Yeltsin went home on December 4. Home until 2001 was not Barvikha-4, which came under renovation that summer, but Gorki-9, a state dacha in Usovo, just upriver on the Moskva. (The household kept the apartment in Krylatskoye as a Moscow address, but Yeltsin seems not to have stayed one night there in his second term.) His medical condition would force him to spend far more time at Gorki-9 than he had at Barvikha-4. The house had been built in the late 1920s for Lenin’s successor as chairman of the Soviet government, Aleksei Rykov; it was Vyacheslav Molotov’s country place for twenty-five years and Nikita Khrushchev’s from 1958 to 1964. After then, it was used mostly as a governmental guest manor. Gorki-9 was nondescript, with narrow Grecian columns in front and a hotel-style layout; long corridors on two floors opened left and right onto small rooms. It was rather dilapidated ; in 2000 part of the second-floor ceiling was to fall in.17 To regain his strength, Yeltsin perambulated the extensive grounds where Khrushchev, who fancied himself an agriculture expert, had in his day planted vegetables, flowers, and berries. Khrushchev liked the path around the property because it was level, and this no doubt was an attraction to Yeltsin.18
Yeltsin was restricted to thirty minutes of business conversation daily, signing decrees and bills (a facsimile signature was used for protocol decisions), and meeting several times weekly with Chubais.19 On December 23 he finally made it to his Kremlin desk for an hour or two. He was on top of the world. “I had a palpable sensation of impatience, a desire to work. . . . I was another person. I could deal with any problem.”20 On December 31 he attended the mayor’s annual tree-trimming party in the Kremlin. Several days later he went to a steambath. It had not been properly heated, and he caught cold. He was hospitalized on January 7 with double pneumonia and could not drag himself back to the office until the last week of the month. One of his first foreign visitors, on February 21, was the new U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. She found him “like a figure made of wax,” his face pasty and his body “startlingly thin” (he was sixty pounds lighter than at his inauguration). Nonetheless, “Yeltsin’s voice was strong and his blue eyes sparkled.”21
Healthwise, 1997 was the best year of Yeltsin’s second term. He made rapid strides that spring. Foreign statesmen saw it in Paris on May 27, at the signing of the “founding act” that formalized Russia’s begrudging acceptance of the eastward expansion of the NATO bloc. In the grand ballroom of the Élysée Palace, he gave an earthy reminder of the Yeltsin of old:
When Yeltsin joined the sixteen allied leaders and [Secretary General] Javier Solana at the podium, he behaved as though he were a famous comic actor listening to testimonials before accepting a lifetime achievement award: He knew that the occasion required solemnity, but he couldn’t help giving the fans a little of what they’d come to expect from him. Yeltsin’s expression kept changing. One minute he was beaming with pleasure as the other dignitaries, one by one, praised his statesmanship as well as his credentials as a reformer and democrat; the next he was screwing up his face in exaggerated concentration on the weightiness of the moment. When it came time for him to sign the Founding Act, he took a huge breath, wrote his name with a flourish, then gave Solana a bear hug and a big kiss on both cheeks.22
Yeltsin was in similarly fine fettle at the G-8 meeting in Denver in June, when the G-7 club of industrial powers was enlarged to include Russia. On his summer vacation at Shuiskaya Chupa and Volzhskii Utës in July and August, which Russian television cameras were allowed to show, he was tanned and relaxed. He did not have another setback until December, when he had to be treated for a respiratory infection.
