Yeltsin caught a head cold in Jordan that did not respond to rest. Shortly after getting back to Moscow, on April 11, 2007, he was admitted to the Central Clinical Hospital. He persuaded the doctors to discharge him after two days. On April 16 he was readmitted with an upper respiratory infection and symptoms of failure of the heart, lungs, and internal organs. He and his wife fully expected him to recover: He had been sicker than this in 2001 and had pulled through. He laid plans that weekend to be given his release early the coming week. About eight A.M. on Monday, April 23, Naina spoke to his adjutant by phone and said she would come in to help him wash up and shave. At 8:20 Yeltsin’s eyes went blank. She was told and rushed to the hospital. He was in intensive care, in a coma, when she made it there. Naina covered him with a shawl and sprinkled him with water she had taken from the Jordan.33 His pulse stopped at 3:45 P.M.
Neither the family nor the government had made funeral plans. That evening Putin announced a day of national mourning for the Wednesday. He proposed through his office and through the Patriarch an Orthodox service and accompanying state honors, with burial in Novodevichii Cemetery. Naina gladly accepted. Overnight Tuesday the body lay in state under the golden dome of the neo-Byzantine Cathedral of Christ the Savior, destroyed by Stalin in the 1930s and rebuilt from scratch in the 1990s. There had been no time to take down the banners from Easter, April 8. Yeltsin’s Soviet-era and post-Soviet medals were on view on a velvet cushion. Twenty-five thousand people filed briskly by the open oak casket, draped in the Russian tricolor. The morning of Wednesday, April 25, the family was comforted by Putin, by former Yeltsin associates, by foreign statesmen (Clinton and Kohl again, George H. W. Bush, Lech Wałesa, a total of thirty-five sitting and former national leaders), and by UPI classmates. The most surprising to find among the mourners was Yeltsin’s archrival, Gorbachev. Their paths had not crossed since December 1991. Gorbachev “stood there downcast and suddenly looked much older. It was evident that he was suffering in ways that few in the hall were. Together with the life of Boris Yeltsin, a piece of his own life had been torn away.”34 Naina thanked him for coming and wished him well.
Twenty white-robed clergy chanted the requiem mass at midday. A hearse took the coffin in procession from the cathedral to Novodevichii and an armored vehicle pulled it through the gates on a gun carriage. Behind the red walls, Yeltsin’s widow tucked a white handkerchief inside the casket and took her leave.35 It was lowered into one of the last plots left in the congested graveyard, where Nikita Khrushchev, alone of the Soviet leaders, and Yeltsin’s favorite writer, Anton Chekhov, lie and where he had planned to put Lenin. Three cannons fired a salvo and a band played the new-old national anthem.
Coda
What makes a political leader interesting is not necessarily what makes him influential
Immediate responses to Boris Yeltsin’s passing in 2007 are illustrative. The day of his funeral, KPRF deputies refused to stand for a minute of silence in the Duma. One of them joked bitterly that a stake of ash wood should be hammered into his grave, as if he were a vampire. The communists were in no doubt that Yeltsin’s influence had been overpowering. The source of their fury was the sentiment that communism’s and the Soviet Union’s demise was a crime for which he ought to be condemned.1
It would have done Yeltsin’s heart good to hear Anatolii Chubais, his associate in many projects, reach for precedents: “If you try to understand who in the history of Russia measures up to Boris Nikolayevich in the sum of what he did, perhaps [you would look to] Peter the Great. Or maybe it would be Lenin and Stalin combined, only each of them had a minus sign and [Yeltsin] had a plus sign.”2 Chubais thus rated Yeltsin high on both the empirical and the normative scales.
