, governed himself from adolescence onward by means of a distinctive “three-step”: He bumbles into peril by acting preemptively; the misstep sets off a crisis; through an exercise of will, and with a pinch of good fortune, he saves the day. As a homely early case, Davydov cites Yeltsin’s and his school chums’ quest for the headwaters of the Yaiva River after ninth grade; the start of economic shock therapy is a politicized case from the 1990s.45 Davydov’s thesis is way too rigid and is circular as welclass="underline" Yeltsin’s motivation is inferred from his behavior, and then used to account for that same behavior. What can be said is that, whether or not danger sought him out, it not uncommonly found in Yeltsin a willing accessory.
There is no shortage of other conjectures about the alternating moods of Yeltsin. One or two journalists have said he had the mental affliction cyclothymia, a class of bipolar or manic-depression disorder. Patients with this condition experience swings from elated to somber.46 However, no clinician who examined Yeltsin, or any other, has ever indicated such a diagnosis. Normal onset of cyclothymia is in the teens or early twenties, for which Yeltsin’s biography provides zero evidence, and the moods of patients oscillate furiously, in a matter of days, which his are not known to have done. Yeltsin’s temper when on the knife’s edge is typically described as selfcontrolled and collected, not euphoric. A good specimen would be the events of September–October 1993, in the heat of the battle with the Congress of Deputies. A general who was present at one of his garrison visits before September 21 found him energetic, focused, and “going deep into every word” the officers said. Speaking on the telephone to President Clinton right after his edict, Yeltsin was “pumped and combative” yet on task. The evening of October 3, as street battles raged in Moscow, he was not equal to addressing the population on television. By the early morning hours of October 4, though, as he awaited his climactic predawn meeting with the army command, he had the sang-froid to take to a sofa in his office suite for a two-hour snooze.47
Yeltsin’s red-letter actions as leader were most often taken in spasms of effort and in crises he had a part in stimulating. His pugnacity was a given, and had been since Berezniki. “I am not the type,” he had exclaimed at the Higher Komsomol School in 1988, “to take the easier or more pleasing course, to go by the satiny paved road rather than the rough footpath” (see Chapter 7). The novelty here was that the Moscow pressure cooker and the pluralism and quicksilver quality of transitional politics supplied him with incomparably more make-or-break situations in which it could be activated.
Yeltsin and people who knew him in the 1990s often linked his flair for rising to the occasion with his athletic experience, even though he and they well knew that governing a country is infinitely more complicated than batting a ball about with a small number of players and fixed rules. One might see it as a crossbreed of Yeltsin’s success and testing scripts—improving his record while proving himself. Yeltsin was likeliest to see a political challenge as in scale to his talents when its magnitude was great and the chips were down. He took for granted that he could meet the challenge and others would not.