Yeltsin let loose with some of his opinions in the open. In August 2000, when Putin was slow to interrupt a vacation and respond to the sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, Yeltsin made it known that Putin had been insensitive. That December he took Putin to task for siding with parliamentarians who wanted to bring back the musical score of the pre-1991 Soviet anthem, with updated lyrics. “For me, the old hymn has only one association—the [Communist Party] congresses and party conferences at which the power of the party bureaucrats was confirmed and strengthened.” Yeltsin scoffed at Putin’s report that Russian athletes at the Summer Olympics in Sydney were not inspired by the nineteenth-century Glinka melody that Yeltsin instituted as the national anthem in 1993, and to which words had not yet been set. The athletes would adapt to whatever music the country required, Yeltsin said, and in any case they were young people who looked “to the future and not to the past.” On symbolic matters, he continued, “The president should not blindly follow the people’s mood; on the contrary, it is up to him to actively influence it.”15 Three weeks after Yeltsin spoke out, Putin signed the anthem bill into law.16
Putin in power at first combined economic liberalism with vigorous and often brutal prosecution of the second Chechen war and a moderate tightening of political controls. Yeltsin was in full agreement with the economic changes, which were mostly designed and implemented by younger technocrats whom he had promoted in his second term, and were pushed through the Duma by Putin’s coalition there.17 For the first wave of political changes, he expressed “restrained support.” They included new central levers over the regions and a squeeze on the more forward of the oligarchs, prompting both Vladimir Gusinskii and Boris Berezovskii to flee the country in 2001.18 Yeltsin was fully behind the drive for a military solution in Chechnya. Most of the surviving warlords from 1994 to 1996 were killed in the Russian operation, and he came to believe he had erred when he ended that first conflict on the separatists’ terms.19
With the passage of time, though, the authoritarian flavor of many of Putin’s choices in the political arena, made and executed in concert with fellow products of the security services, was increasingly at odds with Yeltsin’s more liberal outlook.20 A tender point was the curbing of media autonomy, starting with Gusinskii’s NTV network and ORT, which had been in Berezovskii’s orbit. Gusinskii and Berezovskii defended their assets more out of financial interests and power concerns than out of democratic principle,21 but the net effect was the narrowing of the sphere in which officialdom’s behavior could be held up to scrutiny. In March 2002 Yeltsin gave his consent to a suggestion by Boris Nemtsov that he chair a new supervisory board for TV-6, a small for-profit channel, previously owned by Berezovskii, that had begun to carry news programming and to which some of the journalists from NTV migrated when Gusinskii and Igor Malashenko were ousted there. Putin heard of it and insisted that Yeltsin pull out of the arrangement before it could be announced.22
The Putin administration crossed a threshold in October 2003 with the arrest of billionaire businessman Mikhail Khodorkovskii. He was put on trial for fraud and tax evasion and sentenced in 2005 to nine years in a Siberian prison camp; his oil company, Yukos, was broken up and the pieces acquired by state-dominated firms. The affair was motivated in part by Khodorkovskii’s political independence. In September 2004 Putin took advantage of a horrific hostage-taking by Chechen and pro-Chechen guerrillas in the town of Beslan, North Ossetiya, to introduce legislation ending the popular election of oblast and republic leaders and authorizing him in effect to select them from above. The Beslan tragedy and the fall of a pro-Moscow government in neighboring Ukraine in December 2004 were also followed by the imposition of stiffer restrictions on opposition groups, human-rights activists, and nongovernmental organizations. Yeltsin disapproved of these retrograde changes and others. As Yegor Gaidar, who had several searching conversations with him, summarized it the week of Yeltsin’s death, Yeltsin “was very disconcerted by much of what was going on in Russian politics.”23
The Yeltsin-Putin relationship inevitably deteriorated under these strains. Their face-to-face meetings became less frequent in 2001, occurring only every second or third month. The first three years, the Yeltsin and Putin families had a social gathering on New Year’s Eve to mark the anniversary of the transfer of power; there was none in December 2003 or any subsequent year. From late 2002 on, the leaders visited only on Yeltsin’s birthday and for chats on protocol occasions. They did not talk substance until two confidential conversations they had in Yeltsin’s final months.24 When I had a chance to ask Putin in September 2007 how it had been between them, the first thing he volunteered was that they had seen little of one another in recent years. His attitude was courteous and correct but markedly cool. Yeltsin, he said, had been satisfied with the “general course”; they were at variance on “particular problems.”25
Yeltsin, although he was more displeased with the particulars than before, was also more discreet in passing judgment on them. One reason this was so was that Putin took care not to go at him ad hominem and even to praise him on occasion for liberating Russians from the dead hand of the communist past. Yeltsin continued to trust Putin’s good intentions. If the new president was acting in error, time would heal the wounds. But the key basis for Yeltsin’s acquiescence was situational realism. It derived from the weariness with politics that had led him to leave the Kremlin ahead of schedule, his candid acknowledgment in 1999 that he had let many Russians down, the recognition that it was he who put Putin on the throne and that he bore a certain moral responsibility for Putin’s behavior, and a practical awareness of the limits of his influence as ex-president. The economic boom and the perception that order had been restored made Putin, year in and year out, as popular as Yeltsin had been during his romance with the electorate in 1990–91. He swept the 2004 presidential election with 70 percent of the popular vote, double what Yeltsin took in the first round of his 1996 re-election bid. Putin was not an easy leader to challenge.
The constraints that kept Yeltsin on the sidelines came through in his interview with Kirill Dybskii of Itogi magazine in January 2006:
DYBSKII: Does everything in current Russian politics suit you?
YELTSIN: I always have reproofs to make. It would be strange if I didn’t. But the main thing is the strategic course, and I support it and consider it the right one.
DYBSKII: But how about tactical differences?
YELTSIN: I don’t discuss these in the press. I can talk about them one on one with Vladimir Vladimirovich, but in public, as they say in the West, no comment. Don’t forget, I’m not a public politician any more.
DYBSKII: But knowledgeable people say it is impossible to get out of politics entirely.
YELTSIN: Perhaps [you can keep at it] if you have the force of will and the brains. But you need to figure out that there is a time to leave, to make way for the young, to stop interfering. Of course, in my inner thoughts I constantly analyze what is going on in the country and try to guess what I would have done in this or that context. But here’s where I have to stop myself and say, “Hold on! Today the president of the country is named Putin and not Yeltsin….” I hope I had the intelligence and the selfmastery to depart the proper way. So you’re not going to hear any critical comments from me. Why sow discord? This is of no use to the country or its leader. I am the one who put Putin forward and I ought to support him….