In his survey of the financial collapse in Presidential Marathon, Yeltsin revisited the therapeutic imagery he had applied to shock therapy six or seven years beforehand. “A political crisis,” he wrote, “is a temporary phenomenon and is even useful in a way. I know from my life that the organism uses a crisis to overcome an illness, renew itself, and return to its customary, healthy state.”46 The passing of the great panic of 1998, however, was not followed by a revival of Boris Yeltsin’s fortunes. Instead, he was increasingly beleaguered and preoccupied by finding a way out of the jam he was in.
One reason this was so was that the economic turnaround seemed fragile and did not improve the well-being of the average Russian family for some time to come. Per-capita income and consumption reached pre-crash levels only in 2001, by which time Yeltsin was in retirement.
A more immediate problem was with the president’s personal health and ability, actual and perceived, to do his job. Yeltsin maintained mental equilibrium after the blur of events in August–September, largely out of relief that things were not worse and that Primakov had taken the bit between his teeth. It was his physical condition that worsened noticeably. One month after Primakov’s installation, Yeltsin’s occasional appearances at the Kremlin were being played up by the Russian media as “breaking news.” On a visit to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the second week of October, he had coughing spells, several times lost his footing, and returned to Moscow early.47 He checked into the Barvikha sanatorium at the end of October, went on a threeweek layoff attributed by his staff to exhaustion, and was admitted to the TsKB on November 23 with double pneumonia, staying there for better than two weeks. On January 17, 1999, he was hospitalized with a bleeding stomach ulcer. He emerged from the sanatorium in early February to fly to the funeral of King Hussein of Jordan, where Primakov had been announced as Russia’s representative. His doctors were unconditionally against the expedition. “No one understands me,” Yeltsin declared to his staff, ordering a six A.M. departure for the presidential plane.48 He was on the ground in Amman for only six hours.
The ulcer flared up again in late February. Yeltsin was readmitted for three weeks in hospital and sanatorium. The Izvestiya columnist Maksim Sokolov floridly summed up the contrast with Yeltsin in his prime: “The material out of which nature made Yeltsin is the wood from which kings are carved. Yeltsin’s and all Russia’s misfortune is that nine years of transitional burdens have managed to chew this wood into dust.”49 Attendees at the G-8 meeting in Cologne in June 1999, where Yeltsin dropped in on the final day, found that he “looked like a battered statue that might topple over at any moment.”50 After an even-keeled summer, he was in hospital for several days in October 1999 for influenza and laryngitis and, following a short visit to Istanbul—his last as president—went through it all over again in November and early December, for pneumonia.
The decline in Yeltsin’s health provoked repeated pleas in parliament and the media for him to resign. Some went so far as to appeal to Naina Yeltsina and the family to intercede to put a stop to the “public spectacle” of him “dying away” in office—unsolicited advice that the Yeltsins found deeply wounding.51
There were multitudinous markers of poorer political health after August 1998—poorer than Yeltsin had ever been in as national leader. Public-relations and policy-planning endeavors begun in 1996–97 were inaudibly abandoned. The Friday brainstorming group did not convene after the 1998 crisis. The Saturday radio chats were canceled rather than having to make amends each time for “the disaster of the week.”52 In the monthly ratings of influence in Nezavisimaya gazeta for October, the superpresident, Yeltsin, was put in third place, below Prime Minister Primakov and Mayor Luzhkov; he remained there until the February 1999 poll, when he was back in second place, with Primakov still in first.53 A corruption scandal broke out early in 1999 around the Swiss construction company Mabetex. Prosecutors in Switzerland alleged that it had paid kickbacks to Pavel Borodin and other high-level officials to secure the main contract for the reconstruction of Building No. 1, in Yeltsin’s first term. The procurator general, Yurii Skuratov, who had long been estranged from Yeltsin’s administration, launched an internal investigation. It eventually was claimed that the owner of Mabetex, Kosovar-Albanian businessman Behgjet Pacolli, had transferred a million dollars to a Hungarian bank account for President Yeltsin, supplied him and his two daughters with credit cards, and paid for expensive purchases through them. Guilt or innocence is impossible to ascertain with certainty, owing to the secrecy surrounding all these transactions, but the finger pointing at the Yeltsin family lacks credence and none of the charges was ever proved. Still, the affair was of sufficient magnitude for Yeltsin to mention it on the telephone with President Clinton in September 1999.54
Proof of an embattled presidency could not be missed in various areas. In center-periphery relations, provincial governors were among those who summoned Yeltsin to cede power during and after the 1998 crisis, and there was a spike in regional noncompliance with central laws and policy at this same time. Chechnya, brutalized by the war of 1994 to 1996, remained an open sore. Leader Aslan Maskhadov proved incapable of reining in gangsters, terrorists, and Islamic fundamentalists; dealings with Moscow became tenser by the month.55 Foreign policy had its own frustrations, as Yeltsin could not stop NATO from retaliating against Serbia for its repression of rebel forces and civilians in Kosovo. An air war against the Serbs began on March 24, 1999, leading Russia to freeze relations with the alliance.
Yeltsin’s hesitancy showed in the pattern of executive appointments. More than in unsettled periods in the past, he was prepared to select helpers who would score points for him with audiences that found him deficient. On Yumashev’s suggestion, Yeltsin on December 7, 1998, named career KGB officer Nikolai Bordyuzha to replace Yumashev as chief of the Kremlin administration. Bordyuzha retained the position of secretary of the Security Council that he had held since September. Yeltsin wrote afterward that he had doubts about Bordyuzha; they were only partly offset by assurances that at the beginning he would clear all big decisions with Yumashev. But Yeltsin swallowed his doubts, hoping the choice would send the message that he still meant business. His office “needed some force behind it, at least for show.” Let the opposition shout at him as much as they wanted. “It would be harder to do that when next to the president there stands the figure of a colonel general who simultaneously holds two of the principal positions in the state.” Yeltsin likened the decision to castling (rokirovka in Russian), the chess move that shelters the king beside a rook, away from the middle of the board.56