The rebellion scenario now read like diaries stored in a dusty attic. In the August coup, Oleg Poptsov had marveled at his capability for overturning the status quo: “The framework of power has to be adjusted to him. A person with a cunning, deep-set capacity for mutiny, he can smash this framework in a single minute.”4 The framework of power had been not only adjusted to Yeltsin but harnessed to him. There was no one left to rebel against.
Yeltsin never discarded his testing script, with its tinges of strength and competency. At his desk, he used trite policy details as tests. A topnotch speed reader—aided by a pencil, he ran his eye along the diagonal of the page, from upper left to lower right—he would memorize factoids and passages from official documents and retrieve them in discussions weeks or months later, tickled when he could recite the exact page number. Away from the office, exercise and sport remained the main devices. For old times’ sake, Yeltsin might still do a walrus swim in a frigid river or lake. Aleksandr Korzhakov reports one on the Moskva River on a March day in the early 1990s, with ice floes bobbing. Whenever possible, Yeltsin capped a steam bath with a plunge into a snowbank or freezing water; he would submerse himself in the water, ticking off the seconds, for two full minutes, longer than most men half his age could stand the temperature and the oxygen deprivation.5 With volleyball behind him, Yeltsin had taken up tennis, the racket sport that also has a serve-and-volley structure, while working at Gosstroi. He played it in pairs and had a booming serve, although he was lumbering on his feet and rallied poorly with his mutilated left hand. Shamil Tarpishchev, the professional captain of the Russian national team, was his personal coach, and found him no more genial in the face of a loss than his Sverdlovsk volleyball mates had. One time Tarpishchev thought it would be amusing to offer to play doubles against Yeltsin and Korzhakov by pairing with Yeltsin’s grandson Boris, and to neutralize his advantage by handcuffing himself to young Boris. The manacled Tarpishchev and Boris, Jr., won the first set. “I looked over and the president was exerting himself and glowering at Borya and me. We threw the second set and got out of there.”6
As in almost any leadership career, success was still the script of the most import to Yeltsin. Richard Nixon, who met with him in 1991, 1992, and 1993, saw in Yeltsin “a relentless inner drive that propelled him to the top,” rather like Nixon, who was also raised poor, made it almost to the top in the United States, was set back, and clawed his way back up Everest.7 If getting to be “first” motivated Yeltsin in the good old days, staying first motivated him now, and that was no easier a task, for one had to pedal like mad in this environment just to stand still. And building a better way of life, as he was to say in his retirement speech, was proving to be “excruciatingly difficult” and “exceptionally complicated,” and that realization was never out of his mind. He had always been hard on himself. As his daughter Tatyana said in an interview, “Even when he had made some kind of speech and I would say, ‘Papa, that went fantastically,’ or he had pulled off some kind of deal very well, he would say, ‘No, nonetheless I could have done it better.’… Even when something came out very well, he was always dissatisfied to some extent.”8 Now he seemed to be such more often and more thoroughly. In one of his several televised dialogues with the president in 1993, the filmmaker El’dar Ryazanov inquired if he was satisfied with his work. Yeltsin’s stygian response prefigured his 1999 valedictory: “I am rarely satisfied with my work…. I am satisfied with my work 5 to 10 percent of the time and 90 percent of the time I am dissatisfied. I am constantly dissatisfied with my work, and that is a frightful thing.”9
At the middle of the heaving sea that was Boris Yeltsin’s life in his presidential years there sat an atoll of domestic tranquility. As he had except at UPI and in his first year as an engineer, he based himself in, and drew succor from, a traditional household—“a patriarchal Urals family” arrayed around “a supreme authority, the grandfather.”10 Yelena Okulova and her husband and children (a boy, Ivan, was born in the late 1990s) had an apartment midtown and then in the Krylatskoye block, a floor below the in-laws’ piedà-terre. Yeltsin’s second daughter, Tatyana, and her family resided in Boris and Naina’s home, dividing their time between Moscow and Barvikha-4. She went from the military institute to a position in the Dawn of the Urals Bank, a small firm based in Perm, in 1994, and then onto maternity leave when her second son, Gleb, was born in August 1995. (Tatyana’s first son, Boris, studied at Winchester, an English boarding school, from 1996 to 1998.) The Dyachenkos and Okulovs had dachas of their own. Callers at the Yeltsin home often remarked on the prevalence of females, children, bicycles, and toys.
While Boris Nikolayevich may have been the patriarch, the stabilizer in the family unit was its warmhearted, retiring, and boundlessly patient matriarch. Now a homemaker full-time, she devoted herself to a demanding spouse. Naina Iosifovna, an aide of hers, Natal’ya Konstantinova, observed in a memoir, “carries her husband like a crystal vase,” seeing him through toil and trouble.11 She overcame the claustrophobia about vehicles and airplane cabins that she had been subject to in Sverdlovsk. In 1993, after eight years in the capital, she declared that she did not yet feel “at home” there and spent long hours on the telephone with friends and kin in Yekaterinburg and Orenburg. “Life here has not treated us kindly,” she said to Ryazanov. “They have poured so much filth on us. In my entire life before, I never had even one drop of this.”12 Her widowed mother, Mariya Girina, lived in Yekaterinburg; she was buried in Shirokorechenskoye Cemetery next to Yeltsin’s father in 1994. Naina attended religious services with greater regularity in the 1990s and hung several painted icons on the walls of Barvikha-4. Without fanfare, she took up small-scale philanthropy. She sponsored maternity homes, pediatric hospitals, and orphanages and arranged food and medical aid for elderly female stars of the Soviet stage and screen who had fallen upon hard times. Boris did not make a habit of discussing politics with her, but they consulted on the personal fallout of political matters and she had a voice on staff she saw daily (such as drivers, cooks, and photographers). “Without her,” he confided mawkishly but truthfully, “I would never have borne up under so many political storms… not in 1987, not in 1991, not later.”13
Boris and Naina Yeltsin “generally do not worry about material things,” as Konstantinova wrote.14 Although it would be absurd to say he was against the good life, Yeltsin did not go into post-communist politics, and did not stay in it, for mercenary purposes. Had he so wished, he could have left the government and ridden the new free-enterprise economy to riches. He continued to be partial to plain Russian food. In Paris on an official visit in February 1992, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev invited him to dine in one of the city’s three-star restaurants, where he could try out nouvelle cuisine concoctions. Leaving Kozyrev to go out on the town, Yeltsin stayed behind at the embassy and had the kitchen cook him meat patties and potatoes.15