91 Fifty-two KPRF deputies voted against Putin but thirty-two voted for him. If seven of those thirty-two had voted against, the nomination would have failed.
92
93 “Prezident Rossii Boris Yel’tsin: Rossiya vstupayet v novyi politcheskii etap” (The president of Russia Boris Yeltsin: Russia is entering into a new political phase),
94
95 Yel’tsin,
96 See Timothy J. Colton and Michael McFaul,
97 Yel’tsin,
98 See ibid., 9–21, and
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1 Boris Yel’tsin,
2 Michael Wines, “Putin Is Made Russia’s President in First Free Transfer of Power,”
3 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya khotel, chtoby lyudi byli svobodny” (Boris Yeltsin: I wanted people to be free),
4 Comment about the pneumonia in 2001 from Naina Yeltsin, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007).
5 He proudly told a journalist a year after resigning that he was getting up these days at four A.M. “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ni o chëm ne zhaleyu” (Boris Yeltsin: I am not complaining about anything),
6 The net worth of Deripaska, born in 1968, was estimated at $13.3 billion in 2007, putting him fortieth on
7 A fourth great-grandson was born two months after Yeltsin’s death in 2007. Two of the boys were born to Yelena’s daughter Yekaterina and two to Yelena’s daughter Mariya.
8 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002). Naina Yeltsina took me through the library during our second interview. It held five or six thousand volumes at the time, and at least that many older books were stored in the Yeltsins’ Moscow apartment.
9 “Russian Tennis Remembers Yeltsin,” http://leblogfoot.eurosport.fr/tennis/davis-cup/2007/sport_sto1160667.shtml. Yeltsin first displayed his barrier-leaping technique at the Kremlin Cup tournament in Moscow in October 2003. He rushed out onto the court and embraced Anastasia Myskina, who won the women’s single title, with parental pride.
10 Yel’tsin,
11 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ni o chëm ne zhaleyu.”
12 Among the foundation’s other projects have been help for a Russian-language university in Kyrgyzstan, musical training in orphanages, a pianists’ contest in Siberia, a nursing home for army veterans, a clinic for juvenile cancer patients, small war memorials, a film series on “Freedom in Russia,” and construction of a tennis and sports complex in Yekaterinburg.
13 Kirill Dybskii, “Ot pervogo litsa: vsë pravil’no” (From the first person: everything is fine),
14 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ni o chëm ne zhaleyu” (italics added).
15 Ibid.
16 The new lyrics were written by Sergei Mikhal’kov, now eighty-seven, the author of children’s books who wrote the original words for the Soviet anthem in 1944. Successive pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian anthems can be downloaded from http://www.hymn.ru/index-en.html.
17 Mikhail Kasyanov (born in 1957), Putin’s prime minister from 2000 to 2004, had been Yeltsin’s last finance minister in 1999. Aleksei Kudrin, the new minister of finance (born 1960), was first deputy minister from 1997 to 1999. The minister of industry and trade, German Gref (born 1964), was first deputy minister of state property from 1998 to 2000.
18 The phrase “restrained support” is from “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ni o chëm ne zhaleyu” and was specifically applied to changes in the federal system. Yeltsin in that interview (December 2000) expressed no reservations about the move against Berezovskii, who he said “did more harm than good.” He did not comment on Gusinskii, who had spent several days in jail in May 2000.
