Notes
INTRODUCTION
1 The lunch with a few ministers and aides began at 11:30. But the television in the dining room did not work, and so at noon the group briefly repaired to the nearby office of Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko to watch the speech. The legal transfer of powers to Putin as acting president took effect at that very minute.
2 The Russian Orthodox Church still uses the Julian calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. It currently lags thirteen days behind the more accurate Gregorian calendar in use in the West since 1582 A.D., and so Russian Christmas falls on January 7. The Soviet government introduced the Gregorian calendar for secular purposes in 1918.
3 This was the ruling party’s name as of 1952, before which it was the All-Russian Communist Party and the Bolshevik Party.
4 “Boris Yel’tsin: glavnoye delo svoyei zhizni ya sdelal” (Boris Yeltsin: I have done with the main business of my life), Nezavisimaya gazeta, January 6, 2000.
5 Ibid.
6 Sergei Roy, review of Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), in Moscow Times, January 22, 2000. Aron’s book, elegantly written and uniformly praiseful, is the most informative on Yeltsin’s life by a Westerner. Several of the better books were put out by journalists at the turn of the 1990s: John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991); and Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992). George W. Breslauer’s fine scholarly monograph Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) compares how Yeltsin and Gorbachev “built authority” in the 1980s and 1990s, with Gorbachev’s predecessors as Soviet general secretary as the benchmark, and offers insights into Yeltsin’s “patriarchal” aspect. Further enlightenment comes from Gwendolyn Elizabeth Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT: Democratization, Suverenizatsiia, and Boris Yeltsin in the Breakup of the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995); and Jerrold M. Post, “Boris Yeltsin: Against the Grain,” Problems of Post-Communism 43 (January–February 1996), 58–62. Stewart observed Yeltsin as a photojournalist, and Post is a psychiatrist who has profiled foreign leaders for the U.S. government.
7 Sergei Markedonov, “Boris Yel’tsin: eskiz istoricheskogo portreta” (Boris Yeltsin: outline of a historical portrait), http://polit.ru/author/2006/02/01/eltsyn_75.
8 A recent tour of the genre describes the English as historically more “biography-obsessed” than Americans, but adds that the celebrity culture of the United States partly compensates (James Atlas, “My Subject Myself,” New York Times Book Review, October 9, 2005). See also Lewis J. Edinger, “Political Science and Political Biography: Reflections on the Study of Leadership,” Journal of Politics 26 (May 1964), 423–39. Russia scores far below both Britain and America in acceptance of biography.
9 The best-known biographical project in the country is the series “Lives of Outstanding People,” put out by the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house in Moscow. Its almost 1,200 titles cover cultural as well as political and military figures, in Russia and abroad. There was no Yeltsin title in the series until writer and editor Boris Minayev’s volume in 2010. The collective memoir by nine former aides, Yu. M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), is the best book about Yeltsin in power in any language. But the points of view of individual contributors are not identified, and it just scratches the surface of Yeltsin’s personality and decision-making processes. The journalist and editor Vitalii Tret’yakov, who was one of the first to comment on the Yeltsin phenomenon, and to do so favorably, wrote most of an unfavorable biography of him in 1998–99. Tiring, he said, of “the banality of the theme and of the main hero of the book,” he did not finish it. Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka” (Sverdlovsk upstart), part 1, Politicheskii klass, February 2006, 36. Selections from the manuscript, which takes Yeltsin to 1989 only, were published in the February through August issues of this magazine.
10 “Authors are wary of tackling [the issue] precisely because Yeltsin has played a huge and overpowering role in the birth of the new Russia.” Peter Rutland, “The Boris Yeltsin of History,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 6 (Fall 1998), 692.
11 A search of books for sale at www.amazon.com, using the person’s name and “biography” as keywords, on November 15, 2007, turned up 2,904 titles about Washington, 2,202 about Lincoln, 1,009 about Churchill, and 975 about Hitler.
12 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 420. This book appeared in English as Midnight Diaries. Unless specially noted, I will quote the Russian originals of Yeltsin’s memoirs and cite them by their Russian titles—translating those titles, in the body of the text, into English. Englishand Russian-language texts of all three books are now available at the Yeltsin Foundation website: http://yeltsin.ru/yeltsin/books.
13 Oleg Poptsov, Khronika vremën “Tsarya Borisa” (Chronicle of the times of “Tsar Boris”) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1995), 218.
14 Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 260.
15 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:281.
16 Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 48.