Yeltsin reacted in pain to the general flow of negative news and to specific events. In the spring of 1992, he was despondent for weeks over the unexpectedly high rate of inflation and the nonarrival of recovery in production. Bad tidings in the economy were a constant during his first term, but the degree of awfulness varied, with “Black Tuesday”—October 11, 1994, when the ruble lost one-quarter of its value in a single day—taking the cake. As an afterclap of Black Tuesday, the Duma initiated but did not approve a vote of no-confidence in the government.
The constitutional turbulence of 1992–93 afforded a series of precipitating events. The blows of Ruslan Khasbulatov and the deputies at the congress in December 1992 produced, Yeltsin recalls, “a relapse of the psychological wretchedness” that had plagued him when he was demoted by Gorbachev.54 He was wretched enough to think of ending it all. On December 9, 1992, the day the congress refused to accede to Gaidar as prime minister, he came home to Barvikha-4 “in a complete trance” and locked himself in the steambath. There he was lost in “very bad” thoughts (Yeltsin’s phrase, from Notes) until Korzhakov broke into the bath and took him to his wife. “I was just in time,” Korzhakov asserts, “to stop him from taking the ultimate step”—connecting the dots, that step would have been killing himself through scalding and suffocation in the steam. Korzhakov, who depicted the rescue in his anti-Yeltsin memoir, is a hostile witness. It is instructive, though, that Yeltsin’s wording implies he was in truth suicidal and that he did not contest Korzhakov’s account in Presidential Marathon in 2000. This affair is thus a far cry from the feigned suicide attempt of November 9, 1987.55 A week after locking himself in the steambath, Yeltsin was in a blue funk while on a visit to China and broke the trip off with a complaint of numbness in his extremities. Korzhakov blithely mentioned to him that Franklin Roosevelt ran the U.S. government from a wheelchair.56
Yeltsin recovered from this low-water mark, but as parliament moved toward impeachment in the spring of 1993 he “fell into a depression,” Korzhakov reports, and began to lose the thread of conversations. His mother’s death, a week before the March 28 vote on the resolution, intensified the gloom. Security Minister Viktor Barannikov had made him a birthday present of an imported handgun and a carton of ammunition, which Yeltsin stashed in an office cabinet. Alerted by an informant, Korzhakov had one of the Kremlin chefs boil the cartridges in water to disable them. Days before the roll was called, Yeltsin, with Korzhakov and two other officials looking on, took out the pistol, cocked it, and threatened to shoot himself. He let himself be talked out of pulling the trigger, unaware that the bullets had been doctored. Korzhakov says he eventually removed the firing pin.57
Chechnya brought further torture the next year. The president “was greatly afflicted by the tragedy” of the storming of Grozny, which began on December 31, 1994. For several days he cut himself off from the telephone and refused to receive even Korzhakov.58 A secondary effect of the intervention was the breakdown in relations with political liberals who had once been at his side. When Yelena Bonner criticized Yeltsin for his praise of Defense Minister Grachëv, Naina Yeltsina, with whom she had maintained social contact since Andrei Sakharov’s death, phoned to give her a tearful talking to, and the two stopped speaking.59 A schism broke out in the pro-reform Russia’s Choice movement, where Yegor Gaidar came out against the war while Boris Fëdorov, the former finance minister, left the organization in search of a more “patriotic” one. Yeltsin had arrived at “almost complete political isolation” because of the war and other issues. “I could no longer feel the support of those with whom I had begun my political career.”60 The hostage-taking at Budënnovsk, introducing Russia at large to terrorism, sent him into a tailspin in June 1995. He announced to a meeting of the advisory Security Council on June 30 that he planned to resign the presidency, since he had initiated an unsuccessful war. Council members asked him not to, and he withdrew the threat. “I don’t think this was playacting on Yeltsin’s part,” writes Yevgenii Primakov, who attended as director of Russian foreign intelligence. “He suffered over everything connected with Chechnya.”61
Yeltsin was in good company. Among modern leaders whose biographies were studied by the psychiatrist Arnold M. Ludwig, the lifetime rate for episodes of depression or melancholia lasting several weeks or more is 14 percent (as compared to 6 percent in the population of the United States), and under a more catholic definition would be about 30 percent. Ludwig found visionary statesmen who try to reshape society, and politicians whose power is crumbling, to be most susceptible to the problem.62
Yeltsin, however, was also prone to a second type of withdrawal that is not well captured by the usual typology. It came, ironically, in the backwash of heady victory as opposed to jarring defeat.
Late Soviet occurrences of this complex—his flight from Moscow after the 1989 and 1990 elections and the 1991 putsch—have been discussed in earlier chapters. The pattern reared its head again in the first several months of 1992, when Yeltsin left Gaidar and the cabinet to prosecute economic reform with little guidance from him. In 1993, after the successful referendum of April 25, Yeltsin was dilatory in following up and took a long summer holiday at Valdai. After he did take decisive steps against the parliament in September–October, he honored a promise to pay a visit to Tokyo, worked on the constitution for several weeks, and then was hard for most of his ministers and staffers to reach until after the December election and plebiscite. The pressure of those months “was so powerful that I still do not understand how my organism got through it, how it coped,” Yeltsin recollects.63
With his presidentialist constitution, and hence his supremacy in Russian politics, in the bag, one might have predicted that Yeltsin would be in a glowing frame of mind in 1994. His mood, though, was indolent for the first half of the year. Write his former aides, “The presidential timetable for that year logs Yeltsin’s numerous and often lengthy absences, attesting to the fact that he was going through a protracted crisis.” He took two weeks in Sochi in March and did not travel publicly in the provinces until his visit to Kazan at the end of May. His annual list of presidential objectives was finalized only in late April, when he initialed it but declined to set priorities among them. A staff memorandum attributed falling approval ratings to “the president’s passivity and lack of clarity over goals and policy.”64
These events are harder to make sense of than the straightforwardly dysphoric episodes in the first category. Why would Yeltsin’s very triumphs, the thrashing of his political rivals, weigh on him? There was, first, an exhaustion factor. When I questioned him about it in 2002, Yeltsin acknowledged it as a form of letdown (spad) or breather (peredyshka), not of depression (depressiya), and as a natural way for him to unwind after the battle.65 It is an admissible point. Even revolutionaries and warriors need a vacation every now and then, and Yeltsin after a victory was usually languid and distracted rather than morose. At his hideaways, he would make himself unavailable by telephone and spent much of the time in the fresh air.