Yeltsin’s one intimate friendship of any duration with a public figure was with Aleksandr Korzhakov, the beefy security officer whom he made head of the Kremlin’s praetorian guard. Through the first half of the 1990s, they were inseparable: They commuted, worked, broke bread, played games, and vacationed in one another’s company. On a visit to the republic of Sakha, Yeltsin accidentally nicked Korzhakov with a knife he had received as a gift; at Yeltsin’s suggestion, Korzhakov reciprocated and they mingled their blood. They repeated the rite several years later in Moscow.30 In 1994, hearing from Yeltsin his fears about surgery for a deviated septum in his nose—a condition Korzhakov also had—Korzhakov volunteered to have his operation first, “as a guinea pig.” He did, and Yeltsin repeated the procedure later that year.31 Korzhakov had his in-town apartment in the Krylatskoye building, on the sixth floor next door to the Yeltsins, and was apportioned a dacha plot in Gorki-10, again next to Yeltsin. When travel forced Yeltsin to miss the wedding of Korzhakov’s daughter Galina in 1994, the family repeated it upon his return. In 1995 Korzhakov was godfather to Yeltsin’s fourth grandchild, Gleb Dyachenko.
In Notes of a President, published in 1994, Yeltsin wrote that Korzhakov’s position “forces him to be next to me twenty-four hours a day.”32 But it was his disposition, and its fit with Yeltsin’s, that won the president over. They were, in Russian argot, tovarishchi, comrades, of the nonpolitical variety, who had achieved sympathy and trust. They shared plebeian origins—Korzhakov, born in 1950, was the son of a Moscow textile worker and lived until age seven in a flyblown barracks—although Yeltsin was considerably better educated. Comradeship, political as well as nonpolitical, was mostly a manly phenomenon in the Soviet Union, going back to the Bolsheviks, and so it was with Yeltsin and Korzhakov.33 Korzhakov was Yeltsin’s drinking companion, safety blanket, and confessor. Yeltsin in his book remembered unwinding at the Korzhakov cottage when he was out of favor with the Politburo. “We did not stay in the house but bivouacked beside it, angled for fish, went for a dip in the creek.” As head of state, he still relied on Korzhakov: “Korzhakov never leaves my side, and when we are traveling we sit up at night unless we are asleep. He is a very decent, shrewd, strong, and courageous person, although outwardly he seems quite simple.”34 While Naina Yeltsina always had her doubts about Korzhakov, she considered him “almost a member of our family.” She once asked his wife, Irina, over a meal if he would ever give away confidences. Irina said the Korzhakovs loved the Yeltsins so much that they would take their secrets to the grave, and Korzhakov repeated these words.35
However, Yeltsin wearied of Korzhakov and Korzhakov of him: Twenty-four hours a day of togetherness was too much. The age difference mattered more as Yeltsin’s health declined, and Korzhakov alarmed Yeltsin by expanding his Kremlin role into all-round aide-de-camp and gatekeeper. The blood brothers parted over Korzhakov’s affiliation with the clique of high-level conservatives who favored postponement of the 1996 presidential election and who scuffled with liberals for control of the electoral campaign. A funding scandal on June 20, 1996, in between the two rounds of the voting, was the final insult. Yeltsin was to fire Korzhakov for insubordination, saying he and his group “took much for themselves and gave little.” The jilted retainer, who was not offered another job, made the separation irreparable by publishing a vengeful memoir, Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn to Dusk, brimming with unflattering stories and photos of Yeltsin with tousled hair, in baggy swim trunks, or with glass, fishing rod, or rifle in hand. Yeltsin thenceforth considered Korzhakov a traitor to him, and with some reason: For bodyguards, like clergy, valets, and physicians, circumspection is the golden rule. Yeltsin was never to exchange a word with him again. To Korzhakov, Yeltsin was the traitor. In a letter on June 22, 1996, he said the people would hold the dismissal against Yeltsin: “They take everything at face value and are coming to the judgment, ‘He betrayed his own and now he will betray us.’” Korzhakov quotes Irina as saying she saw “the smile of Judas” on Yeltsin’s face when he spoke on television about the firing.36
Students of human nature more astute than Burbulis and Korzhakov were alive to the risks in overfamiliarity with number one or in giving him the sense that he was in someone’s debt. Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russia’s prime minister from 1992 to 1998 (and born in 1938), went to Zavidovo and had some holiday meals with the president, yet knew enough to respect his wish for autonomy: “Even when we were hunting together, I never allowed myself to try to make use of the proximity…. I saw that anyone who did, haha, would end up [paying the price].”37
More polar to the Yeltsin presidency than his hot-and-cold relations with people is the question of phasing and consistency over time. In the organization of his everyday docket, he was as ever a stickler for promptness. Family members teased by getting him to guess the time of day without checking his watch—and usually he could do it down to the minute, he says. Yeltsin valued protocol officer Vladimir Shevchenko for his good judgment and for being “fanatically punctual,” and said to Aleksandr Rutskoi that one reason for picking him as running mate was his military devotion to schedule.38 A subordinate a minute late for an appointment would find Yeltsin tapping his foot irascibly. At Russian-American summits, he was irked by the tardy Bill Clinton. The only times Yeltsin was late for organized events were when he wanted to indicate displeasure. An example would be the 1991 negotiations at Novo-Ogarëvo, before and after the August coup, at which he often arrived after Gorbachev had called the meeting to order.
Fastidiousness about the hands of the clock makes it all the more noticeable that in the sweep of the process of national reconstruction Yeltsin displayed his marked political arrhythmia. In the event-packed first term, he often wove puzzlingly between assertive activism and sluggish quiescence.
Where did this cadence come from? A plethora of answers rooted in external factors—none of them particularly believable—have been floated. Several acquaintances have seen a similarity to Russia’s national mascot, the brown bear, which hibernates in winter and prowls the forest in the warm weather.39 Gaidar saw Yeltsin as a latter-day Il’ya Muromets, the knighterrant of Slavic folk poems.40 Lame since his youth, Il’ya is restored to health by two psalm-singing pilgrims and gallops off to smite evil serpents and barbarian hordes. Every Russian schoolchild knows the tale; it is commemorated in paintings, in a symphony by Reinhold Glière, in the name of the country’s first bomber aircraft (built in World War I by Igor Sikorsky), and in Aleksandr Ptushko’s film from the 1950s, the first widescreen movie made in the USSR. In a more real-life vein, Mikhail Gorbachev has pointed to Yeltsin’s career in the Soviet construction industry, with its ethos of “storming” and “hurry up and finish” after intervals of idleness.41
These zoological, folkloric, and occupational analogies do not hit the bull’s-eye. Yes, Yeltsin might have been said to be ursine in visual aspect and gait, but any parallel across species can be no more than lightheartedly allegorical, and his highs and lows did not issue forth in the seasonality of a hibernating mammal. The mythic Il’ya Muromets roused himself from his pallet only once, at the age of thirty-three, and never revisited it. Soviet civil engineers, unlike Yeltsin as president, functioned in an orderly temporal framework laid down by the monthly, quarterly, and yearly planning calendars. And, since Russian politicians with this professional past differed in their styles and predilections, labor in construction could not have been determinant.42