Yeltsin полностью

One fortuitous byproduct of worsened health was that it prompted a near cessation of Yeltsin’s drinking. Consuming alcohol in volume, daily or almost daily, stopped for him in 1996. The craving diminished greatly during his reclusiveness before and after surgery. Self-preservation supplied the most hardheaded of motives: Akchurin and Chazov told him bluntly that not to give the habit up would be the death of him, and Yeltsin took their word for it. He was instructed to hold himself to a glassful of wine a day—advice he followed to the letter, he wrote in Presidential Marathon.³⁵ The fall of Aleksandr Korzhakov and the faction around him removed the small-group medium in which Yeltsin had found drinking most congenial. Naina Yeltsina’s say over his diet and routine increased markedly. For state receptions and dinners, the family had the Kremlin kitchen lay in red wine adulterated with colored water, specially prepared for the president’s table. On social occasions, according to his daughter Tatyana, he might allow himself one, two, or, rarely, three glasses of dry red wine or champagne, but he knew when to stop.³⁶ These restraints seem to have been breached on a limited number of occasions, although even domestic and foreign observers who record them note the contrast with the first term.³⁷ Alcohol had ceased to be the part of Yeltsin’s life that it was in the first half of the 1990s, and no longer figured significantly in his relations with others.

More’s the pity that he received no political dividends from this sobriety. Most Russians did not know his conduct had changed, and most analysts of those years write as if it had not. Yeltsin’s privacy fetish and embarrassment over past miscues deterred him from providing any kind of explanation. It would have been undignified, as he put it in his final memoir volume, to “beat my breast” about the issue, and many would never have taken his word for it anyway.³⁸ He was in a when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife trap: He could not say he had licked the vice without admitting he had it in the first place, which he was not willing to do until after retirement. Without a signal from him, no one in the government or the Kremlin could talk about the subject, and the press corps, for its part, considered it taboo.

Another change for the better was in psychological humor. The truncated second term was on the whole, his daughter said in an interview, “a calmer period” mentally for Yeltsin than the first.³⁹ He was less subject than back in the day to the mood swings between sleeping giant and snarling tiger. Physical debilitation precluded the spikes of supercharged effort, and the letdowns in their wake, that punctuated the first term: “I had endured a lot and, you could say, I had returned from the dead. I could not solve problems as I used to, by mustering all my physical strength and charging headon into frontal clashes. That wasn’t for me anymore.”⁴⁰ Objectively, Russia’s “reformist breakthrough,” as Yeltsin termed it in October 1991, was behind him. The foundations of a post-communist order had been laid, for better or worse, and his re-election ruled out a communist restoration for now. Although there would be political exigencies—the 1998 financial crash and the 1999 attempt to impeach him stand out—nothing would measure up to the initiation of shock therapy, the constitutional donnybrook of 1993, the first Chechen war, or the 1996 election. About his own role, Yeltsin seems to have been more philosophical following his second inauguration, more accepting that his main work was done and judgment of it would be up to history. And, in his presidential autumn, the end of his time at the top, and the transfer of power to friend or foe, were on the horizon. Someone else would soon be opening the color-coded files in Building No. 1.

From the summer of 1996 to the spring of 1997, Yeltsin’s leadership was in reactive mode. Besides weathering his parlous recovery and enforced leave, he was limited to tying up loose ends from the campaign. Promises that were affordable or whose costs could be deferred until better times were satisfying to return to. Small-change works projects and giveaways authorized during the campaign went ahead, at considerable expense to the budget. The cities of Ufa and Kazan used federal and provincial resources to start tunneling their subways in 1997; they opened to riders in 2004 and 2005 and are supposed to be under construction until the year 2040.