YELTSIN: I grumbled a little, and then I calmed down. And what came of it? The anthem stayed in place.26
Matters of state were forgotten when Yeltsin on February 1, 2006, accepted Putin’s hospitality for a seventy-fifth birthday party in the Kremlin palace. It was his last hurrah before a political audience. Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl, Patriarch Aleksii II, and Mstislav Rostropovich, and all of Yeltsin’s prime ministers headed the guest list of three hundred. They were treated to champagne and canapés in Alexander Nevsky Hall, chamber music in St. Andrei’s Hall, and a dinner of pheasant, sturgeon, and veal in St. George’s Hall. He had been a free man since 2000, Yeltsin said in his toast to the company, and would not trade it for anything. For the first time in a thousand years a past leader of Russia “did not have his head chopped off ” and got to enjoy an evening in his honor in the Kremlin. During the response toasts, he sat with a microphone in hand, “like at a production meeting,” prepared “to give a piece of his mind to subordinates,” which he did several times. Viktor Chernomyrdin drew the loudest applause. Yeltsin had been hard to work with and was no angel, “But angels are not able to govern the state.”27
Yeltsin liked to tell his wife and children that he intended to see one hundred but might be willing to settle for eighty-five. As he grew old, he grew more introspective, and as he did he gave considerable thought to spiritual issues. There was abundant media speculation in Russia in 2007 that he had undergone a religious re-conversion and died a devout Orthodox Christian. It was whetted by the church funeral he received, by word that he had gone on a trip to the biblical Holy Land weeks before his fatal illness, and by the Patriarch’s statement at the fortieth-day rite, on June 1, that Yeltsin in recent times had journeyed from atheism to being a believer
It is clear that Yeltsin’s curiosity about, and regard for, religion revived during and after the collapse of communism. When he and Billy Graham spent an hour together in Moscow in July 1991, it was with pride that he said his grandchildren all wore crucifixes around their necks. “I could tell,” Graham recalled, “that he was growing in his sympathetic attitude toward the church and toward the gospel.”28 Yeltsin attended services on holidays from the late 1980s onward; during them, he would make an offering, light a votive candle, and cross himself in the Orthodox fashion, right shoulder before the left. At his mother’s funeral in 1993, he is said to have queried one of the priests about the afterlife.29 His attention to religious themes appears to have increased after 2000. In an interview in 2006, he for the only time in public referred to God as a presence and to himself as having a soul: “For me, God is the creature who knows what goes on in my soul. He sees within me that which no one else sees. And I want to believe God sees that my thoughts have been clean.”30 In late March and early April of 2007, he traveled to Jordan, which he had seen once before, on government business, in 1999. He and Naina stayed at a Dead Sea resort and took a drive one day to the River Jordan. Yeltsin waded in and washed his face in the waters of the river, close by the place Jesus is thought to have been baptized. The couple, in Naina’s words, “warmly addressed God” by voicing words of prayer together.31
Despite these incidents, Yeltsin, like most Russians, did not worship weekly, did not pray regularly or keep the Lenten fast, and did not delve in any detail into church teachings. He was drawn mostly in a general, cultural sense to the faith of his parents and grandparents. He did take comfort, however, from what he knew of it, and showed so in gestures that the communist of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s would never have made.
The beginning of the end for Yeltsin was the fall he took on the bathroom floor of a hotel suite in Sardinia on September 7, 2005. He fractured his left thigh bone up near the hip and had to have surgery on the joint upon his return to Moscow. He was on crutches for several months and walked with a limp after that. Less mobile than before, he exercised less and put on weight. He began to feel a malaise in the autumn of 2006. His perennial aide, Vladimir Shevchenko, noticed that winter that he was “more inside himself.” “He was thinking things over, taking them to heart, reconsidering.”32
