15 Baturin et al., Epokha, 251.
16 Vyacheslav Terekhov, interview with the author (June 5, 2001).
17 The greatest controversy was over the exclusion of Khizha, with whom Yeltsin did not want to work closely. One deputy protested that there had been a “gentlemen’s agreement” to put him on the final list, but Yeltsin denied it. Interviewed in the lobby after the action, he said,“My opinion had to be taken into account, too.” Vladimir Todres, “S”ezd” (The congress), Nezavisimaya gazeta, December 15, 1992; Nikolai Andreyev and Sergei Chugayev, “U Gaidara—golosa iskrennikh storonnikov, u Chernomyrdina—doveriye s”ezda” (Gaidar got the votes of sincere supporters and Chernomyrdin got the trust of the congress), Izvestiya, December 15, 1992. Khizha left the government in May 1993.
18 Chernomyrdin was deputy minister of the oil and gas industry from 1982 to 1985, answering for the west Siberian fields. His responsibilities included the pipelines being built through Sverdlovsk oblast. He lived at the time, he told me, in the city of Tyumen, the capital of the province bordering Sverdlovsk on the east. He was appointed minister in February 1985 and saw much of Yeltsin when Yeltsin was department head and secretary in the Central Committee apparatus, touring the Siberian fields with him and Gorbachev in September 1985. Chernomyrdin, as a member of the CPSU Central Committee, attended the October 1987 plenum, where he walked up to Yeltsin and shook his hand at the intermission. Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000).
19 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 326.
20 “Viktor Stepanovich… almost openly sympathized with Gazprom, which he had created practically with his own hands.” Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000),120.
21 See on this point Daniel S. Treisman, “Fighting Inflation in a Transitional Regime: Russia’s Anomalous Stabilization,” World Politics 50 (January 1998), 250–52.
22 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 183.
23 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 256, 258. Not all managers in the petroleum industry favored price controls. As Gaidar describes, quite a few wanted the restrictions to be lifted.
24 Author’s interviews with Lev Ponomarëv and Gleb Yakunin (both on January 21, 2001). See also Valerii Vyzhutovich, “My podderzhivayem Yel’tsina uslovno” (We support Yeltsin conditionally), Izvestiya, October 7, 1991.
25 Yurii Burtin, “Gorbachev prodolzhayetsya” (Gorbachev is continuing), in Burtin and Eduard Molchanov, eds., God posle avgusta: gorech’ i vybor (A year after August: bitterness and choice) (Moscow: Literatura i politika, 1992), 60. See for details Viktor Sheinis, Vzlët i padeniye parlamenta: perelomnyye gody v rossiiskoi politike, 1985–1993 (The rise and fall of parliament: years of change in Russian politics, 1985–93) (Moscow: Moskovskii Tsentr Karnegi, Fond INDEM, 2005), 677–87.
26 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 245.
27 Gennadii Burbulis, second interview, conducted by Yevgeniya Al’bats (February 14, 2001).
28 Baturin et al., Epokha, 202.
29 Chernomyrdin interview.
30 Anders Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995), 198.
31 Boris Fëdorov, interview with the author (September 22, 2001). In September 1993 Yeltsin wanted to have Fëdorov replace Gerashchenko in the central bank, but canned the idea due to Chernomyrdin’s strong opposition.
32 Baturin et al., Epokha, 256. On fiscal and monetary policy after Fëdorov, see Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy, 200–203; and Treisman, “Fighting Inflation in a Transitional Regime,” 235–65.
33 “Obrashcheniye prezidenta k sograzhdanam” (Address of the president to his fellow citizens), Rossiiskaya gazeta, August 20, 1992.
34 In his first book of memoirs, in 1990, he did refer to perestroika as “a revolution from above,” but mostly to convey that it did not engage the populace and was resisted by established interests. Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 103.
35 “B. N. Yel’tsin otvechayet na voprosy ‘Izvestii’” (B. N. Yeltsin answers the questions of Izvestiya), Izvestiya, May 23, 1991.
36 See Yel’tsin, Marafon, 236–37.
37 “Obrashcheniye prezidenta k sograzhdanam.” The quotation is from Mayakovsky’s 1918 poem “Left March,” a celebration of the 1917 Revolution.
38 These events are described in Timothy J. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 654–57. On August 23 patrolmen and deputies had to escort Yurii Prokof’ev, Yeltsin’s successor as Moscow first secretary, from the building of the city party committee adjacent to the Central Committee, after demonstrators refused to let him leave.
39 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 166 (italics added).
40 Lyudmila Pikhoya, interview with the author (September 26, 2001).
41 Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, “Russian Archives in Transition: Caught between Political Crossfire and Economic Crisis,” International Research and Exchanges Board, Working Paper, January 1993, 3; conversations with Jonathan Sanders. One mentally deranged American from the Vietnam era was discovered; he stayed in Russia.
42 Mark Kramer, “The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New Findings,” Journal of Contemporary History 33 (April 1998), 165.
43 Benjamin B. Fischer, “Stalin’s Killing Field,” https://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99–00/art6.html. For some reason, the Katyn massacre had a special resonance for Yeltsin. He had tears in his eyes at the meeting with the journalists in Moscow. In Warsaw, Fischer maintains, he was likely inspired by Willy Brandt, who as chancellor of West Germany in 1970 fell to his knees after placing a wreath at a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto destroyed by the Nazis in 1943. Gorbachev acknowledged Soviet responsibility for the Katyn deaths in 1990 but said Lavrentii Beriya, the head of the secret police, made the decision. The documents given to Wałesa in 1992 verify that the decision was taken in March 1940 by Stalin and the Politburo, six of whose members signed the resolution. Soviet propaganda before Gorbachev had claimed that German troops killed the captive Poles.
44 “Beseda zhurnalistov s prezidentom Rossii” (Conversation of journalists with the president of Russia), Izvestiya, July 15, 1992.
45 In the former East Germany, all citizens were in 1991 given the right to inspect their files in the archives of the Stasi security service. Millions did so, with devastating results. “There have been countless civil suits initiated when victims uncovered the names of those who had denounced and betrayed them, and many families and friendships were destroyed.” John O. Koehler, “East Germany: The Stasi and Destasification,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 12 (Summer 2004), 391. But the policy did shatter the police state, which never happened in Russia.
46 This point is well brought out in Samuel H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 2003).
47 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 162. Yeltsin introduced Volkogonov to Bill Clinton at a meeting in Moscow several months before the general died of cancer. Volkogonov spoke about his work, and “Yeltsin’s face took on a look I’d never seen there before: one of unadulterated compassion, affection, admiration, and sorrow.” Ibid.