Sifting through the not very good alternatives, Yeltsin decided to go under the knife. He revealed to Russian television on September 5 that he had a sick heart and would submit to an unspecified procedure at the end of the month, and in Moscow: “The president is supposed to have operations at home [in Russia].” In that he had been noncommittal in his last meeting with the doctors, his statement was to them “like a thunderclap in an unclouded sky”—a vintage Yeltsin surprise.9
Acting in character, Yeltsin put a brave face on the situation to Itogi and posed it as a test of his abilities and self-command: “Some say to me, Take care of yourself, don’t go to any special difficulty, spare yourself. But I can’t spare myself! A president should not allow himself this…. Russians didn’t vote for me so that I would spare myself.”10 If consenting to the surgery could be rationalized as an affirmative act, it was also a blow to Yeltsin’s ego, as he was to admit in his memoirs:
For so many years, I had kept the sensation of myself as a ten-year-old boy: I can do absolutely anything! That is right, absolutely anything! I could climb a tree or float on a raft down the river. I could hike across the taiga. I could go days on end without sleeping or spend hours in the steambath. I could defeat any opponent. You name it, I could do it. But a person’s omnipotence can disappear in a flash. Someone else—the doctors, destiny—acquires power over his body. [I asked myself] was this new “I” needed by his loved ones? Was he needed by the country as a whole?11
He was admitted to the TsKB, the central Kremlin hospital, on September 12. The Yeltsins took Chazov’s advice to bring in a group of consultants from Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, headed by the pioneering cardiac surgeon Michael E. DeBakey, whose professional contacts with Soviet and Russian peers went back to the 1950s. The Americans came to the conclusion that his heart was failing and the bypass operation was the patient’s only hope. DeBakey delivered his verdict on September 25. He informed Yeltsin the bypass should let him live comfortably for ten to fifteen years. “I’ll do what you say if you can put me back in my office,” Yeltsin replied, which DeBakey told him was doable.12
Yeltsin took a month more to lose weight, overcome transient anemia from gastrointestinal bleeding, and improve his thyroid function. Reconciled to his fate, he was wheeled into the cardiology center’s operating theater at seven A.M. on November 5. Before going under, he temporarily ceded his constitutional powers, among them those of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, to Chernomyrdin.13 The twelve-member operating team was led by Renat Akchurin, who had spent a sabbatical in Houston and was Chernomyrdin’s surgeon in 1992. DeBakey, four American colleagues, and two Germans watched them on closed-circuit television from an adjoining room, with devices for ventricular assistance at the ready if needed. Yeltsin’s chest was opened and portions of his left internal mammary artery and saphenous vein were transferred to form five grafts on the heart. The painstaking work took seven hours. For sixty-eight minutes, heartbeat was stopped and his blood was circulated by a heart-lung machine. The muscle restarted on its own without chemical stimulation.14
The operation was a lifesaver. Yeltsin’s coronary ejection fraction rose to 50 percent, still subnormal but not menacing. In gratitude, he was to have the Presidential Business Department quietly allocate larger apartments to Akchurin and six anesthesiologists and nurses.15 But rehabilitation was long and uncertain. Yeltsin was taken off the ventilator on November 6 and initialed a decree taking authority back from Chernomyrdin, twenty-three hours after giving it away. He pestered the doctors into moving him on November 8 to the TsKB, where the VIP suite had secure communication lines. On November 20, the sutures removed, he was allowed a stroll in the hospital park. The yard “was dank, quiet, and cold. I went slowly along the path and looked at the brown leaves and the November sky. It was autumn, the autumn of a president.”16 On November 22 he was taken to the Barvikha sanatorium to rest.
Yeltsin went home on December 4. Home until 2001 was not Barvikha-4, which came under renovation that summer, but Gorki-9, a state dacha in Usovo, just upriver on the Moskva. (The household kept the apartment in Krylatskoye as a Moscow address, but Yeltsin seems not to have stayed one night there in his second term.) His medical condition would force him to spend far more time at Gorki-9 than he had at Barvikha-4. The house had been built in the late 1920s for Lenin’s successor as chairman of the Soviet government, Aleksei Rykov; it was Vyacheslav Molotov’s country place for twenty-five years and Nikita Khrushchev’s from 1958 to 1964. After then, it was used mostly as a governmental guest manor. Gorki-9 was nondescript, with narrow Grecian columns in front and a hotel-style layout; long corridors on two floors opened left and right onto small rooms. It was rather dilapidated ; in 2000 part of the second-floor ceiling was to fall in.17 To regain his strength, Yeltsin perambulated the extensive grounds where Khrushchev, who fancied himself an agriculture expert, had in his day planted vegetables, flowers, and berries. Khrushchev liked the path around the property because it was level, and this no doubt was an attraction to Yeltsin.18
Yeltsin was restricted to thirty minutes of business conversation daily, signing decrees and bills (a facsimile signature was used for protocol decisions), and meeting several times weekly with Chubais.19 On December 23 he finally made it to his Kremlin desk for an hour or two. He was on top of the world. “I had a palpable sensation of impatience, a desire to work…. I was another person. I could deal with any problem.”20 On December 31 he attended the mayor’s annual tree-trimming party in the Kremlin. Several days later he went to a steambath. It had not been properly heated, and he caught cold. He was hospitalized on January 7 with double pneumonia and could not drag himself back to the office until the last week of the month. One of his first foreign visitors, on February 21, was the new U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. She found him “like a figure made of wax,” his face pasty and his body “startlingly thin” (he was sixty pounds lighter than at his inauguration). Nonetheless, “Yeltsin’s voice was strong and his blue eyes sparkled.”21
Healthwise, 1997 was the best year of Yeltsin’s second term. He made rapid strides that spring. Foreign statesmen saw it in Paris on May 27, at the signing of the “founding act” that formalized Russia’s begrudging acceptance of the eastward expansion of the NATO bloc. In the grand ballroom of the Élysée Palace, he gave an earthy reminder of the Yeltsin of old:
When Yeltsin joined the sixteen allied leaders and [Secretary General] Javier Solana at the podium, he behaved as though he were a famous comic actor listening to testimonials before accepting a lifetime achievement award: He knew that the occasion required solemnity, but he couldn’t help giving the fans a little of what they’d come to expect from him. Yeltsin’s expression kept changing. One minute he was beaming with pleasure as the other dignitaries, one by one, praised his statesmanship as well as his credentials as a reformer and democrat; the next he was screwing up his face in exaggerated concentration on the weightiness of the moment. When it came time for him to sign the Founding Act, he took a huge breath, wrote his name with a flourish, then gave Solana a bear hug and a big kiss on both cheeks.22