Yeltsin was in similarly fine fettle at the G-8 meeting in Denver in June, when the G-7 club of industrial powers was enlarged to include Russia. On his summer vacation at Shuiskaya Chupa and Volzhskii Utës in July and August, which Russian television cameras were allowed to show, he was tanned and relaxed. He did not have another setback until December, when he had to be treated for a respiratory infection.
Memories of the cover-up of his June 1996 heart attack and of his long nonappearance at the Kremlin were fresh, though, and more than anything explain the subsidence of Yeltsin’s approval ratings to the depths they had hit before the 1996 campaign.23 Aleksandr Korzhakov, elected to the Duma in a February by-election, came out with his voyeuristic book about Yeltsin in August 1997; it gave details on his health problems and first-term drinking extravagances.24 Armchair diagnoses of some untreatable condition circulated in the press and the Moscow rumor mill—that he suffered from Alzheimer’s, diabetes, Parkinson’s, dropsy, a brain tumor, or cirrhosis of the liver. All were false, but suspicions lingered. Aleksandr Salii, a KPRF legislator, claimed in June to have evidence that Yeltsin was so far gone that a body double had been standing in for him, and demanded that the procurator general’s office investigate. This featherbrained line of questioning would go on for years, reaching a low point in a potboiler published in 2005 whose thesis was that Yeltsin died during a heart-transplant operation in 1996, before the election, and was replaced by an imposter on the payroll of the CIA.25
The fact remained that Yeltsin was getting on in years, was in compromised general health, and was prone to emergencies and indispositions, which were to recur with greater frequency and harshness in 1998 and 1999. He put back on most of the girth he lost in 1996. The last flecks of gray in his mane had given over to snowy white and his voice had deepened from baritone to a raspy bass. His walk was stiff. Staff plotted itineraries at home and overseas that got around high staircases; three or four doctors, one of them a cardiologist, flew with him on all his foreign travels (this practice was begun in the first term); a larger medical area was built into the new presidential jet, an Ilyushin-96, delivered in 1996.26 By this age, political leaders in societies with far higher levels of well-being and healthcare than post-Soviet Russia may be hard-pressed to discharge their duties. Yeltsin had marked his sixty-sixth birthday shortly before returning to the Kremlin in 1997, which made him one year older than Dwight Eisenhower when he was felled by his big heart attack in 1955—and only one year younger than Yeltsin’s father when he had a devastating stroke in 1973.
Gone were the swagger and stamina that had been Yeltsin trademarks in Berezniki, Sverdlovsk, and Moscow. His beloved tennis and cold-water swims had to be put aside, and there were no more road shows or boogeying à la Ufa or Rostov.27 He was left with tame leisure pursuits like swimming, in heated pools, trout fishing, driving powerboats and snowmobiles, and billiards, in which he could still run the table and shoot from behind his back. And he was somewhat more given to verbal faux pas and dizzy spells. In Paris for the NATO confab in May 1997, for example, he proclaimed that Russian forces were going to take the nuclear warheads off their strategic missiles; they were not, and aides spent the rest of the meeting doing damage control. His visit to Stockholm in December 1997 brought stray claims about nuclear weapons and momentary confusion about whether he was in Sweden or Finland. A highlight of his call on Pope John Paul II in February 1998 was his declaration during a Vatican banquet of his “undying love for Rome, Italy, and Italian women.” Yeltsin referred to glitches like these by the abstruse Russian word zagogulina, which stands for “curlicue,” “squiggle,” or “bit of mischief.” The mishaps sometimes had a physical aspect. At a news conference at Stockholm city hall, for instance, his knees buckled and press secretary Sergei Yastrzhembskii had to prop him up, “trying to make it appear as if he were handing Yeltsin some important pieces of paper.”28
Russian journalists reported these occurrences in gory detail, as they had every right to. Memories were short, for there had been malapropisms when Yeltsin was healthy, too, and some observers had thought them endearing at the time (and this is not to mention those made over the years by leaders in other countries—think no further than the forty-third president of the United States).29 The misstatements and also the stumbles were interpreted much less charitably in the altered Russian context.
Anxiety over the condition of his circulatory system persisted after the operation. Yeltsin was bothered by insomnia, as before 1996, and used prescription sleeping pills. He took analgesics for pain in his back and asked doctors whether the pangs were connected with his heart condition; the doctors said they were not. Conspiracy buffs hypothesized that illness excused Yeltsin from answering tough questions about policy and was helpful as a loyalty test, in clarifying who was willing to stand by him and who was not.30 Maybe there was something to these theories, but Yeltsin on any given day was more apt to feel caged in by his limitations. Family members say that the one great regret of his second term was the failure to recover bodily vigor, as he had trusted he would when he consented to the surgery.
Yeltsin’s medical situation necessitated a substantial reduction in his time at official workplaces. He was still an early bird (rising for a freezing shower at five A.M.), but many days he stayed at home and his spokesmen told the media he was “working with documents.” When he did come to the office, it was usually at 9:00 or 9:30, and stays after the midday meal around two P.M. were the exception rather than the rule. In January, February, and March of 1998, for instance, Yeltsin lasted after four P.M. on only seven or eight days; on two of them, it was for state dinners (for the king of Belgium and the Ukrainian president). The correspondent who disinterred this information titled her exposé “Yeltsin in Gorki.” Russian readers would have seen the double entendre. Gorki (not to be confused with Gorki-9 or Gorki-10) is a former nobleman’s estate south and west of Moscow where Vladimir Lenin lived as an invalid from his cerebral hemorrhage in May 1922 to his death in January 1924. A photo of a sunken-eyed Lenin in a rattan wheelchair, a blanket draped over his knees, was reprinted in many Soviet history texts.31
While it was patent that Yeltsin was not his former self, some of the coverage of his condition was misleading. He was acutely ill in hospital eight times between November 1996 and December 1999, and while on vacation he was out of touch with most staff for one or two weeks a year. The rest of the time, if and when his departure from the Kremlin was on the early side, he would indeed work “with documents” at Gorki-9. Yeltsin went on long, restful vacations, true, but so do many other world leaders with fewer health concerns. Ronald Reagan, for example, took 436 vacation days in eight years, or an average of fifty-five days a year, spending many of them at his ranch in Santa Barbara, California. George W. Bush had taken 418 days by mid-2007, or sixty-four a year, mostly in Crawford, Texas, and President Eisenhower is said to have spent 222 days playing golf in Augusta, Georgia.32 Yeltsin’s vacation time after 1996 was of the order of thirty or forty days a year. When in the country near Moscow, he made more use of the telephone than in the past. Politicos and bureaucrats were expected to come to him when invited, which a handful were on most workdays. Unlike Lenin in the 1920s, he was not dying, was not a shut-in, and had not lost cognitive capacity.33