Memories of the cover-up of his June 1996 heart attack and of his long nonappearance at the Kremlin were fresh, though, and more than anything explain the subsidence of Yeltsin’s approval ratings to the depths they had hit before the 1996 campaign.23 Aleksandr Korzhakov, elected to the Duma in a February by-election, came out with his voyeuristic book about Yeltsin in August 1997; it gave details on his health problems and first-term drinking extravagances.24 Armchair diagnoses of some untreatable condition circulated in the press and the Moscow rumor mill—that he suffered from Alzheimer’s, diabetes, Parkinson’s, dropsy, a brain tumor, or cirrhosis of the liver. All were false, but suspicions lingered. Aleksandr Salii, a KPRF legislator, claimed in June to have evidence that Yeltsin was so far gone that a body double had been standing in for him, and demanded that the procurator general’s office investigate. This featherbrained line of questioning would go on for years, reaching a low point in a potboiler published in 2005 whose thesis was that Yeltsin died during a heart-transplant operation in 1996, before the election, and was replaced by an imposter on the payroll of the CIA.25
The fact remained that Yeltsin was getting on in years, was in compromised general health, and was prone to emergencies and indispositions, which were to recur with greater frequency and harshness in 1998 and 1999. He put back on most of the girth he lost in 1996. The last flecks of gray in his mane had given over to snowy white and his voice had deepened from baritone to a raspy bass. His walk was stiff. Staff plotted itineraries at home and overseas that got around high staircases; three or four doctors, one of them a cardiologist, flew with him on all his foreign travels (this practice was begun in the first term); a larger medical area was built into the new presidential jet, an Ilyushin-96, delivered in 1996.26 By this age, political leaders in societies with far higher levels of well-being and healthcare than post-Soviet Russia may be hard-pressed to discharge their duties. Yeltsin had marked his sixty-sixth birthday shortly before returning to the Kremlin in 1997, which made him one year older than Dwight Eisenhower when he was felled by his big heart attack in 1955—and only one year younger than Yeltsin’s father when he had a devastating stroke in 1973.
Gone were the swagger and stamina that had been Yeltsin trademarks in Berezniki, Sverdlovsk, and Moscow. His beloved tennis and cold-water swims had to be put aside, and there were no more road shows or boogeying à la Ufa or Rostov.27 He was left with tame leisure pursuits like swimming, in heated pools, trout fishing, driving powerboats and snowmobiles, and billiards, in which he could still run the table and shoot from behind his back. And he was somewhat more given to verbal faux pas and dizzy spells. In Paris for the NATO confab in May 1997, for example, he proclaimed that Russian forces were going to take the nuclear warheads off their strategic missiles; they were not, and aides spent the rest of the meeting doing damage control. His visit to Stockholm in December 1997 brought stray claims about nuclear weapons and momentary confusion about whether he was in Sweden or Finland. A highlight of his call on Pope John Paul II in February 1998 was his declaration during a Vatican banquet of his “undying love for Rome, Italy, and Italian women.” Yeltsin referred to glitches like these by the abstruse Russian word
Russian journalists reported these occurrences in gory detail, as they had every right to. Memories were short, for there had been malapropisms when Yeltsin was healthy, too, and some observers had thought them endearing at the time (and this is not to mention those made over the years by leaders in other countries—think no further than the forty-third president of the United States).29 The misstatements and also the stumbles were interpreted much less charitably in the altered Russian context.
