98 Robert S. Strauss, interview with the author (January 9, 2006).
99 Viktor Yaroshenko, Yel’tsin: ya otvechu za vsë (Yeltsin: I will answer for everything) (Moscow: Vokrug sveta, 1997), 20.
100 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 174.
101 See on the coverage Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 341–50; and Yaroshenko, Yel’tsin, 29–61.Wesley Neff, who accompanied Yeltsin on the trip, says he most nights had no more than one or two drinks and was never inebriated. Yaroshenko, a USSR deputy who accompanied him, recalls (Yel’tsin, 21) that Yeltsin was insulted when he found his New York hotel room stocked with many bottles of liquor, saying this showed how some Americans extended “hospitality to a ‘Russian peasant.’”
102 “Yeltsin Interviewed,” 77.
103 Vadim Bakatin, interview with the author (May 29, 2002). Bakatin was to be head of the KGB in the autumn of 1991 and may have had access to files about the incident there. Rumor has long had it that Yeltsin went to see the Bashilovs’ chambermaid. The woman, Yelena Stepanova, denies any relationship and says KGB officers told her he met someone and then ended up in a ditch on the property. Anna Veligzhanina, “Yel’tsin padal s mosta ot lyubvi?” (Did Yeltsin fall from the bridge out of love?), Komsomol’skaya pravda, November 21, 2004. Several persons close to Yeltsin at the time believe he engineered the occasion as a publicity stunt.
104 Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy,” part 3.
105 At an interview with a journalist on October 21, Yeltsin was “in a fantastic mood.” Andrei Karaulov, Chastushki (Humorous verses) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1998), 169.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1 George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 125. As Breslauer shows, polarization was Gorbachev’s worst fear, because of his personality and his reading of historical experiences such as the destruction of reform communism in Czechoslovakia in 1968. As for Yeltsin, his power-seeking is difficult to comb out from his substantive goals. The study that most accentuates his drive for power is Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1997). Even it must concede (340) that Yeltsin also had transformative aims.
2 Lev Sukhanov, Tri goda s Yel’tsinym: zapiski pervogo pomoshchnika (Three years with Yeltsin: notes of his first assistant) (Riga: Vaga, 1992), 241.
3 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 78.
4 Lyudmila Pikhoya, interview with the author (September 26, 2001). Kharin died in 1992, but Il’in stayed with Yeltsin until 1998 and Pikhoya until 1999.
5 Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 81.
6 V. I. Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak: iz dnevnika chlena Politbyuro TsK KPSS (But this is how it was: from the diary of a member of the Politburo of the CPSU) (Moscow: Sovet veteranov knigoizdaniya, 1995), 342–43, 348, 362–63.
7 The book was widely distributed in other Soviet republics. The CPSU first secretary in Ukraine, Vladimir Ivashko, told the Politburo it had made Ukrainian coal miners question their party dues: “The miners say, Why should we pay money so that someone else can live in luxury?” Politburo transcript, April 9, 1990 (Volkogonov Archive, Project on Cold War Studies, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University), 356.
8 “Yeltsin’s RSFSR Election Platform Outlined,” FBIS-SOV-90-045 (March 7, 1990), 108–9; L. N. Dobrokhotov, ed., Gorbachev–Yel’tsin: 1,500 dnei politicheskogo protivostoyaniya (Gorbachev–Yeltsin: 1,500 days of political conflict) (Moscow: TERRA, 1992), 173 (italics added).
