Yeltsin’s overindulgence was elevated from an open secret to a public issue in 1994. On August 31 he was in Berlin to represent the country at ceremonies with Chancellor Kohl to mark the departure of Russian forces from the former East Germany. He had gotten a head start the night before by bending elbows at the hotel with Defense Minister Pavel Grachëv. On that day, in baking heat, he imbibed enthusiastically. After lunch, on the square in front of the High Renaissance city Rathaus, where a brass band from the local police was serenading the troops with march music, Yeltsin motioned for the stick from the conductor. Bent at the waist, he woozily stabbed the air with it for several minutes as the band played on gallantly. Minutes later, he took up a microphone to lead the assembled Russians through unmelodious couplets from the folk song “Kalinka-Malinka” (Juniper-Raspberry), concluding with a whoop, a thumb-up sign, and kisses blown to the tittering crowd.75
Yeltsin’s political advisers, a gaggle of whom were there, considered resignation and decided against it. Kostikov inserted vocal articles about the pratfall in Berlin into his daily media reviews. Yeltsin knit his brows upon seeing the material but did not comment. They then tried to convince Korzhakov to level with Yeltsin. He declined, saying he had tried to reason with Yeltsin in the past, but suggested they write the president a letter, something assistant Viktor Ilyushin, who had worked with him since the 1970s, at first opposed as counterproductive. The supercautious Ilyushin came around, and Kostikov cobbled together a collective letter. It was signed by seven people: Kostikov; Ilyushin, who gave it a final edit; Korzhakov and his colleague from the security services, Mikhail Barsukov; Vladimir Shevchenko, the long-suffering chief of presidential protocol; speechwriter Lyudmila Pikhoya; and Dmitrii Ryurikov, Yeltsin’s foreign-policy assistant. Korzhakov delivered the missive by hand on September 10, on a presidential flight to Sochi. The document—wags in the press, which got wind of it, named it “The Letter of the Aides to Their Sultan,” after a nineteenth-century painting by Il’ya Repin—took the president to task for his hermetic tendencies; his complacency and “tsarist” airs; his aversion to planning, which left too many decisions to hang on “irrational factors, chance, and even caprice”; and his separation from past and prospective allies. The authors did not trace all or most of Yeltsin’s problems to alcohol. But, using code to spare his feelings, they stated clearly that in their estimation his dependency—“the well-known Russian vice”—was dragging him down. The signals he had sent in Berlin were “impossible to ignore and difficult to correct.” He needed, they said, “to reassess once and for all your attitude toward your health and your harmful habits,” halt “unexpected disappearances and periods of rehabilitation,” and find ways of decompressing other than “athletics followed by a banquet.” No ruler of Russia before or since has seen the likes of it.76
Yeltsin sulked. He would not shake hands with the messengers for weeks, excluded several of them from a trip to London and Washington, and did not speak to Pikhoya for six months. Kostikov in November was to be handed the honeyed exile of the Russian ambassadorship to the Vatican. Walking the beach in Sochi in mid-September, Yeltsin meditated on his behavior and, he says, made a resolution “to revive [his] strength” and set limits.77 So the message was in a way received, although the incidents, including documented ones abroad, did not stop.78
Yeltsin had progressed from convivial social drinking to drinking with abandon as a balm for a battered ego—to lighten the weight of the world in a period of extreme personal tension. Only in Presidential Marathon, the memoir volume published after his retirement, did Yeltsin begin to concede what had happened: “At a certain time, I sensed that alcohol is a means that rapidly relieves stress.” In Berlin he had been beset by the emotion of the moment and by the onerousness of his office. “The load eased after several glasses, and then, in that light-headed condition, it was possible for me to conduct an orchestra.” Yeltsin wrote it up with a self-pitying slap at those who harped on the theme: “If it was not the blasted alcohol, it would have been something else, they would found some other vulnerable point.”79
Drinking in moderation and on his own time might have been good for Yeltsin’s mental health and equanimity. Drinking immoderately and on the government’s time was a self-inflicted wound that brought no good to anyone. While he must bear responsibility, it is only fair to observe that others tolerated and even condoned his behavior. Naina Yeltsina did her best to restrain her husband and chided associates who did not. She and her daughters blamed Aleksandr Korzhakov for feeding the alcohol habit so as to maintain his personal access to the president. By 1995 Naina was avoiding social contact with Korzhakov for this reason.80 Korzhakov denies the charge, and is half-right in doing so. As the authors of The Yeltsin Epoch point out, he “knew how to ‘regulate the process’” and could be either an enabler or a restrainer. And Korzhakov was but one of those around Yeltsin who saw benefit to them in lifting a glass with the president. For the Berlin incident, the inciter was Pavel Grachëv: “Every shot of vodka taken with Yeltsin was like a star on his general’s epaulets.”81
The “letter to the sultan” was better late than never. But Yeltsin and Russia would have been better served if more people had taken a stand, earlier, and put their positions on the line if that was what it took. Even the Berlin signatories did not have the temerity to speak to him about their handiwork. Yeltsin asked Pikhoya why she signed the letter but had not once brought up the issue in person. “There are situations,” she said sotto voce, “where it is easier to write than to speak.”82 This was one of them. “I was not going to make excuses for myself in front of my assistants,” Yeltsin says of the epistle. “I doubt whether any of them would have been able to help me. The distance between us was too great.”83 The author of that distance was Boris Yeltsin, whose personality cowed those who might have helped.
Yeltsin was not the first modern statesman to have a soft spot for Bacchus. One study of modern rulers estimates 15 percent of them abused alcohol at one time or another, or about the same proportion as in the American population.84 Kemal Atatürk of Turkey and Winston Churchill, to mention two great leaders, ingested potables in quantities that would put Yeltsin to shame.85 No sensible historian would reduce Atatürk’s or Churchill’s career to his drinking escapades. None should do that to Yeltsin’s, either.
Yeltsin opponents and haters sometimes tried to link his alcohol use to political outcomes. Gorbachev complained to his staff in November 1991 that Gennadii Burbulis and Yeltsin’s entourage were plying Yeltsin with liquor to get him to concur in their separatist designs and that there was a danger he would be a “blind pawn” of others.86 There is no credible evidence of this ever being the case. Foreign partners found Boris Yeltsin’s drinking to be irrelevant, other than in distracting him and lengthening the communications and negotiations. At the Vancouver meeting with President Clinton in 1993, Yeltsin’s conduct on the first evening “didn’t seem to impair his performance the next morning. The summit was a success.”87 In domestic politics, none of Yeltsin’s crucial actions in his first term, before he swore off drinking, happened because of alcohol or under the influence of alcohol.
But drinking was detrimental to the Yeltsin presidency through more roundabout routes. In the early 1990s, the Russians forgave it, seeing it as secondary to his crusade to improve their lives, and in some cases thinking it connoted soulfulness and the release of inhibitions. When his quiet revolution went sour, it was taken as validation of egocentrism and transmogrified into a political liability.88 It sparked rumors of misbehavior even when there was none, something he resented but was helpless to counter. It disrupted his schedule and his accessibility to interlocutors. In July 1993 Ruslan Khasbulatov arranged for President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan to visit to mediate the affray between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet. A meeting was arranged for the ABTs guesthouse. Yeltsin was not adequate to the task and Nazarbayev had to leave without seeing him. Khasbulatov blamed “the forces behind” Yeltsin for wrecking the plan.89 Lower-ranking political tasks, such as press briefings, were shortchanged as the tennis/steambath/dining cycle waxed in importance. But the greatest harm was that done to Yeltsin’s health.