Yeltsin’s days now centered on his country residence—Gorki-9 in the first year, the more pleasant Barvikha-4 for the duration. The feared personal indignities did not come about. He was never jeered at or made a spectacle of. No one went after him for his actions in government or tried to do him harm through his family.
Aside from the evils avoided, retirement brought with it two good things, in particular. For one, it did wonders for Yeltsin’s physical condition. “Immediately after my departure from the post of president, an enormous, unbelievably heavy load fell from my shoulders and I began to breathe easy”; “the constant pressure that . . . saps the health of the strongest organism” was behind him.3 Health problems did nag at Yeltsin. He submitted to surgery for eye cataracts in 2000 and 2005. He came down with double pneumonia in January–February 2001 and spent his seventieth birthday in the hospital. In December 2001 he had an angioplasty at the German Heart Center in Berlin. A virus kept him away from Putin’s second inauguration in May 2004. Except for the bout with pneumonia—when the doctors warned the family he might have only days to live—these were pinpricks compared to what he endured from 1996 through 1999.4 Yeltsin still awoke at dawn.5 Under Naina Yeltsina’s watchful eye, he trimmed his waistline, ate a wholesome diet, and kept his drinking to a minimum. His overall condition took a turn for the better in 2002. Acquaintances thought he looked ten years younger.
The other great bonus from relinquishing office was the time and freedom to pursue interests he had long put on the back burner. Yeltsin saw a fair amount of his old Sverdlovsk friends and in May 2005 hosted a fiftieth reunion of his UPI class at a mountain spa in Kislovodsk. Of high-ranking coworkers from his presidential years, he renewed acquaintances with almost every one from whom he had parted amicably and with many from whom he had not—Aleksandr Korzhakov being the outstanding exception.
Yeltsin’s deepest interest was in a family circle that continued to swell. His daughter Tatyana, who ceased all political activity, married Valentin Yumashev in 2001 and bore Yeltsin his sixth grandchild, Mariya. Tatyana Yumasheva moved out of Boris and Naina’s home, but she and Yelena Okulova came around to see their father almost every day. The marriage of Yumashev’s daughter, Polina, to aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, one of the richest men in Russia, assured that segment of the Yeltsin clan financial security. 6 A first great-grandchild, a boy, had been born in late 1999; a second and third, also boys, arrived in 2005 and 2006.7 In September 2006, Boris, Naina, and brood celebrated the couple’s golden wedding anniversary.
The biggest claim on Yeltsin’s leisure hours was reading. He had the children’s nursery on the first floor of Barvikha-4 converted into a library with a writing desk and armchair. Tatyana had a box of about a dozen books delivered to him each week. They were put on a sorting table and stored on floor-to-ceiling shelves only when he was through with them. With a target of three hundred pages a day, Yeltsin plowed through memoirs, biographies, historical novels, foreign literature in translation, detective and spy thrillers, science fiction, military history, and the poetry of Pushkin. He read the multivolume works of the great Russian historians Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), Nikolai Kostomarov (1817–85), Sergei Solov’ëv (1820–79), and Vasilii Klyuchevskii (1841–1911). When I last conversed with him, in 2002, he had just finished a number of classic and recently released books about Peter the Great. He was appalled by the evidence of his hero’s cruelty and imbalanced mind: “I have come to view him with great realism, although I remain a defender of Peter.”8
