Anxiety over the condition of his circulatory system persisted after the operation. Yeltsin was bothered by insomnia, as before 1996, and used prescription sleeping pills. He took analgesics for pain in his back and asked doctors whether the pangs were connected with his heart condition; the doctors said they were not. Conspiracy buffs hypothesized that illness excused Yeltsin from answering tough questions about policy and was helpful as a loyalty test, in clarifying who was willing to stand by him and who was not.30 Maybe there was something to these theories, but Yeltsin on any given day was more apt to feel caged in by his limitations. Family members say that the one great regret of his second term was the failure to recover bodily vigor, as he had trusted he would when he consented to the surgery.
Yeltsin’s medical situation necessitated a substantial reduction in his time at official workplaces. He was still an early bird (rising for a freezing shower at five A.M.), but many days he stayed at home and his spokesmen told the media he was “working with documents.” When he did come to the office, it was usually at 9:00 or 9:30, and stays after the midday meal around two P.M. were the exception rather than the rule. In January, February, and March of 1998, for instance, Yeltsin lasted after four P.M. on only seven or eight days; on two of them, it was for state dinners (for the king of Belgium and the Ukrainian president). The correspondent who disinterred this information titled her exposé “Yeltsin in Gorki.” Russian readers would have seen the double entendre. Gorki (not to be confused with Gorki-9 or Gorki-10) is a former nobleman’s estate south and west of Moscow where Vladimir Lenin lived as an invalid from his cerebral hemorrhage in May 1922 to his death in January 1924. A photo of a sunken-eyed Lenin in a rattan wheelchair, a blanket draped over his knees, was reprinted in many Soviet history texts.31
While it was patent that Yeltsin was not his former self, some of the coverage of his condition was misleading. He was acutely ill in hospital eight times between November 1996 and December 1999, and while on vacation he was out of touch with most staff for one or two weeks a year. The rest of the time, if and when his departure from the Kremlin was on the early side, he would indeed work “with documents” at Gorki-9. Yeltsin went on long, restful vacations, true, but so do many other world leaders with fewer health concerns. Ronald Reagan, for example, took 436 vacation days in eight years, or an average of fifty-five days a year, spending many of them at his ranch in Santa Barbara, California. George W. Bush had taken 418 days by mid-2007, or sixty-four a year, mostly in Crawford, Texas, and President Eisenhower is said to have spent 222 days playing golf in Augusta, Georgia.32 Yeltsin’s vacation time after 1996 was of the order of thirty or forty days a year. When in the country near Moscow, he made more use of the telephone than in the past. Politicos and bureaucrats were expected to come to him when invited, which a handful were on most workdays. Unlike Lenin in the 1920s, he was not dying, was not a shut-in, and had not lost cognitive capacity.33
The bottom line politically was that when the second-term Yeltsin rationed his effort and expended it purposefully, he
