DYBSKII: But it used to be that you criticized openly. For example, you complained about the new Russian anthem and said it was just the old Soviet one dressed up.
YELTSIN: I grumbled a little, and then I calmed down. And what came of it? The anthem stayed in place.26
Matters of state were forgotten when Yeltsin on February 1, 2006, accepted Putin’s hospitality for a seventy-fifth birthday party in the Kremlin palace. It was his last hurrah before a political audience. Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl, Patriarch Aleksii II, and Mstislav Rostropovich, and all of Yeltsin’s prime ministers headed the guest list of three hundred. They were treated to champagne and canapés in Alexander Nevsky Hall, chamber music in St. Andrei’s Hall, and a dinner of pheasant, sturgeon, and veal in St. George’s Hall. He had been a free man since 2000, Yeltsin said in his toast to the company, and would not trade it for anything. For the first time in a thousand years a past leader of Russia “did not have his head chopped off ” and got to enjoy an evening in his honor in the Kremlin. During the response toasts, he sat with a microphone in hand, “like at a production meeting,” prepared “to give a piece of his mind to subordinates,” which he did several times. Viktor Chernomyrdin drew the loudest applause. Yeltsin had been hard to work with and was no angel, “But angels are not able to govern the state.”27
Yeltsin liked to tell his wife and children that he intended to see one hundred but might be willing to settle for eighty-five. As he grew old, he grew more introspective, and as he did he gave considerable thought to spiritual issues. There was abundant media speculation in Russia in 2007 that he had undergone a religious re-conversion and died a devout Orthodox Christian. It was whetted by the church funeral he received, by word that he had gone on a trip to the biblical Holy Land weeks before his fatal illness, and by the Patriarch’s statement at the fortieth-day rite, on June 1, that Yeltsin in recent times had journeyed from atheism to being a believer (veruyushchii).
It is clear that Yeltsin’s curiosity about, and regard for, religion revived during and after the collapse of communism. When he and Billy Graham spent an hour together in Moscow in July 1991, it was with pride that he said his grandchildren all wore crucifixes around their necks. “I could tell,” Graham recalled, “that he was growing in his sympathetic attitude toward the church and toward the gospel.”28 Yeltsin attended services on holidays from the late 1980s onward; during them, he would make an offering, light a votive candle, and cross himself in the Orthodox fashion, right shoulder before the left. At his mother’s funeral in 1993, he is said to have queried one of the priests about the afterlife.29 His attention to religious themes appears to have increased after 2000. In an interview in 2006, he for the only time in public referred to God as a presence and to himself as having a souclass="underline" “For me, God is the creature who knows what goes on in my soul. He sees within me that which no one else sees. And I want to believe God sees that my thoughts have been clean.”30 In late March and early April of 2007, he traveled to Jordan, which he had seen once before, on government business, in 1999. He and Naina stayed at a Dead Sea resort and took a drive one day to the River Jordan. Yeltsin waded in and washed his face in the waters of the river, close by the place Jesus is thought to have been baptized. The couple, in Naina’s words, “warmly addressed God” by voicing words of prayer together.31
Despite these incidents, Yeltsin, like most Russians, did not worship weekly, did not pray regularly or keep the Lenten fast, and did not delve in any detail into church teachings. He was drawn mostly in a general, cultural sense to the faith of his parents and grandparents. He did take comfort, however, from what he knew of it, and showed so in gestures that the communist of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s would never have made.
The beginning of the end for Yeltsin was the fall he took on the bathroom floor of a hotel suite in Sardinia on September 7, 2005. He fractured his left thigh bone up near the hip and had to have surgery on the joint upon his return to Moscow. He was on crutches for several months and walked with a limp after that. Less mobile than before, he exercised less and put on weight. He began to feel a malaise in the autumn of 2006. His perennial aide, Vladimir Shevchenko, noticed that winter that he was “more inside himself.” “He was thinking things over, taking them to heart, reconsidering.”32
Yeltsin caught a head cold in Jordan that did not respond to rest. Shortly after getting back to Moscow, on April 11, 2007, he was admitted to the Central Clinical Hospital. He persuaded the doctors to discharge him after two days. On April 16 he was readmitted with an upper respiratory infection and symptoms of failure of the heart, lungs, and internal organs. He and his wife fully expected him to recover: He had been sicker than this in 2001 and had pulled through. He laid plans that weekend to be given his release early the coming week. About eight A.M. on Monday, April 23, Naina spoke to his adjutant by phone and said she would come in to help him wash up and shave. At 8:20 Yeltsin’s eyes went blank. She was told and rushed to the hospital. He was in intensive care, in a coma, when she made it there. Naina covered him with a shawl and sprinkled him with water she had taken from the Jordan.33 His pulse stopped at 3:45 P.M.
Neither the family nor the government had made funeral plans. That evening Putin announced a day of national mourning for the Wednesday. He proposed through his office and through the Patriarch an Orthodox service and accompanying state honors, with burial in Novodevichii Cemetery. Naina gladly accepted. Overnight Tuesday the body lay in state under the golden dome of the neo-Byzantine Cathedral of Christ the Savior, destroyed by Stalin in the 1930s and rebuilt from scratch in the 1990s. There had been no time to take down the banners from Easter, April 8. Yeltsin’s Soviet-era and post-Soviet medals were on view on a velvet cushion. Twenty-five thousand people filed briskly by the open oak casket, draped in the Russian tricolor. The morning of Wednesday, April 25, the family was comforted by Putin, by former Yeltsin associates, by foreign statesmen (Clinton and Kohl again, George H. W. Bush, Lech Wałesa, a total of thirty-five sitting and former national leaders), and by UPI classmates. The most surprising to find among the mourners was Yeltsin’s archrival, Gorbachev. Their paths had not crossed since December 1991. Gorbachev “stood there downcast and suddenly looked much older. It was evident that he was suffering in ways that few in the hall were. Together with the life of Boris Yeltsin, a piece of his own life had been torn away.”34 Naina thanked him for coming and wished him well.
Twenty white-robed clergy chanted the requiem mass at midday. A hearse took the coffin in procession from the cathedral to Novodevichii and an armored vehicle pulled it through the gates on a gun carriage. Behind the red walls, Yeltsin’s widow tucked a white handkerchief inside the casket and took her leave.35 It was lowered into one of the last plots left in the congested graveyard, where Nikita Khrushchev, alone of the Soviet leaders, and Yeltsin’s favorite writer, Anton Chekhov, lie and where he had planned to put Lenin. Three cannons fired a salvo and a band played the new-old national anthem.
Coda
Legacies of an Event-Shaping Man
What makes a political leader interesting is not necessarily what makes him influential. Reactions to his personality and to its unfolding over a life span will always be subjective. When it comes to the actor’s influence, it has to be gauged on two dimensions, the empirical and the normative. The key empirical question is about facts—how much of a difference the man made. The key normative question is about values—whether the difference was for good or for evil.