23 Vladimir Shevchenko, Povsednevnaya zhizn’ Kremlya pri prezidentakh (The everyday life of the Kremlin under the presidents) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2004), 126–27.
24 Matt Taibbi, “Butka: Boris Yeltsin, Revisited,” http://exile.ru/105/yeltsin.
25 Viktor Manyukhin, Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 178.
26 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 270.
27 Robert S. Strauss, interview with the author (January 9, 2006).
28 Of the German, Yeltsin wrote (Marafon, 164), “Kohl and I always found it easy to understand each other psychologically. We resembled one another in terms of our reactions and style of communication and saw the world from the same generational bell tower.” Yeltsin used the word “friend” (drug) to describe Kohl, Jiang, and Jacques Chirac of France (born in 1932), and mentioned how much he liked speaking Russian with Jiang, who lived in Moscow in the 1950s. He did not discuss Strauss in his memoirs. By contrast, Yeltsin’s relations with François Mitterrand, the president of France until January 1996 (born in 1916), were always chilly.
29 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 250.
30 Details from Korzhakov interview. The Sakha visit was in December 1990, when Yeltsin was still parliamentary chairman.
31 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 391.
32 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 9.
33 The masculine side of comradeship has been revealed in studies of Soviet propaganda, literature, and art. See Eliot Borenstein, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
34 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 198–99.
35 Conversation with Naina Yeltsina during my third interview with Boris Yeltsin (September 12, 2002).
36 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 458, 19.
37 Viktor Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000). Chernomyrdin is one of Moscow’s most accomplished swearers, and thus had to suppress that habit as well as any chumminess.
38 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 176–77; Aleksandr Rutskoi, interview with the author (June 5, 2001).
39 This congruity was stressed in my interviews with Boris Nemtsov.
40 Yegor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Days of defeats and victories) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 106.
41 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:372. Gorbachev throws in archly that many Soviet builders lied about project completion and made believe that half-finished buildings were ready for occupancy.
42 Other than Yeltsin, the construction engineer who soared highest in Russian politics in the 1990s was the Sverdlovsker Oleg Lobov. Lobov was a level-tempered administrator with none of Yeltsin’s quirks.
43 Georgii Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh (With leaders and without them) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 376.
44 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 305.
45 Oleg Davydov, “Yel’tsinskaya trekhkhodovka” (The Yeltsin three-step), in A. N. Starkov, ed., Rossiiskaya elita: psikhologicheskiye portrety (The Russian elite: psychological portraits) (Moscow: Ladomir, 2000), 65–80.
46 See, for example, “Altered Statesmen: Boris Yeltsin,” http://www.discoverychannel.co.uk/alteredstatesmen/features5.shtml. The Wikipedia online encyclopedia now reports as established fact that Yeltsin, along with Winston Churchill, was cyclothymic. Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), provides what purports to be analysis of other mental conditions, including paranoia, persecution mania, schizophrenia, and “hysterical psychopathy.” This text reports a few useful anecdotes, mostly from Korzhakov, but the discussion of Yeltsin’s mental state is pure character assassination. Never saying directly that he had most of these conditions, let alone adducing evidence, it prints stylized descriptions of them in boldface in the midst of narration of incidents in his life, leaving it to the reader to draw conclusions. It is also full of basic factual errors. For more responsible discussion of select themes, see Martin Ebon, “Yeltsin’s V.I.P. Depression,” http://www.mhsource.com/exclusive/yeltsin.html.
47 Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 151; Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 87; Baturin et al., Epokha, 367; Sergei Filatov, second interview with the author (January 25, 2002).
48 Tarpishchev interview.
49 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 85–86.
50 Muzhskoi razgovor.
