78 In addition to those mentioned in the text, Stankevich interview and interviews with Yurii Ryzhov (June 7, 2000) and Mark Zakharov (June 4, 2002).
79 Popov interview.
80 Yeltsin expressed approval of foreign investment in the USSR but, just weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, also gave a favorable assessment of economic change in East Germany. To a young Harvard economist at the meeting, Yeltsin showed “all the dissatisfaction with the sclerotic Soviet system but no clue about any market anything.” Lawrence H. Summers, interview with the author (November 25, 2005).
81 Dan Quayle, Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 170.
82 Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 104–5. See also George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), 142–43.
83 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 99.
84 Yeltsin and his party did not always see American reality for what it was. For example, he came to the conclusion that homelessness was not a major problem in New York, and one member of the Russian group declared that the homeless were on the streets not because they had nowhere to sleep but because they wanted the authorities to give them plots of land on which they could build houses. Ibid., 100–101.
85 Ibid., 149, 153. I learned of Yeltsin’s upset on the bus from Wesley Neff of the Leigh Bureau, who witnessed it. Excerpts from the Randall’s video are in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 2.
86 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 150.
87 Boris Nemtsov, first interview with the author (October 17, 2000). Yeltsin was “shocked” when he described the Houston store to Naina upon his return. She underwent a similar shock a few months later during a private visit to the Netherlands. In November 1991, when she accompanied Yeltsin on his first foreign visit as Russian president to Germany, the wife of the mayor of Cologne took her shopping for shoes and on a walk through the city market. Thinking of Moscow’s bare shelves, “I was ashamed. I had worked my whole life, we had wanted to make life better, and we had not done anything. I wanted to hide somewhere.” Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007).
88 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 181.
89 James MacGregor Burns, Transforming Leadership: A New Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 166.
90 Gaidar, Gibel’ imperii.
91 See especially Archie Brown, “Gorbachev, Lenin, and the Break with Leninism,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 15 (Spring 2007), 230–44.
92 I owe the sequence frown-doubt-assent to Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life (New York: Scribner, 2004), 38. On the ambiguous attitudes of younger Soviets, see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever.
93 “Yeltsin Airs Plans for Deputies Elections,” FBIS-SOV-9-021 (January 31, 1990), 69. In this context, Yeltsin meant “leftward” to connote openness to change, and not to a greater state role in the economy, as the word tends to mean in the West. In the 1990s Russian understandings of left-right terminology came into better conformity with foreign ones.
94 In John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 49–50. Yeltsin first indicated he thought of himself as a social democrat on a visit to Greece the month before. John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991), 108.
95 The decision was made a few days after Korzhakov celebrated Yeltsin’s fifty-eighth birthday with him. “The bosses especially did not like the toasts I raised to Boris Nikolayevich. Fallen leaders of the Communist Party, it turns out, are not supposed to have any prospects for the future.” Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 69. Viktor Suzdalev, another of Yeltsin’s three guards from 1985 to 1987, was removed for the same offense. Yurii Kozhukhov, the head bodyguard, was demoted by the KGB after November 1987 but dropped contact with Yeltsin.
96 Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata; poslesloviye (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk; epilogue) (Moscow: Detektiv-press, 2004), 517–18. He relates that the machine was at idle as the driver talked to the driver of a Zhiguli car through the car window. “It became clear later” that the passenger had a damaged spinal disk and bruised kidneys, “after which he was very ill for a long time.” Korzhakov says he and a neighbor, businessman Vladimir Vinogradov, helped with medical expenses and paid for the funeral, since the unnamed victim “had no close relatives.” Korzhakov writes that Yeltsin never inquired about the man’s condition, and does not mention having volunteered information about it to his boss. Yeltsin family members say the Korzhakov volume was the first they had heard of the matter.
97 A lurid book written with Korzhakov’s cooperation replays many of his stories about Yeltsin, but not this one. The book also makes extensive use of KGB files. See Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni.
98 Robert S. Strauss, interview with the author (January 9, 2006).
99 Viktor Yaroshenko, Yel’tsin: ya otvechu za vsë (Yeltsin: I will answer for everything) (Moscow: Vokrug sveta, 1997), 20.
100 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 174.
101 See on the coverage Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 341–50; and Yaroshenko, Yel’tsin, 29–61.Wesley Neff, who accompanied Yeltsin on the trip, says he most nights had no more than one or two drinks and was never inebriated. Yaroshenko, a USSR deputy who accompanied him, recalls (Yel’tsin, 21) that Yeltsin was insulted when he found his New York hotel room stocked with many bottles of liquor, saying this showed how some Americans extended “hospitality to a ‘Russian peasant.’”
102 “Yeltsin Interviewed,” 77.
103 Vadim Bakatin, interview with the author (May 29, 2002). Bakatin was to be head of the KGB in the autumn of 1991 and may have had access to files about the incident there. Rumor has long had it that Yeltsin went to see the Bashilovs’ chambermaid. The woman, Yelena Stepanova, denies any relationship and says KGB officers told her he met someone and then ended up in a ditch on the property. Anna Veligzhanina, “Yel’tsin padal s mosta ot lyubvi?” (Did Yeltsin fall from the bridge out of love?), Komsomol’skaya pravda, November 21, 2004. Several persons close to Yeltsin at the time believe he engineered the occasion as a publicity stunt.
104 Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy,” part 3.
105 At an interview with a journalist on October 21, Yeltsin was “in a fantastic mood.” Andrei Karaulov, Chastushki (Humorous verses) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1998), 169.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1 George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 125. As Breslauer shows, polarization was Gorbachev’s worst fear, because of his personality and his reading of historical experiences such as the destruction of reform communism in Czechoslovakia in 1968. As for Yeltsin, his power-seeking is difficult to comb out from his substantive goals. The study that most accentuates his drive for power is Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1997). Even it must concede (340) that Yeltsin also had transformative aims.