100 He made the remark at the opening of a tennis court, during a tour of Volga cities on the steamboat Rossiya. Yeltsin had asked Nemtsov to do something about the nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovskii, who was following in his wake in a rented boat, making anti-Yeltsin speeches at every stop. Nemtsov ordered the local water authorities to detain Zhirinovskii’s vessel in one of the Volga locks upriver of Nizhnii Novgorod—a peremptory resolution of the problem that Yeltsin loved and in which he surely saw a similarity to his own assertiveness. Yeltsin took Nemtsov with him to the United States and introduced him to President Clinton as a potential heir. “Boris Nemtsov—Yevgenii Al’bats o Yel’tsine” (Boris Nemtsov to Yevgeniya Al’bats about Yeltsin), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007.
101 “Prezident RF otvechayet na voprosy redaktsii ‘Truda.’
102 The 350,000 Chechens affected were part of the 2 million Soviet citizens deported during the war. In the North Caucasus, four other groups—the Balkars, Ingush, Kalmyks, and Karachai—were also deported en masse, and none of them was to reject Russian authority in the 1990s.
103 See Emil Souleimanov, An Endless War: The Russian-Chechen Conflict in Perspective (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007), 24–26.
104 Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 107.
105 Thomas Goltz, Chechnya Diary: A War Correspondent’s Story of Surviving the War in Chechnya (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), 52.
106 Undated statement shown in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 4.
107 Gall and de Waal, Chechnya, 150–51; John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 158–60.
108 V. A. Tishkov, Ye. L. Belyayeva, and G. V. Marchenko, Chechenskii krizis: analiticheskoye obozreniye (The Chechen crisis: an analytical review) (Moscow: Tsentr kompleksnykh sotsial’nykh issledovanii i marketinga, 1995), 33.
109 Ibid. This conversation with Shaimiyev has been dated variously in March or May of 1994. But Gall and de Waal, Chechnya, 146–47, relying on interviews, refer to a conversation on June 10. See also the references to Dudayev’s rhetoric in Taimaz Abubakarov, Rezhim Dzhokhara Dudayeva: zapiski dudayevskogo ministra ekonomiki i finansov (The regime of Djokhar Dudayev: notes of Dudayev’s minister of economics and finance) (Moscow: INSAN, 1998), 167.
110 Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 69.
111 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 371.
112 Sergei Yushenkov, chairman of the Duma’s defense committee at the time, quoted in Gall and de Waal, Chechnya, 161. The statement is reported a little differently in S. N. Yushenkov, Voina v Chechne i problemy rossiiskoi gosudarstvennosti i demokratii (The war in Chechnya and problems of Russian statehood and democracy) (Moscow: Semetei, 1995), 75. Here Lobov is quoted as observing that Clinton’s ratings went up after the Haiti operation but not as advocating that Yeltsin intervene in Chechnya for that reason.
113 Oleg Lobov, interview with the author (May 29, 2002).
114 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 88. George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chap. 9, maintains that Yeltsin began the war as much to recoup lost popularity as to negate the threat to Russia’s unity. The argument is well put, but there is no hard evidence to support it.
115 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 69.
116 Muzhskoi razgovor dva (Male conversation two), interview of Yeltsin by El’dar Ryazanov on ORT-TV, June 16, 1996 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya).
117 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 69.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1 The phrase is from Arnold M. Ludwig, King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 172–74.
