Yeltsin полностью

Counter to the doomsday talk, the Russian economy after those first jumpy weeks commenced a dramatic upturn that has continued to this day. There were signs as early as October and November of 1998. The annual figures for 1999 were music to Yeltsin’s ears—5.4 percent growth and inflation under 40 percent. The seemingly disastrous decision to mark down the currency ended up being a revitalizing tonic. The devalued ruble made petroleum and other exports more affordable to external buyers and formed a nontariff barrier against imports, which sparked a recovery in the domestic supply of food, apparel, and consumer durables. Shut out of international capital markets, Russia was at last pressed to harden its state budget and restructure the sovereign debt. Crisis let these revisions, undoable in normal times, be imposed and locked in against regression. In the worldwide economic environment, trends turned in Russia’s favor for the first time since the 1980s. Most critically, oil prices more than doubled between 1998 and 2000. That surge, compounded by an increase in production and exports, tripled revenues from the oil and gas trade, which in turn restored liquidity to cash-starved commerce and put an end to the demonetization and nonpayment syndromes.⁴⁵

In his survey of the financial collapse in Presidential Marathon, Yeltsin revisited the therapeutic imagery he had applied to shock therapy six or seven years beforehand. “A political crisis,” he wrote, “is a temporary phenomenon and is even useful in a way. I know from my life that the organism uses a crisis to overcome an illness, renew itself, and return to its customary, healthy state.”⁴⁶ The passing of the great panic of 1998, however, was not followed by a revival of Boris Yeltsin’s fortunes. Instead, he was increasingly beleaguered and preoccupied by finding a way out of the jam he was in.

One reason this was so was that the economic turnaround seemed fragile and did not improve the well-being of the average Russian family for some time to come. Per-capita income and consumption reached pre-crash levels only in 2001, by which time Yeltsin was in retirement.

A more immediate problem was with the president’s personal health and ability, actual and perceived, to do his job. Yeltsin maintained mental equilibrium after the blur of events in August–September, largely out of relief that things were not worse and that Primakov had taken the bit between his teeth. It was his physical condition that worsened noticeably. One month after Primakov’s installation, Yeltsin’s occasional appearances at the Kremlin were being played up by the Russian media as “breaking news.” On a visit to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the second week of October, he had coughing spells, several times lost his footing, and returned to Moscow early.⁴⁷ He checked into the Barvikha sanatorium at the end of October, went on a threeweek layoff attributed by his staff to exhaustion, and was admitted to the TsKB on November 23 with double pneumonia, staying there for better than two weeks. On January 17, 1999, he was hospitalized with a bleeding stomach ulcer. He emerged from the sanatorium in early February to fly to the funeral of King Hussein of Jordan, where Primakov had been announced as Russia’s representative. His doctors were unconditionally against the expedition. “No one understands me,” Yeltsin declared to his staff, ordering a six A.M. departure for the presidential plane.⁴⁸ He was on the ground in Amman for only six hours.

The ulcer flared up again in late February. Yeltsin was readmitted for three weeks in hospital and sanatorium. The Izvestiya columnist Maksim Sokolov floridly summed up the contrast with Yeltsin in his prime: “The material out of which nature made Yeltsin is the wood from which kings are carved. Yeltsin’s and all Russia’s misfortune is that nine years of transitional burdens have managed to chew this wood into dust.”⁴⁹ Attendees at the G-8 meeting in Cologne in June 1999, where Yeltsin dropped in on the final day, found that he “looked like a battered statue that might topple over at any moment.”⁵⁰ After an even-keeled summer, he was in hospital for several days in October 1999 for influenza and laryngitis and, following a short visit to Istanbul—his last as president—went through it all over again in November and early December, for pneumonia.

The decline in Yeltsin’s health provoked repeated pleas in parliament and the media for him to resign. Some went so far as to appeal to Naina Yeltsina and the family to intercede to put a stop to the “public spectacle” of him “dying away” in office—unsolicited advice that the Yeltsins found deeply wounding.⁵¹