Yeltsin on pension went for a walk and a swim in the pool daily and hunted at Zavidovo several times a year. Unable to take to the tennis court, he played it vicariously by being an ardent fan of the professional game. He attended every big match in Moscow and rented a satellite dish that pulled in broadcasts from every continent—he sometimes watched them live at all hours of the night. Another luxury within reach was extensive travel. In addition to domestic destinations across Russia and the former Soviet Union, he and Naina paid visits to Israel, Germany, China, Japan, France, Britain, Norway, Alaska, Ireland, and Italy. He was in Paris on December, 1, 2002, when Russia won its first major team trophy in tennis, the Davis Cup. Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, Yeltsin-style, Mikhail Youzhny came back from a two-set deficit to edge a French player in the deciding match. “Yeltsin sat in the VIP box along with French President Jacques Chirac during the entire three-day encounter, cheering wildly at every winning point for Russia. In the most dramatic moments of the tie [on December 1], Yeltsin, the self-proclaimed team mascot, punched the air in delight. The moment Youzhny clinched the title, Yeltsin climbed over a courtside barrier to bearhug him and the rest of the squad.”9 He made it to Paris again for the French Open in June 2004, to Wimbledon on the same trip, and back to the French Open in June 2006.
Whereas private life after power had many joys, Yeltsin had to withdraw from the public realm, and this process brought the sting of disappointment as well as relief that somebody else was making the decisions. On January 10, 2000, back from an excursion to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Yeltsin opened the door of his study at Gorki-9 and found the desk empty of papers. The handset of the secured government telephone line had no dial tone. “There was absolutely nothing for me to do in this office. I sat in the chair for a time and then picked up and left.” The phone connection was quickly re-established—the interruption had been a technical hiccup—but for some days Yeltsin experienced “an engulfing emptiness.” He had been a boss at one level or another since the 1950s and had held senior political positions since the 1970s. Now a psychological adjustment was needed. He would have to accept that he was not in charge of anything outside the grounds of his home, and even they belonged to the state. While people might come to him with questions and comments, he had to “contain my . . . leader’s reflex” and get used to expressing no more than an opinion.10 In a press interview a year after bowing out, he conceded that he was sometimes subject to melancholy
Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, who after his involuntary retreat set up a large philanthropic foundation and gave numerous lectures, Yeltsin chose to keep out of the public eye. He abstained from formal speeches in Russia and abroad and gave only about ten newspaper and television interviews in seven years. A Yeltsin Foundation was established in November 2000, with his daughter Tatyana as president and headquartered in a modest building across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. It concentrated on nonpolitical, youth-oriented work, spending several million dollars a year. Among the beneficiaries were the village school in Butka, the Pushkin School in Berezniki, and Urals State Technical University (the former UPI) in Yekaterinburg. There were national programs for sick children, young athletes, and tennis and volleyball tournaments in the hinterland. The organization opened a Urals branch in Yekaterinburg in 2006.12 A presidential library, announced by the Kremlin as a government project in 2000, was funded only after his death in 2007—in the form of a library named after Yeltsin in St. Petersburg, dedicated to the history of the Russian state. Yeltsin dictated and edited
