Sukhanov suspected that the exchange aboard the Miami-bound jet was when “the last prop of Yeltsin’s Bolshevik consciousness decomposed,” and with it the vestiges of his belief in the Soviet model.86 Asked by a close associate in the 1990s what most turned him against the old system, Yeltsin said it was “America and its supermarkets.”87 Yeltsin records the scales falling off his eyes several weeks after the U.S. trip. Aides, seeing him disconsolate after the press skewered his U.S. tour, tried to lift his spirits by organizing a visit to a public steambath in a Moscow district. There were forty nude men in the sultry room, lathering one another on the back with water-soaked birch branches, to improve the circulation. “Hang in there, Boris Nikolayevich,” they cried, “we are with you!” It was then and there, Yeltsin was to claim in Notes of a President, that “I changed my worldview” and came to the understanding “that I had been a communist by Soviet tradition, by inertia, and by upbringing, but not by conviction.”88
If ever there was a eureka moment when Yeltsin separated himself from the Soviet state of mind, either the flight from Texas to Florida or the scene in the steambath might have been it. It is more cogent to visualize the shift, cognitive and affective, as cumulative and as taking months rather than hours. Rethinking communism and kissing it good-bye was one of those exercises in “innovative uncommon sense” that, as James MacGregor Burns writes, “transcends routine problem solving to address the deep human needs and crises from which it emerges.”89 It happened as the economy of the USSR, beginning in the winter of 1988–89, went from stagnation to recession. Lower production and excessive currency emission disordered consumer markets and made for empty shelves in the stores, longer lines, more squirreling away of consumer staples, barter, and by 1990 spot rationing.90 Millions of citizens puzzled it all out in their own way. Gorbachev did, too, but always with a lag and clinging to the dying embers of the faith.91
Less attached to communism’s ideology and more moved by its failures—more like the members of his children’s generation than like his and Gorbachev’s—Yeltsin passed through the stages of realignment during a liminal period lasting from the summer of 1989 to the summer of 1990. In a few years, he had gone from frowning at Soviet difficulties, to doubts about the system, and onward to assent in a new framework for society and politics.92 He had not “become somebody else,” he said when asked in January 1990 to compare his political position in 1990 with 1985–87. “But there has undoubtedly been a change [in me], a change leftward…. I am today disposed toward more radical change than at that time.”93 Reassessment of methods of rule escalated to reassessment of overarching goals and of the paradigm that framed them. In February 1990 Yeltsin would notify British writer Barbara Amiel that he now saw Lenin’s division of world socialism into communist and social-democratic wings in 1919 as a tragedy, and that “in my heart I am really more of a social democrat” than a communist.94 In January he was chosen to join the coordinating committee of the Democratic Platform in the CPSU, a ginger group that favored transmuting the Communist Party into a social-democratic movement—with a family resemblance to Labour in Britain or the German SPD—and institutionalization of jostling factions within it. It was a way station on Yeltsin’s road out of the party. He was transiting from the Gorbachev-in-a-hurry he had been in 1986–87, to the Gorbachev-with-a-difference he was in 1988–89, to the forget-about-Gorbachev of 1990–91.
There were off-key notes as Yeltsin’s political reputation grew. About one of them—purported to be a fatal car accident with him behind the wheel—we know only a claim made many years later by a far from neutral observer. Aleksandr Korzhakov, Yeltsin’s former KGB bodyguard, had continued to see the family after November 1987 and after his discharge from the KGB’s Ninth Directorate in February 1989.95 He writes in the second edition of his memoirs, published in 2004, eight years after he became Yeltsin’s mortal enemy, that at some point between May 1989 and the spring of 1990 Yeltsin drove his Moskvich into a two-seat motorcycle idling at sunrise on a country road near Korzhakov’s dacha at the village of Molokovo, close by Moscow. Korzhakov had given him driving lessons and found him a slow learner. In the Molokovo accident, the motorbike passenger, Korzhakov claims, was injured and died a half year later without the authorities knowing about the accident and perhaps without Yeltsin himself knowing the man had died. Yeltsin, Korzhakov, and a companion, says Korzhakov, had been drinking at Korzhakov’s dacha the previous evening.96 Although a biographer is obliged to note the report, it is an unconvincing one, since Yeltsin was being tailed and wiretapped by KGB officers, and Gorbachev would have pounced on the mere suspicion of such an incident to crucify him politically. Korzhakov did not mention the event in the first edition of his memoirs, published in 1997, or in my interview with him in 2002, and it has been left out of other accounts written in the spirit of his book.97 The presumption of innocence must remain with Yeltsin.
The U.S. junket caused Yeltsin more immediate pain. In Miami Beach, Dwayne Andreas of the food-industry conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland, one of the large companies to which Yeltsin was introduced, loaned him the waterfront property at the Sea View Hotel normally occupied by his two daughters. Yeltsin did not know this detail and threw a fit when he found women’s lingerie in the bedroom drawers. Scared that American intelligence was trying to set him up with a call girl and blackmail him, he placed irate calls to his hosts. Robert S. Strauss, the Washington lawyer and political broker, had to spend an hour calming him by telephone.98
The greater blight was that Yeltsin attracted unpropitious publicity at several of his ports of call. The tour was originally scheduled for two weeks, but CPSU officials refused to give him an exit visa for more than eight days, since he needed to attend a Central Committee plenum on agricultural policy. James Garrison of Esalen compressed the program into the eight days, saying Yeltsin “would have to sleep less.”99 At Johns Hopkins University on September 12, jet lag, sleeping pills, and perhaps the aftereffects of evening-before libations left him the worse for wear. Sukhanov had to admit it was “not his most successful meeting.”100 The Washington Post’s Paul Hendrickson chronicled “Yeltsin’s Smashing Day” and identified bourbon as the main source of the grief, which was an overstatement if not a falsehood. Hendrickson was a prize-winning feature writer; the Post did not think the Yeltsin story important enough to fly its Moscow bureau chief, David Remnick, in for it. Hendrickson would later be contrite about the piece, but the damage was done. On September 18, the day after Yeltsin landed back in Moscow, Pravda reprinted a five-day-old story by Vittorio Zucconi, the Washington correspondent of the Italian newspaper la Repubblica, portraying the voyage as one long orgy of shopping and drinking. It was a mishmash of a few facts and much fiction and innuendo. Videotape of the Johns Hopkins appearance shown on Soviet television appears to have been doctored to garble Yeltsin’s words. His son-in-law Valerii Okulov delivered a letter from Yeltsin to Pravda denouncing the article as libelous. An outcry in Italy and Russia forced the paper to publish a retraction.101 At the Central Committee plenum shortly afterward, Yeltsin accosted Pravda editor Viktor Afanas’ev for publishing the article. It was too bad, he said about their conversation, “that the time of duels has passed.”102