Sifting through the not very good alternatives, Yeltsin decided to go under the knife. He revealed to Russian television on September 5 that he had a sick heart and would submit to an unspecified procedure at the end of the month, and in Moscow: “The president is supposed to have operations at home [in Russia].” In that he had been noncommittal in his last meeting with the doctors, his statement was to them “like a thunderclap in an unclouded sky”—a vintage Yeltsin surprise.9
Acting in character, Yeltsin put a brave face on the situation to
For so many years, I had kept the sensation of myself as a ten-year-old boy: I can do absolutely anything! That is right, absolutely anything! I could climb a tree or float on a raft down the river. I could hike across the taiga. I could go days on end without sleeping or spend hours in the steambath. I could defeat any opponent. You name it, I could do it. But a person’s omnipotence can disappear in a flash. Someone else—the doctors, destiny—acquires power over his body. [I asked myself] was this new “I” needed by his loved ones? Was he needed by the country as a whole?11
He was admitted to the TsKB, the central Kremlin hospital, on September 12. The Yeltsins took Chazov’s advice to bring in a group of consultants from Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, headed by the pioneering cardiac surgeon Michael E. DeBakey, whose professional contacts with Soviet and Russian peers went back to the 1950s. The Americans came to the conclusion that his heart was failing and the bypass operation was the patient’s only hope. DeBakey delivered his verdict on September 25. He informed Yeltsin the bypass should let him live comfortably for ten to fifteen years. “I’ll do what you say if you can put me back in my office,” Yeltsin replied, which DeBakey told him was doable.12
Yeltsin took a month more to lose weight, overcome transient anemia from gastrointestinal bleeding, and improve his thyroid function. Reconciled to his fate, he was wheeled into the cardiology center’s operating theater at seven A.M. on November 5. Before going under, he temporarily ceded his constitutional powers, among them those of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, to Chernomyrdin.13 The twelve-member operating team was led by Renat Akchurin, who had spent a sabbatical in Houston and was Chernomyrdin’s surgeon in 1992. DeBakey, four American colleagues, and two Germans watched them on closed-circuit television from an adjoining room, with devices for ventricular assistance at the ready if needed. Yeltsin’s chest was opened and portions of his left internal mammary artery and saphenous vein were transferred to form five grafts on the heart. The painstaking work took seven hours. For sixty-eight minutes, heartbeat was stopped and his blood was circulated by a heart-lung machine. The muscle restarted on its own without chemical stimulation.14
The operation was a lifesaver. Yeltsin’s coronary ejection fraction rose to 50 percent, still subnormal but not menacing. In gratitude, he was to have the Presidential Business Department quietly allocate larger apartments to Akchurin and six anesthesiologists and nurses.15 But rehabilitation was long and uncertain. Yeltsin was taken off the ventilator on November 6 and initialed a decree taking authority back from Chernomyrdin, twenty-three hours after giving it away. He pestered the doctors into moving him on November 8 to the TsKB, where the VIP suite had secure communication lines. On November 20, the sutures removed, he was allowed a stroll in the hospital park. The yard “was dank, quiet, and cold. I went slowly along the path and looked at the brown leaves and the November sky. It was autumn, the autumn of a president.”16 On November 22 he was taken to the Barvikha sanatorium to rest.
