20 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 473.
21 Yeltsin’s displeasure at Rutskoi that day has been well documented. In one of his press interviews after the death of Yeltsin in 2007, Rutskoi said how impressed he was by the fact that Yeltsin never swore!
22 Aleksandr Korzhakov, interview with the author (January 28, 2002).
23 Vladimir Shevchenko, Povsednevnaya zhizn’ Kremlya pri prezidentakh (The everyday life of the Kremlin under the presidents) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2004), 126–27.
24 Matt Taibbi, “Butka: Boris Yeltsin, Revisited,” http://exile.ru/105/yeltsin.
25 Viktor Manyukhin, Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 178.
26 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 270.
27 Robert S. Strauss, interview with the author (January 9, 2006).
28 Of the German, Yeltsin wrote (Marafon, 164), “Kohl and I always found it easy to understand each other psychologically. We resembled one another in terms of our reactions and style of communication and saw the world from the same generational bell tower.” Yeltsin used the word “friend” (drug) to describe Kohl, Jiang, and Jacques Chirac of France (born in 1932), and mentioned how much he liked speaking Russian with Jiang, who lived in Moscow in the 1950s. He did not discuss Strauss in his memoirs. By contrast, Yeltsin’s relations with François Mitterrand, the president of France until January 1996 (born in 1916), were always chilly.
29 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 250.
30 Details from Korzhakov interview. The Sakha visit was in December 1990, when Yeltsin was still parliamentary chairman.
31 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 391.
32 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 9.
33 The masculine side of comradeship has been revealed in studies of Soviet propaganda, literature, and art. See Eliot Borenstein, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
34 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 198–99.
35 Conversation with Naina Yeltsina during my third interview with Boris Yeltsin (September 12, 2002).
36 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 458, 19.
37 Viktor Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000). Chernomyrdin is one of Moscow’s most accomplished swearers, and thus had to suppress that habit as well as any chumminess.
38 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 176–77; Aleksandr Rutskoi, interview with the author (June 5, 2001).
39 This congruity was stressed in my interviews with Boris Nemtsov.
40 Yegor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Days of defeats and victories) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 106.
41 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:372. Gorbachev throws in archly that many Soviet builders lied about project completion and made believe that half-finished buildings were ready for occupancy.
42 Other than Yeltsin, the construction engineer who soared highest in Russian politics in the 1990s was the Sverdlovsker Oleg Lobov. Lobov was a level-tempered administrator with none of Yeltsin’s quirks.
43 Georgii Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh (With leaders and without them) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 376.
44 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 305.
45 Oleg Davydov, “Yel’tsinskaya trekhkhodovka” (The Yeltsin three-step), in A. N. Starkov, ed., Rossiiskaya elita: psikhologicheskiye portrety (The Russian elite: psychological portraits) (Moscow: Ladomir, 2000), 65–80.
46 See, for example, “Altered Statesmen: Boris Yeltsin,” http://www.discoverychannel.co.uk/alteredstatesmen/features5.shtml. The Wikipedia online encyclopedia now reports as established fact that Yeltsin, along with Winston Churchill, was cyclothymic. Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), provides what purports to be analysis of other mental conditions, including paranoia, persecution mania, schizophrenia, and “hysterical psychopathy.” This text reports a few useful anecdotes, mostly from Korzhakov, but the discussion of Yeltsin’s mental state is pure character assassination. Never saying directly that he had most of these conditions, let alone adducing evidence, it prints stylized descriptions of them in boldface in the midst of narration of incidents in his life, leaving it to the reader to draw conclusions. It is also full of basic factual errors. For more responsible discussion of select themes, see Martin Ebon, “Yeltsin’s V.I.P. Depression,” http://www.mhsource.com/exclusive/yeltsin.html.
47 Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 151; Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 87; Baturin et al., Epokha, 367; Sergei Filatov, second interview with the author (January 25, 2002).
48 Tarpishchev interview.
49 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 85–86.
50 Muzhskoi razgovor.
51 Baturin et al., Epokha, 504.
52 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 304–5.
53 Ibid., 239.
54 Ibid., 293.
55 Ibid.; Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 203.
56 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 203.
57 This event is reported only in the revised edition of Korzhakov’s memoir: Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata; poslesloviye (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk; epilogue) (Moscow: Detektiv-press, 2004), 245–46. He told me about it in our interview in 2002. The other men present were reportedly Viktor Ilyushin and Mikhail Barsukov, neither of whom has contradicted Korzhakov’s account. Korzhakov knew Yeltsin would not be able to put a bullet in his head but feared, nonetheless, that he might have a heart attack due to the strain.
58 Baturin et al., Epokha, 632.
59 Yelena Bonner, interview with the author (March 13, 2001).
60 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 23.
61 Yevgenii Primakov, Vosem’ mesyatsev plyus… (Eight months plus) (Moscow: Mysl’, 2001), 93.
62 Ludwig, King of the Mountain, 233–40. Ludwig (233) includes combinations of the following symptoms: “a melancholy mood, a sleep disturbance, increased or decreased appetite, lack of energy, excessive tearfulness, a sense of dread or futility, social withdrawal, morbid thoughts, or suicidal preoccupation.”
63 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 348.
64 Baturin et al., Epokha, 505, 507.
65 Third Yeltsin interview.
66 Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom, 301, 306–7.
67 Valentin Yumashev, fourth interview with the author (January 22, 2007).
68 Author’s first interview with Vladimir Bokser (May 11, 2000) and interviews with Jack Matlock (September 1, 2005), Robert Strauss (January 9, 2006), Valerii Bortsov (June 11, 2001), Aleksandr Rutskoi (June 5, 2001), and Yurii Ryzhov (June 7, 2000); and Aleksandr Korzhakov, “Yel’tsin ne pozvolyal, chtoby v yego kompanii sachkovali s vypivkoi” (Yeltsin did not allow people to goof off because of drink in his company), http://news.rin.ru/news///130889.