The bottom line politically was that when the second-term Yeltsin rationed his effort and expended it purposefully, he still had the last word in national affairs. As it was put by Sergei Stepashin, who filled a number of positions in the second administration and was his next-to-last prime minister, Yeltsin made “all decisions about goals and strategy” in his government.34
One fortuitous byproduct of worsened health was that it prompted a near cessation of Yeltsin’s drinking. Consuming alcohol in volume, daily or almost daily, stopped for him in 1996. The craving diminished greatly during his reclusiveness before and after surgery. Self-preservation supplied the most hardheaded of motives: Akchurin and Chazov told him bluntly that not to give the habit up would be the death of him, and Yeltsin took their word for it. He was instructed to hold himself to a glassful of wine a day—advice he followed to the letter, he wrote in Presidential Marathon.35 The fall of Aleksandr Korzhakov and the faction around him removed the small-group medium in which Yeltsin had found drinking most congenial. Naina Yeltsina’s say over his diet and routine increased markedly. For state receptions and dinners, the family had the Kremlin kitchen lay in red wine adulterated with colored water, specially prepared for the president’s table. On social occasions, according to his daughter Tatyana, he might allow himself one, two, or, rarely, three glasses of dry red wine or champagne, but he knew when to stop.36 These restraints seem to have been breached on a limited number of occasions, although even domestic and foreign observers who record them note the contrast with the first term.37 Alcohol had ceased to be the part of Yeltsin’s life that it was in the first half of the 1990s, and no longer figured significantly in his relations with others.
More’s the pity that he received no political dividends from this sobriety. Most Russians did not know his conduct had changed, and most analysts of those years write as if it had not. Yeltsin’s privacy fetish and embarrassment over past miscues deterred him from providing any kind of explanation. It would have been undignified, as he put it in his final memoir volume, to “beat my breast” about the issue, and many would never have taken his word for it anyway.38 He was in a when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife trap: He could not say he had licked the vice without admitting he had it in the first place, which he was not willing to do until after retirement. Without a signal from him, no one in the government or the Kremlin could talk about the subject, and the press corps, for its part, considered it taboo.
Another change for the better was in psychological humor. The truncated second term was on the whole, his daughter said in an interview, “a calmer period” mentally for Yeltsin than the first.39 He was less subject than back in the day to the mood swings between sleeping giant and snarling tiger. Physical debilitation precluded the spikes of supercharged effort, and the letdowns in their wake, that punctuated the first term: “I had endured a lot and, you could say, I had returned from the dead. I could not solve problems as I used to, by mustering all my physical strength and charging headon into frontal clashes. That wasn’t for me anymore.”40 Objectively, Russia’s “reformist breakthrough,” as Yeltsin termed it in October 1991, was behind him. The foundations of a post-communist order had been laid, for better or worse, and his re-election ruled out a communist restoration for now. Although there would be political exigencies—the 1998 financial crash and the 1999 attempt to impeach him stand out—nothing would measure up to the initiation of shock therapy, the constitutional donnybrook of 1993, the first Chechen war, or the 1996 election. About his own role, Yeltsin seems to have been more philosophical following his second inauguration, more accepting that his main work was done and judgment of it would be up to history. And, in his presidential autumn, the end of his time at the top, and the transfer of power to friend or foe, were on the horizon. Someone else would soon be opening the color-coded files in Building No. 1.
From the summer of 1996 to the spring of 1997, Yeltsin’s leadership was in reactive mode. Besides weathering his parlous recovery and enforced leave, he was limited to tying up loose ends from the campaign. Promises that were affordable or whose costs could be deferred until better times were satisfying to return to. Small-change works projects and giveaways authorized during the campaign went ahead, at considerable expense to the budget. The cities of Ufa and Kazan used federal and provincial resources to start tunneling their subways in 1997; they opened to riders in 2004 and 2005 and are supposed to be under construction until the year 2040.
Cleaning up unpaid wages and social allowances was like rolling a boulder up a steep hill again and again. To give the government the wherewithal to make good on claims, Yeltsin in October 1996 appointed a Temporary Extraordinary Commission for Strengthening Tax and Budgetary Discipline. Chaired by the prime minister, it went colloquially by the name VChK, a contraction of three of the Cyrillic letters in its tongue-twisting title—the very same acronym as the first version of the Soviet secret police in 1917, and taken as instilling the Kremlin’s seriousness of purpose. Yeltsin thought the problem well on the way to solution until he met with the commission in January 1997 and learned there was no timetable for catching up in the state sector. He threatened to issue a decree mandating full back payment of pensions by April 1 and then settled grumpily for a July 1 deadline.41 There was no fix by July 1. Only strenuous effort got the total nonpayments in the economy by year’s end down to the level of about $8 billion where they had stood in January, and they were to rise in the first half of 1998. Individuals and Russian families made adjustments on their own, as well as they could.42
The most urgent item on the presidential agenda was Chechnya, where fighting had resumed right after the electoral runoff. On August 6, 1996, Chechen units commanded by Aslan Maskhadov attacked Grozny. The Russians under Konstantin Pulikovskii counterattacked, and the city was ablaze as Yeltsin took his oath of office. On August 11 he made Aleksandr Lebed, the electoral rival whom he had brought into his administration in between rounds of the election, his personal envoy to the republic and ordered him to hammer out an agreement that would honor his pledge to put a stop to the war and bring the boys home. With General Pulikovskii’s troops encircled and running short of supplies, Lebed and Maskhadov signed an armistice at Khasavyurt, Dagestan, on August 30. Yeltsin may have been able to push around the Chechen delegation in the Kremlin in May; on the field of battle, the superior morale and mobility of the rebels gave them the edge over the Russian conscripts. Khasavyurt deferred determination of the province’s final status until 2001 and made provision for the exodus of all army and MVD forces. Yeltsin and Maskhadov, by then the elected president of Chechnya, would formalize the agreement as a treaty on May 12, 1997. The Chechens had won de facto recognition, the expunging of all Muscovite influence, and a promise of economic aid. Yeltsin had bought peace, at a heavy price but one that public opinion at the time wanted paid.
Dissension over Chechnya between Lebed and Anatolii Kulikov, the free-spoken interior minister who had helped talk Yeltsin out of canceling the presidential election, and who was on close terms with Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, broke into the open in September 1996. Kulikov, not without reason, felt the Khasavyurt terms were ambiguous and that it was only a matter of time before the war restarted. Lebed further antagonized him by reproving the MVD troops under Kulikov’s command and, says Kulikov, by scheming to institute a “Russian Legion,” a crack military force that would report to Lebed as national security adviser and would be reinforced by 1,500 Chechen guerrillas. Anatolii Chubais publicly backed Kulikov and drew counterfire from Lebed.43