President Yeltsin handed Naina his pay envelope every Friday, as he had in Sverdlovsk, and she gave him back an allowance. He was at a loss about consumer prices, did not recognize ruble notes by denomination, did not have credit cards, and needed to be shown how to swipe a debit card at one of the automated teller machines that were cropping up in Moscow.16 His ruble salary was worth five hundred to a thousand dollars a month, varying with the exchange rate. Extra income came from several hundred thousand dollars in book royalties, mostly from his second memoir volume, Notes of a President, published in Russian and many foreign languages in 1994. Upon retirement, the couple owned, he said in Presidential Marathon, a 1995 BMW automobile (7-series), home furnishings, and personal articles (he listed guns, tennis rackets, costume jewelry, and electronics); they held no stocks, bonds, or foreign bank accounts.17
If Yeltsin came into any bonanza, it was in the real estate market. The presidential manse at Barvikha-4 (and Gorki-9, where the family lived in the second term) was under what is today the Federal Protection Service or FSO, known up to 1991 as the Ninth Directorate of the KGB. The house was never Yeltsin’s personal property, his to sell for monetary benefit or to transmit to heirs. On two lesser holdings, the English edition of Presidential Marathon mistranslates Yeltsin. “I own some real estate jointly with my wife,” it says, referring to the Krylatskoye flat and a 4,900-square-foot dacha on ten acres in Odintsovo district, a few miles from Barvikha-4.18 In this context, the verb vladeyu means “dispose of,” “have occupancy of,” or “have exclusive use of.” Neither the apartment nor the Yeltsin dacha, which is in the Gorki-10 compound, was owned by Boris and Naina. Both were on the books of the Presidential Business Department, another arm of the government. Under Russian legislation dating to 1991, the Yeltsins could have privatized the Krylatskoye unit by filling out a few forms but, unlike some neighbors, did not. The Gorki-10 getaway was built in 1995–96 by troops from the protection service, on the grounds that it needed to be a secure site. Yeltsin paid for the materials himself out of book revenues and, ignorant about prices, was so mortified by the cost that he considered giving up on the project. Only in 2006–7, making use of a Putin–period law on vacation homes, did he privatize the Gorki-10 dacha. It must be worth some millions of dollars, and represents Yeltsin’s main financial gain—a second-order, delayed (he took ownership just before his death), and legal effect.19
With the signal exception of his drinking, Yeltsin as president retained the tastes and mannerisms of his stiff-necked Urals ancestors. He did not use tobacco and would not abide it around him. On one presidential visit to Germany, seated at a dinner next to Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s wife, Hannelore, he removed a cigarette from her fingers and stubbed it out in an ashtray.20 Unlike Gorbachev, who cursed like a trooper, Yeltsin did not use profanity and forbade it in his hearing: He first came to question his selection of Aleksandr Rutskoi as vice president in 1991 when Rutskoi and his wife, Lyudmila, used expletives at the post-election victory party.21 Yeltsin threw no tantrums and almost never raised his voice. He spoke to officials, again in contrast to Gorbachev, in given name and patronymic, not given name only or diminutive, and in the decorous second person plural. This applied even to his sidekick Korzhakov, whom he hailed as Aleksandr Vasil’evich unless they had been speaking one-on-one for a time, when he might say Aleksandr or, infrequently, Sasha.22 Yeltsin still had his shoes buffed to a gossamer sheen and in gaps in the conversation would scan them for scuffs. The wardrobe was updated some: He switched from Russian to more debonair foreign-tailored suits and footwear and brought in tuxedos and black ties for formal Kremlin affairs, for the first time since Lenin.23
In addressing the core features of Yeltsin’s personality, we must address the incongruities raised in the Introduction to this volume. In human relations, many contemporaries saw in him a mating of antipodes: He was at once too forward and too mistrustful, too brash and too wary. And his mood presented sharp contrasts over time. Some moments found him the epitome of energy and activism; at others, he was unexpressive and withdrawn. These divergences were a joint product of the mercurial setting and of Yeltsin’s idiosyncrasies.
He had always kept an affective distance from almost all professional and political collaborators. The trait was probably handed down from the Urals village. A Butka acquaintance who had known Nikolai Yeltsin told a journalist, “Boris Nikolayevich… had an attitude that if he developed a friendship with someone, that would mean that he couldn’t demand as much from them. So he kept everyone at an arm’s length. He was just like his father.”24 The dog-eat-dog medium of the CPSU apparatus reinforced this attitude. As Sverdlovsk party boss, Yeltsin did not camouflage it. At his elk and duck shoots, “He relaxed in the outdoors and permitted himself to greet [people] in hail-fellow-well-met fashion. All the same, he always kept his detachment.”25 About his years in the obkom and after that the Moscow party committee, Yeltsin said, “Number ones as a rule have no close friends. There arises a complex of insularity, and your caution in communicating with others grows. All of this in time made its appearance in me—unreachability, a nervousness about socializing with new acquaintances.”26 Another person might have responded by reaching out to like spirits and not to recoil from them. Not Yeltsin: In him, being number one bred Chekhovian solitude. And it did so with greater intensity once he was leader of all Russia, in conditions of uncertainty and flux.
Yeltsin did open himself up to close connections with the odd foreigner. One was Robert S. Strauss, the last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and the first to Russia. “He neither liked nor trusted most people,” Strauss recalled years later, “but he did me.” Strauss could only explain it in terms of fellowship—each saw the “twinkle” in the other—and by the facts that they were of the same generation and Strauss did not want anything of him.27 Yeltsin’s making friends with Helmut Kohl, the first world leader he called on in 1991, and with President Jiang Zemin of China, would be other examples. All three are of Yeltsin’s age group or older (Strauss was born in 1918, Kohl in 1930, and Jiang in 1926).28
Symptomatic of the very different pattern with Russians, where the tie was severed when suspicions set in, was the relationship with Gennadii Burbulis (born in 1945), the ex-academic from Sverdlovsk who had Yeltsin’s ear at the beginning of his administration. After they got to know one another in the Soviet parliament, Burbulis was right-hand man to Yeltsin in the Russian congress, ran his 1991 election campaign, was the first choice to establish his presidential office (an invitation he foolhardily declined), advised on the recruitment of Yegor Gaidar, and was given the titles of first deputy premier and state secretary. Before 1992 was rung out, as we have seen, Burbulis and Yeltsin were estranged. There was an interpersonal dynamic as well as a political one:
I won’t hide the fact that at a certain point I began to feel an impalpable, cumulative fatigue. I got tired of seeing the same face every day in my office, at meetings and receptions, at the dacha, on the tennis court, in the steambath. It is possible and necessary for someone to try to influence the president—to get things done, to carry through on one’s ideas. But there has to be some limit. As freely as Gennadii Burbulis had walked into any meeting he felt like, he started coming to see me in person all the time. He overstepped some boundary in our personal relations. Well, it happens.29