Another drama, playing out covertly, was about the incumbent’s medical condition, which had been abraded by stress, travel, and twelve-hour workdays. On June 23, midway between the two halves of the election, Yeltsin was hit with chest pains while on a whistle stop in Russia’s Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad. On June 26, resting at Barvikha-4, he was stricken with a fourth heart attack. His presiding physician, Anatolii Grigor’ev, was in the room and revived and medicated him. The seizure was kept secret and Yeltsin’s disappearance written off to a head cold. NTV’s president, Igor Malashenko, knew Yeltsin was in a bad way, if not the details, yet kept information about his condition out of the news. As he told me, he would have preferred “the corpse of Yeltsin” to Zyuganov alive.106 On June 28 Yeltsin somehow bulled ahead with a meeting with Lebed on Chechnya. The klieg lights were shining and television cameras were whirring, but the scene was staged by staffers in a room of the Barvikha sanatorium, with them and the medical attendants edited out of the videotape.107 All campaign appearances were canceled. Viktor Chernomyrdin read out a greeting to several thousand farm workers in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, who had gathered to hear the president. It did not sit well, and by Chubais’s estimate Yeltsin was losing 1 or 2 percentage points in the polls every day.108 On July 3 it was all Yeltsin could do to take several steps with his wife and hand in a ballot slip at the polling station located in the sanatorium.
Irrespective of the fears, voting in the runoff went very much as planned. Yeltsin received 40,208,384 votes, about five million fewer than in 1991 but enough to outpoll Zyuganov by 54 percent to 41 percent. He carried fifty-seven of eighty-nine provinces, bettering his 1991 numbers in scattered oblasts and a number of the minority republics, losing strength in the red belt and the Muslim republics of the North Caucasus, and holding his own elsewhere. In between rounds, Yeltsin’s share of the popular vote went up 19 percentage points and Zyuganov’s by only 8 points. Division around the question of returning to communism or escaping it was more complete than in the opening round: 90-plus percent of those who favored the new political system voted for Yeltsin; 80 percent of those who wanted to re-create the communist system went for Zyuganov. Healthy majorities of the first-round supporters of the non-communist candidates other than Zhirinovskii went for the president now that their top choices were out of the game: 57 percent of the Lebed voters, 67 percent of Yavlinskii voters, 30 percent of Zhirinovskii voters, and 57 percent of those who had voted for the lightweight candidates.109
Yeltsin had rejuvenated himself politically just as he was failing corporeally. He entered his second term as Russia’s leader under contradictory stars, one of them encouraging and the other pointing in a discouraging direction. The night of July 3, family and friends gave him teary hugs and flowers. He had accomplished “a fantastic, surprising victory.” He wished he could dance a jig, and one suspects he would not have been averse to some liquid refreshment, but these were beyond him: “I lay in my hospital bed and gazed tensely at the ceiling.”110 Right he was to be tense. The game hereafter was about Yeltsin trying to resume Russia’s progress while grappling with grievous physical limitations and with power parameters that had changed subtly and unsubtly from those of his first term.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Autumn of a President
President Yeltsin’s fourth proven heart attack, on June 26, 1996, was the most invasive to date and came on the heels of indication after indication that he was at the end of his rope.1 The consilium of ten physicians watching over him during the campaign had sent a letter to Aleksandr Korzhakov on May 20 warning of “changes of a negative character” in his state of health, the result of “the mounting burdens on him, physically and emotionally,” and of his sleep allotment dwindling to three or four hours a night. “Such a work regimen poses a real threat to the health and life of the president.” The Yeltsins were apprised of the findings, although Korzhakov inexplicably withheld the letter.2 El’dar Ryazanov, filming a conversation for broadcast, found Yeltsin on June 2 “a whole other man” than the last time they spoke, in November 1993: sallow-complected, careworn, and churlish. Had a rival obtained the unedited footage of the interview, Ryazanov is sure Yeltsin would never have been re-elected. “When I left, I was disheartened. I thought to myself, My God, if he wins, in whose hands will Russia find itself?”3 He still voted for Yeltsin.
The second inauguration, on August 9, was low-key, in contrast to July 1991. Plans for another inaugural address went by the boards. The event was moved indoors into the Kremlin Palace of Congresses instead of Cathedral Square, in the sunlight. Onstage, looking pudgy but frail, Yeltsin swore the oath in forty-five seconds, his hand on a bound copy of the constitution and his eyes on a teleprompter primed to help him notice the pauses. The speaker of the upper house of parliament, Yegor Stroyev, slipped the presidential chain of office around his neck.4 It was done within sixteen minutes:
Knowing his condition, Boris Yeltsin was extremely nervous. But once awareness set in that it was all behind him, that he been installed in office again, it was as if he had gotten a second wind. After the official ceremony, attendees at the state reception were surprised to see quite a different person. He entered the hall briskly, made a brief but animated toast, and even chatted up several guests. After about a half hour, he left. It was obvious to everyone who witnessed the official start to Yeltsin’s second presidential term that the ill-health of the leader was now a basic factor in Russian politics.5
On July 16 Yeltsin appointed Anatolii Chubais, his campaign mastermind, as presidential chief of staff, sending Nikolai Yegorov, a political soulmate of the demoted Korzhakov, back to Krasnodar as governor.6 The press dubbed Chubais Russia’s “regent.” For prime minister, Yeltsin stayed with the old pro Viktor Chernomyrdin, whom the State Duma confirmed uncomplainingly on August 10.
The theme of the next half year was apolitical—Yeltsin’s fight for elementary survival and recovery. Injections of a clot-dissolving drug eased unstable angina in July. After the induction, a battery of tests, beginning with the coronary angiogram he had refused in 1995 (an X-ray of the heart arteries, using iodized liquid), was done at the Moscow Cardiology Center. German surgeons tapped by Helmut Kohl advised from afar that the Russians consider an arterial bypass and have it done abroad. The conferences with the family were awkward, as Yevgenii Chazov, the director of the Moscow center, was the one who, as USSR health minister, had supervised Yeltsin’s care on behalf of the Politburo after the 1987 secret speech. Some of the medicos feared Yeltsin would not withstand a multiple bypass operation and were hopeful he could get away with balloon angioplasty. Chazov thought the risk was “colossal” but Yeltsin had to chance it.7 The blood ejection fraction from the left ventricle, a standard index of operating efficiency, was 22 percent; a healthy person’s is 55 to 75 percent. Without an intervention, Chazov and his deputies gauged the life expectancy of someone with these symptoms to be one and a half to two years. The choice, they told the family, was either bypass surgery or curtailment of Yeltsin’s activities to several hours a day and an end to most exertion and travel—diminution from governing president to a figurehead.
Yeltsin was apprehensive of the dangers of open-heart surgery and the loss of control it would entail. His daughter Tatyana took Sergei Parkhomenko, the editor of the newsmagazine Itogi, into her confidence. In late August she came into possession of a draft of an article Itogi was about to print on the pros and cons of an operation; she thought it would help ease his fears, provided she and her mother could share it with him before publication. Parkhomenko delayed the piece by one week and was rewarded with a written interview with the president. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, a former heart patient, also sang the therapy’s praises to Yeltsin.8