Yeltsin полностью

106 Malashenko interview.

107 Yeltsin himself described the scene in Marafon, 45.

108 Moroz, 1996, 459–60.

109 Statistical details here taken from the survey data used in Colton, Transitional Citizens. The big change after June 16 was the shift of Lebed voters toward Yeltsin. Oslon’s polls as late as the first week of June showed only 27 percent of Lebed supporters intending to support the president in a second round. FOM, Rezul’taty, June 13, 1996, 1.

110 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 48.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1 Korzhakov in his memoirs counts the June 26 attack as Yeltsin’s fifth, but this includes September 29–30, 1994, when Yeltsin was a no-show for the meeting with Albert Reynolds in Ireland. Most of the medical experts do not classify that event as a full-flown myocardial infarction. Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), 405–6, gets to five by counting the incident in Kaliningrad on June 23 as a separate heart attack. The physician Vladlen Vtorushin is cited as the source of this information.

2 The text of the letter is in Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 451 (italics added). Yeltsin reproduced it in Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 49, saying that Korzhakov “did not conceal” the content of the letter but several times told Tatyana Dyachenko “that if something happened to me she would be guilty.”

3 Author’s interviews with El’dar Ryazanov (May 30, 2001) and Irena Lesnevskaya (January 24, 2001).

4 The chain was instituted in 1994 but Yeltsin’s decree specifying its use in the inauguration came out only on August 5, 1996. It consists of a Greek cross, seventeen smaller medals, and links of gold, silver, and white enamel.

5 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 575. Yeltsin wrote later (Marafon, 50), “Never in my life had I been so tense” as on August 9.

6 Yeltsin had offered the job to Igor Malashenko of NTV, who pleaded personal circumstances. But it would appear that he made the suggestion first to Chubais and returned to him after Malashenko’s refusal.

7 Ye, I. Chazov, Rok (Fate) (Moscow: Geotar-Med, 2001), 259.

8 Author’s interviews with Sergei Parkhomenko (March 26, 2004) and Viktor Chernomyrdin (September 15, 2000). The article appeared in the Itogi of September 10, 1996. It was reported in the press that Chernomyrdin had a bypass operation in 1992, but in fact the procedure he had was an angioplasty.

9 Renat Akchurin, quoted in “Postskriptum” (Postscript), Izvestiya, April 28, 2007.

10 “Ekslyuzivnoye interv’yu Prezidenta Rossii zhurnalu ‘Itogi’” (Exclusive interview of the president of Russia with the magazine Itogi), Itogi, September 10, 1996.

11 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 53.

12 Lawrence K. Altman, “In Moscow in 1996, a Doctor’s Visit Changed History,” New York Times, May 1, 2007. Citing an interview with DeBakey after Yeltsin’s death the previous week, Altman claims that “his Russian doctors said he could not survive such surgery.” But the fullest Russian account, by Chazov, says the Russians had already decided that the bypass was necessary and survivable and that they wanted DeBakey for psychological and strategic support. “And that is what happened. Yeltsin confirmed for himself the correctness of his decision, his family calmed down, and the press and television redirected themselves to DeBakey, leaving us finally in peace.” Chazov, Rok, 262.

13 Yeltsin had communicated his intent to do the temporary transfer in a decree dated September 19. Chernomyrdin took his provisional duties to heart: “He called military specialists in and acquainted himself in detail with the automated system for controlling [Russia’s] strategic nuclear forces.” Baturin et al., Epokha, 725.

14 See on this point Chazov, Rok, 271.

15 Akchurin in “Postskriptum.”

16 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 57.

17 Interviews with family members. Khrushchev put up Vice President Richard Nixon at Novo-Ogarëvo in 1959, since at Gorki-9 “it was not possible to provide the conveniences to which guests were accustomed. For example, there was only one toilet for everyone, located at the end of the [first-floor] hall. The bath was there, too. By American standards, only people in the slums lived in such conditions.” Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, trans. Shirley Benson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 352.