69 A reporter in 1991 asked her about Yeltsin’s upbringing, and she brushed off reports that he was a drinker: “I know, a lot of rumors are circulating. But I am his mother, I know my son.” She then related the story, reported in Chapter 2, of Yeltsin as a teenager in Berezniki pouring another boy’s glass of vodka on the ground. Izabella Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov ot Belogo doma” (Thousands of kilometers from the White House), Vechernyaya Moskva, October 2, 1991.
70 Talbott, Russia Hand, 44–45; Strobe Talbott, interview with the author (January 9, 2006). Given the eight-hour time difference between Washington and Moscow and Clinton’s dislike of early-morning appointments, coordination of the two presidents’ schedules was no easy task.
71 By evening’s end, Yeltsin’s skin was stretched across his cheeks and a Clinton adviser knew what people meant when they described someone who had too much to drink as “tight.” George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), 140.
72 Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 411–12, 217.
73 Vladimir Bokser, second interview with the author (May 11, 2001); and Bonner interview.
74 Andrei Kozyrev, second interview with the author (September 18, 2001). Kozyrev declined to name the minister.
75 The performance can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAr0MgGrwHA.
76 The letter is reproduced in Baturin et al., Epokha, 521–23. Korzhakov writes that Pavel Grachëv also signed; the other sources deny it. Yeltsin assistants Yurii Baturin and Georgii Satarov took part in the composition but did not sign, since they had been with him for only a year. The Repin painting in question is the tableau Reply of the Zaporozh’e Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey, completed in 1891.
77 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 349.
78 On his visit to Britain in the last week of September, undertaken after his return from Sochi, Yeltsin spent a night at Chequers as a guest of John Major. He and the prime minister called on an English pub in the village of Great Kimble, knocking on the door to get the owner to open up (Yeltsin said he was the president of Russia and the proprietor replied that he was the kaiser of Germany). That evening at the residence, Yeltsin “came downstairs visibly drunk, and took an immediate dislike to his placement. He picked up his own table card, next door to that of Princess Alexandra, and deposited both the card and himself next to John Major, with whom he chatted amiably, if incoherently, all evening.” Max Hastings, Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers (London: Macmillan, 2002), 205.
79 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 348–50.
80 “When she caught sight of Korzhakov, she shook” (Pri vide Korzhakova, yei sotryaslo). Valentin Yumashev, third interview with the author (September 13, 2006).
81 Baturin et al., Epokha, 515.
82 Ibid., 524; Lyudmila Pikhoya, interview with the author (September 26, 2001).
83 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 349.
84 Ludwig, King of the Mountain, 453.
85 For Churchill in the 1930s, “A typical day’s imbibing would begin in midmorning with a whisky and soda and continue through a bottle of champagne at lunch, more whisky and soda in the afternoon, sherry before dinner, another bottle of champagne during dinner, the best part of a bottle of brandy after dinner, and would end with a final whisky and soda before going to bed. On occasions he drank even more than this.” Clive Ponting, Churchill (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 388.
86 Anatolii Chernyayev, 1991 god: dnevnik pomoshchnika Prezidenta SSSR (The year 1991: diary of an assistant to the president of the USSR) (Moscow: TERRA, 1997), 265.
87 Stephanopoulos, All Too Human, 140. Of the correspondence between alcohol consumption and performance in government, Ludwig (in King of the Mountain, 230) reports being “astounded by how well certain rulers were able to run their countries and accomplish impressive deeds” despite their periodic abuse of alcohol. He gives Churchill and Atatürk as examples. A counterexample is Harold Wilson, the British prime minister of the 1960s and 1970s who suffered alcoholic dementia by age sixty.
88 I first heard this interpretation of mass attitudes toward Yeltsin’s use of alcohol from the pollster Aleksandr Oslon (interview, January 25, 2001).
89 Ruslan Khasbulatov, interview with the author (September 26, 2001).
90 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 156.
91 “Sostoyaniye zdorov’ya Borisa Yel’tsina khorosheye” (The state of Boris Yeltsin’s health is good), Izvestiya, July 10, 1992.
92 Author’s interview with El’dar Ryazanov (May 30, 2001); Muzhskoi razgovor.
93 Korzhakov’s firsthand account stresses Yeltsin’s heart pains, but the group had drinks on the ground and in the air. During the 1996 election campaign, Boris Nemtsov, the governor of Nizhnii Novgorod region, who had made cracks about Shannon, was to accompany him on a snap trip to Chechnya. Nemtsov polished off a quart of vodka on the return flight—Yeltsin had almost none—and was incoherent in front of the press at the Moscow airport. Back in Nizhnii, a telephone call from Yeltsin awakened him the next morning at six A.M., and the president taunted him with the similarity to his mishap in Ireland. “Boris Nemtsov—Yevgenii Al’bats o Yel’tsine” (Boris Nemtsov to Yevgeniya Al’bats about Yeltsin), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007.
94 The dates of the first two attacks were publicized in 1995. The third was kept secret and is mentioned, without an exact date, in Chazov, Rok, 250–51; Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 319; and Yel’tsin, Marafon, 22. Chazov speaks of an attack in September 1995, but seems to confuse it with the event of October 26. Yeltsin implies in his memoir that his first full-fledged heart attack (a myocardial infarction, which causes permanent damage to muscle cells) was in December; Chazov, a cardiologist, does not make this distinction.
95 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin… poslesloviye, 325–26.
96 Chazov, Rok, 248–50. In the United States in October, Yeltsin was busy at the bar at the United Nations and the summit with President Clinton in Hyde Park, New York. It was after Hyde Park that Clinton made his oft-quoted one-liner to Strobe Talbott that “Yeltsin drunk is better than most of the alternatives sober.” Yeltsin was to claim in Marafon, 49, that he was never shown the physicians’ report that recommended the angiogram.
97 See the comments on Yeltsin drinking faux vodka toasts with water in Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 450.
98 Drafts of Article 3 contained a guarantee of “freedom of the means of mass communication.” Liberal aides preferred the grander “freedom of mass communication,” and won the president over.
99 Quotations from Baturin et al., Epokha, 494.
100 Vyacheslav Kostikov, interview with the author (May 28, 2001). Journalists sometimes got phone calls from Yeltsin about particular stories. In September 1992, for example, Yeltsin rang up Izvestiya’s diplomatic correspondent and told him his stories about Russian-Japanese relations were “too ironic,” but his tone was warm and he did not demand any change. Konstantin Eggert, interview with the author (September 12, 2006).