Others, meanwhile, have looked to Yeltsin’s psyche for a totally internal explanation—less than compellingly, in my view. Gorbachev, while citing Yeltsin’s background in the construction industry, has also belabored him for an innate preference for confrontation. “In his human qualities,” Gorbachev claims in his memoirs, “he was better suited to an epoch of Sturm und Drang” than to “normal work.” “He contains a volcanic mixture and is capable only of destruction.”43 Gorbachev and some Moscow pundits have also insinuated that Yeltsin stirred tumult so as to rouse himself to action and look the hero while he was at it. The charge that Yeltsin was a purely destructive factor is a red herring, inconsistent with many chapters in his life. Yeltsin denied that he manufactured artificial emergencies: The obstacles to easy accomplishment “have always found me,” and not he them.44
The Moscow psychologist Oleg Davydov finds Yeltsin’s rebuttal flawed because it deals only with the conscious incitement of crisis and not with the subconscious. Yeltsin’s bent for getting into tight spots was subliminal, Davydov thinks, and was matched by an almost mystical belief in his ability to escape unscathed. Yeltsin, he said, governed himself from adolescence onward by means of a distinctive “three-step”: He bumbles into peril by acting preemptively; the misstep sets off a crisis; through an exercise of will, and with a pinch of good fortune, he saves the day. As a homely early case, Davydov cites Yeltsin’s and his school chums’ quest for the headwaters of the Yaiva River after ninth grade; the start of economic shock therapy is a politicized case from the 1990s.45 Davydov’s thesis is way too rigid and is circular as welclass="underline" Yeltsin’s motivation is inferred from his behavior, and then used to account for that same behavior. What can be said is that, whether or not danger sought him out, it not uncommonly found in Yeltsin a willing accessory.
There is no shortage of other conjectures about the alternating moods of Yeltsin. One or two journalists have said he had the mental affliction cyclothymia, a class of bipolar or manic-depression disorder. Patients with this condition experience swings from elated to somber.46 However, no clinician who examined Yeltsin, or any other, has ever indicated such a diagnosis. Normal onset of cyclothymia is in the teens or early twenties, for which Yeltsin’s biography provides zero evidence, and the moods of patients oscillate furiously, in a matter of days, which his are not known to have done. Yeltsin’s temper when on the knife’s edge is typically described as selfcontrolled and collected, not euphoric. A good specimen would be the events of September–October 1993, in the heat of the battle with the Congress of Deputies. A general who was present at one of his garrison visits before September 21 found him energetic, focused, and “going deep into every word” the officers said. Speaking on the telephone to President Clinton right after his edict, Yeltsin was “pumped and combative” yet on task. The evening of October 3, as street battles raged in Moscow, he was not equal to addressing the population on television. By the early morning hours of October 4, though, as he awaited his climactic predawn meeting with the army command, he had the sang-froid to take to a sofa in his office suite for a two-hour snooze.47
Yeltsin’s red-letter actions as leader were most often taken in spasms of effort and in crises he had a part in stimulating. His pugnacity was a given, and had been since Berezniki. “I am not the type,” he had exclaimed at the Higher Komsomol School in 1988, “to take the easier or more pleasing course, to go by the satiny paved road rather than the rough footpath” (see Chapter 7). The novelty here was that the Moscow pressure cooker and the pluralism and quicksilver quality of transitional politics supplied him with incomparably more make-or-break situations in which it could be activated.
Yeltsin and people who knew him in the 1990s often linked his flair for rising to the occasion with his athletic experience, even though he and they well knew that governing a country is infinitely more complicated than batting a ball about with a small number of players and fixed rules. One might see it as a crossbreed of Yeltsin’s success and testing scripts—improving his record while proving himself. Yeltsin was likeliest to see a political challenge as in scale to his talents when its magnitude was great and the chips were down. He took for granted that he could meet the challenge and others would not.
Yeltsin’s tennis teacher and friend until 1996, Shamil Tarpishchev, recalls that on the court his understudy “rallied his nervous system” and went all-out only at the breakpoint in a game, when the server risks losing his serve and the opposing player or team stands to go back on offense. “He was the same in politics,” Tarpishchev notes. “The direr the situation, the more he concentrated.”48 About his decision to go outside and face the crowd and the tanks on August 19, 1991, Yeltsin once observed, “I sorted everything out. I am an athlete and I know very well how it happens. All of a sudden, you are jarred and feel that the game is on, that you can boldly take the initiative into your hands.”49 He approached in the same frame of mind shock therapy in 1992, the 1993 conflict with parliament, Chechnya in 1994, and eventually his re-election campaign in 1996. El’dar Ryazanov interrogated him, weeks after the bombardment of the White House, about his métier being do-or-die situations. “Yes,” Yeltsin responded, “I know myself too well not to agree with this…. I constantly have to keep myself in fighting trim…. Even in sport, when I played volleyball in my student years… you would not see much of me in the main part of the game…. But if the match is on the line I am able to work miracles.”50 In suspenseful situations, Yeltsin’s habit was to ratchet up the sense of crisis, and ergo the demand for decisive action to defuse it, by playing wait-and-see as long as he could. It was in his nature, as his former aides put it well, “to bide his time as things percolated, until the situation presented a danger to him and his power”—until the match was on the line.51 Procrastinating up to the split second his intuition whispered was the right one, it was then into the breach, the adrenalin surging.
“Am I a strong or a weak person?” Yeltsin asked in Notes of a President. “In exigent situations, I am usually strong. In routine situations, I am sometimes limp.” There are also “times when I do not look like the Yeltsin people have grown used to seeing,” including times when “I fly off the handle in stupid ways, like a child.”52
Yeltsinesque torpor was of two basal types, although the line smudged some. The first, and the easier to grasp, was the emotional blowback from failure. Several of the traumas that actuated such feelings during perestroika have been discussed in earlier chapters: the overload of governing the capital city, the secret speech, the attacks on him during his political resurrection. The psychodrama continued after 1991. In writing of it in Notes, he started with economic shock therapy:
The first one who was in for shock, and repeatedly—with pained reactions, having to strain every resource—was me, the president. Enervating bouts of depression, agonizing reflections late at night, insomnia and headaches, despair at the grimy and impoverished look of Moscow and other Russian cities, the criticism that billowed out every day in the newspapers and on the television screen, the badgering at sessions of the congress, the weight of the decisions made, the people close to me who did not support me when I needed it, who did not hold up, who deceived me—all this I had to brook.53