Considerations other than fatigue were involved. Draining as his Nietzschean moments were, Yeltsin felt in his element in them. When they had passed, he sagged. He was hardly the only leader to have had that tendency: Witness the Duke of Wellington’s famous statement the day after Waterloo in 1815 that, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.” What’s more, a post-crisis hiatus, as Aleksandr Muzykantskii observed of Yeltsin’s victory in the 1989 USSR election (see Chapter 7), put the onus on potential allies to come to him with proposals for joint action and gave him the opportunity to look them over. Most important, Yeltsin needed an intermission after a victory because it gave him the chance to consider his options. His moratorium after the attempted coup in 1991 was one of the more fruitful ones. The rolling time-outs in 1993 and 1994 were accompanied by reflection on the future.
There were reasons tangible and intangible why winning was less fun after 1991. The battles won were more ambiguous, for one thing. In the transitional setting, even the alpha leader did not have an inexhaustible storehouse of political capital, and advances could come at a terrible price. Progress achieved put him up foursquare against a fresh set of choices, often more troubling than the last. In the summer of 1993, for example, after Yeltsin had won the April referendum, he backed out of meetings with officeholders, literati, and journalists. It was quite plain to press secretary Vyacheslav Kostikov that the president was shunning contact because he lacked the answers to some of the questions he knew were to be flung at him. Kostikov found the indisposition more pronounced in 1994. Even though the new constitution made Yeltsin’s legal position airtight, Kostikov got used to coming across the superpresident seated pensively at a bare desk. Yeltsin, Kostikov felt, “found himself without his internal pivot” as he came to understand that solutions to Russia’s key reform problems would take five, ten, or more years to resolve. The political system he had constructed left him and only him to answer for problems. “It was my impression,” says Kostikov, “that Yeltsin was getting lost as he faced up to the magnitude of the responsibilities he had arrogated to himself in his constitution.”66 Meantime, personnel turnover and defections had deprived Yeltsin of the most creative minds from his first months in government. Many decisions could be shunted to the trustworthy Chernomyrdin, but the prime minister was not an ideas man, and Yeltsin knew it. What discommoded him the most, as his ghostwriter Valentin Yumashev has noted, was “not psychological loneliness but intellectual loneliness.” “He had begun to feel, I don’t know what to do and I don’t have people around who can supply me with ideas that I can go forward with.”67
One should not imagine that Yeltsin’s depressions and intermissions, in all their multifariousness, went on uninterruptedly from his first to his second inauguration. One by one, he kicked them off. He returned from Sochi to appoint Gaidar and decree shock therapy in 1991; he adjusted the market reforms and accepted Chernomyrdin as his head of government in 1992; he upended the Supreme Soviet and imposed his constitution in 1993; he resumed traveling and politicking and eased Viktor Gerashchenko out of the central bank after Black Tuesday, in 1994, and that same year he picked up the tempo of privatization; he moved crabwise toward negotiations with the Chechen rebels in 1995; in 1996 he decided to run for a second term. The point is not that he failed to accomplish these things but that he did it in a stuttering fashion, which often dragged out the length of time required and intruded on the building of political coalitions to accomplish the task.
The parsing of Yeltsin’s psychodynamics would be incomplete without reference to the substance with which his name is most often linked—alcohol. Until the second half of the 1980s, drinking had a subsidiary function in his life. For the next ten years, until he had to give it up, it loomed larger and took a toll politically, physically, and reputationally.
Although doctors noted at the time that Yeltsin’s consumption increased when he moved to Moscow, and although there were some signs of it interfering with decision making, until 1991 he kept it under control. A Democratic Russia activist who saw him fifty to sixty times between 1989 and the end of 1992 never observed him affected by alcohol. Jack Matlock, the second-to-last U.S. ambassador to the USSR, saw him have drinks but never too many; his successor, Robert Strauss, reports the same. Aleksandr Korzhakov, whose exceedingly unfavorable memoir about Yeltsin, published in 1997, has served as a main source about Yeltsin’s drinking, says that when Yeltsin was chairman of the Russian parliament and under constant watch by the KGB, in 1990–91, he drank relatively little. At Yeltsin’s sixtieth birthday party in February 1991, at a children’s camp near Moscow, he sipped champagne with merrymakers and was the last to retire from the campfire.68
But the rules changed once the Kremlin was his. Korzhakov saw to it that the trunk of the presidential limousine held a satchel containing drinks, shot glasses, and appetizers, renewed daily. Yeltsin’s levels of use, family members testify, went up steadily from 1991 through 1994. His mother’s death removed a watchful parent who had always looked askance at personal excess.69 Yeltsin switched in 1993 from brandy to Gzhel’ka and grass-flavored Tarkhun vodka; he also liked a cocktail of champagne laced with cognac. Vodka, removed by Gorbachev and Yegor Ligachëv from the Kremlin menu in 1985, was reintroduced in 1993. Yeltsin’s afternoon tennis matches would often lead to the sauna and then to a meal rife with toasts. Nips were common at his private luncheons, and Yeltsin squirreled away a rainy-day supply in his office suite.
Foreign partners had to work around Yeltsin’s habit. When Bill Clinton got him on the telephone several days after Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993, Yeltsin’s speech was slurred and “he seemed barely listening to what Clinton had to say,” after which Clinton chuckled that he was “a candidate for tough love, if ever I heard one.” Clinton was to have about fifty phone conversations with Yeltsin over the seven years. To be on the safe side, his aides placed most calls before the dinner hour in Moscow.70 At his first summit meeting with Clinton in Vancouver on April 3–4, 1993, Yeltsin tossed back drinks on the warm-up day, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher and other American officials began the unbecoming practice of keeping a tally.71 First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, often seated next to Yeltsin at official banquets, found him “delightful company” and that, “as is often apparent, he enjoys a drink or two.” On the Clintons’ first official visit to Moscow, Yeltsin provided a running commentary on the food and drink, “informing me in all seriousness that red wine protected Russian sailors on nuclear-powered submarines from the ill effects of strontium 90.”72
Domestic players were more aware of the syndrome. On April 22, 1993, three days before the national referendum on approval of his policies, Yeltsin made a scheduled appearance at a large rally and rock singalong next to St. Basil’s Cathedral. He was far from sober, and Yelena Bonner took the microphone away.73 Yeltsin did not drink alone, a saving grace that may have kept him from worse problems. But drinking with confederates in the first half of the 1990s often closed him off from them, rather than open him up. He would sometimes fall silent, in his “sleeping crocodile” pose, as some called it, while continuing to watch the company. At one such event, a minister of the government offered a lewd bottoms-up. Warned that Yeltsin would not stand for such talk, he made a comment about the chief not hearing. The next morning, Yeltsin signed a decree dismissing the minister, who never reclaimed so high a post.74