Yeltsin полностью

Captaincy of the team was not up for debate. An underperforming player might be slighted for months before Yeltsin let him go. In July 1994, aboard a steamship on the Yenisei River in Siberia with the governor of Krasnoyarsk province, Valerii Zubov, Yeltsin was out of sorts at japes made by press secretary Vyacheslav Kostikov and ordered him thrown into the drink, fully clothed. Pavel Borodin rescued Kostikov with only his self-regard harmed.³⁶ Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev was on the receiving end in 1995. Yeltsin complained of him at press conferences in July and September. When they traveled to the United States in October, the Americans were astonished to see Kozyrev disembark the presidential airplane in New York through a rear door. He was assigned to the hindmost car in the motorcade and forbidden to accompany Yeltsin to the United Nations, after which he “went forlornly off to his hotel.”³⁷ In January 1996 Yeltsin replaced Kozyrev with Yevgenii Primakov.

In meetings scheduled for briefing purposes, Yeltsin never tipped off the questions he would ask of the reporting official. No exception was made for his Tuesday A.M. update from the prime minister, the number two in the Russian state. “Prompting would not have corresponded to the style of Boris Yeltsin. He wanted the weekly performance to have some suspense about it, something unexpected for the prime minister. The latter, of course, was not overjoyed.”³⁸ The prime minister had the same right to ask questions as the president, and Yeltsin had no interest in seeing them before the meeting. In one-on-one meetings the president initiated, he would call for a summary of the recommended course, then ask to hear in a nutshell which pieces of it were spornyi, debatable—likely to cause implementation and political problems. If the discussion had been initiated by a subordinate, it was not unusual for Yeltsin to stare poker-faced for most of the encounter. I heard in interviews that the guest often felt as if trapped in a magnetic field, or like a rabbit in the gaze of a boa constrictor that could strike without warning. Kostikov convincingly attributes Yeltsin’s silence at many meetings to his work in the CPSU apparatus, “when you could pay with your career for a careless word or an overly frank glance,” as well as to an instinct to protect yourself from people “who are prepared to change their opinion depending on the eyebrow movements of a powerful person.”³⁹ But there was personal style at work, too. Yeltsin reflected on it in the last volume of his memoirs: “In conversation, I love sharp turns, gaps, and unexpected transitions. I hold to my own rhythm and cannot stand stupid monotony.”⁴⁰

At meetings with many policymakers present, Yeltsin kept them on their toes by arbitrarily assigning seats at the table and sometimes changing the order at the last second, moving them toward or away from his chair. If he had already made a decision on an issue, he might hear out advice on how to do it better but hated to be contradicted. Were he to revise a position, it was by stealing the critic’s thunder without explicitly endorsing the critique: He “came out in public support of the stand he had previously spurned, without naming names.”⁴¹ During a discussion he thought unproductive, Yeltsin could vacate the room to stunning effect, leaving the others to cool their heels for twenty or thirty minutes. The signing of a memorandum or position paper—though not of a decree or law, which would have undergone laborious review—could evoke “the Yeltsin pause.” The president would take up to sixty seconds to reread the text word for word, pan over the spectators, and then roll up his shirt sleeve and scratch out his signature with a fountain pen. There were days when Yeltsin, pen uncapped, spied a problem in the document and discarded it. The sponsors would go scurrying for cover, and Yeltsin would take the unsigned document away with him.