But everything changed once the Soviet Union dissolved and Yeltsin replaced Gorbachev in the Kremlin. Yeltsin’s loyal drinking buddy/bodyguard Aleksandr Korzhakov—who stood alongside Yeltsin atop the tank—became Yeltsin’s closest confidant. As gatekeeper to Yeltsin’s inner circle where major political decisions were made, Korzhakov became a powerful political player in his own right. Equally important, Korzhakov also became the keymaster of Yeltsin’s alcoholism. He was an enabler—ensuring that the trunk of the presidential limousine was stocked with Yeltsin’s favorite vodkas, champagne laced with cognac, shot glasses, and appetizers. However, Korzhakov was the only one “who could put his hand over Boris Nikolayevich’s glass and say, ‘Enough’,” according to Kremlin sources. There is little evidence that he did this very often. The two were inseparable—whether on the tennis court, the sauna, or late night at the dacha, Korzhakov and Yeltsin were almost always drinking. Yeltsin’s wife Naina and their daughters repeatedly tried to intervene, but in vain. They openly derided Korzhakov for plying Yeltsin with alcohol just to maintain his own political status. Meanwhile, Yeltsin’s alcohol intake skyrocketed through the first half of the 1990s.21
There could not have been a worse time for the president to hit the bottle: guiding Russia from the Soviet administrative-command system to a functioning market economy would take a steady hand. On January 2, 1992, Yeltsin announced a “shock therapy” program of macroeconomic stabilization that included the immediate liberalization of prices, currency, and trade. It was thought that, like ripping off a band-aid, the suffering caused by this dramatic leap to the market would be short-lived. It wasn’t. Ending price restrictions meant that hoarded goods soon reappeared on store shelves—but reflecting their demand, the prices were too high for many to afford. The credit crunch made it impossible for old, uncompetitive Soviet firms to stay in business, which led to a spike in unemployment. Hyperinflation wiped out people’s life savings, forcing tens of millions into abject poverty while sending Russia into a decade-long economic depression. The economic disaster was reflected in social and demographic statistics: alcoholism skyrocketed, as did suicides. Average life expectancy for men—sixty-five at the height of the anti-alcohol campaign in 1987—plummeted to sixty-two in 1992. Two years later it dipped below fifty-eight: indicative of a demographic catastrophe without parallel in peacetime human history, so dramatic was Russia’s fall.22
The most vocal opponents of Yeltsin’s painful economic reforms included his closest allies just months before: his nationalist running mate, Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi, denounced them as “economic genocide.”23 Head of the Russian legislature Ruslan Khasbulatov, who once stood with Yeltsin against the coup, now called for his impeachment. According to the constitution, Khasbulatov’s legislature—the CPD—held more power than the presidency, but recognizing the need to be able to make quick decisions in a time of crisis, the legislators had allowed the president to temporarily rule by decree. Now the Congress wanted their power back from Yeltsin, whom they saw as increasingly drunk with power… and vodka.
In March 1993 Yeltsin “created a strange impression” with legislators at the CPD as he slurred through a rambling defense of his policies. His opponents loudly denounced their president as a drunk. As Yeltsin left the chamber a Kuranty journalist asked him point-blank whether he had been drinking. Yeltsin stopped.
“Smell my breath!” Yeltsin proclaimed.
“And with that,” as David Remnick described it, “the leader of the largest landmass on the globe exhaled into the face of the Fourth Estate.”
“Well?”
The reporter admitted that he did not noticeably reek of alcohol.24
By the early 1990s Yeltsin’s inebriety had become the stuff of legend. While all legends are fed by exaggeration, they also rely on the willingness of the audience to believe it. Certainly Yeltsin did little to dispel the image, as his drinking and the enormous burdens of leadership took a noticeable toll on his health. His CPD opponents seized every opportunity to make Yeltsin the butt of political jokes, highlighting his resemblance to the drunken dinosaurs of the old Brezhnevite gerontocracy. Khasbulatov himself “regularly told reporters that the president was nothing more than an erratic drunk who could not be trusted with the nuclear button.”25
At loggerheads with the president, the Congress let the people decide: a nationwide referendum of April 1993 would ask the disillusioned electorate whether they still had confidence in Yeltsin and his policies. Just three days before the critical vote Yeltsin appeared at a massive rally behind St. Basil’s Cathedral, alongside famed human rights advocate Elena Bonner, widow of the fastidiously dry Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. Horrified by Yeltsin’s drunken state, Bonner snatched the microphone away from the Russian president.26 Yeltsin was lucky to escape the referendum with only fifty-three percent of voters supporting his reforms.
Accusations, proclamations, and legal investigations flew furiously as both sides vied for political power while economic reforms ground to a halt. His ally just months before, Khasbulatov now scoffed at every Yeltsin move, claiming that “after he’s had a few” drinks, Yeltsin would sign anything.27
On September 21, 1993, Yeltsin took to the airwaves to cut the gordian knot. While the constitution empowered the parliament, Yeltsin believed that his narrow victory in the referendum gave him greater legitimacy. He would violate his constitutional authority and dissolve the Congress—effectively overthrowing his own government. With the cameras rolling and his message beaming across the country and around the globe, Yeltsin noticeably reached off camera to his right and calmly sipped from a white cup of tea. The signal was loud and clear: no, Yeltsin was not drunk. He was deadly serious.28
Ironically, Khasbulatov, Vice President Rutskoi, and their supporters did what Yeltsin himself had done just two years earlier: barricaded themselves in the White House to denounce the Kremlin’s coup. Despite having their electricity, hot water, and phones cut, the Congress voted to impeach Yeltsin, replacing him with Rutskoi. The threat of civil war loomed, as Russia had two men both claiming to be president. Asked whether he thought Yeltsin would dare storm the building, Rutskoi said only half in jest: “That depends on how much the president drinks.”29
After days of tense standoff—including the deadly attempt to storm the national media center at the Ostankino TV tower by White House paramilitaries—on October 4 Yeltsin did what the State Committee on the State of Emergency could not do two years before: he opened fire on his own parliament. Relying on the begrudging support of his drinking buddy and now Minister of Defense Pavel Grachev, Yeltsin ordered tanks to shell the upper floors of the White House, setting it ablaze; at the same time, an intense firefight raged outside, catching civilians in the crossfire.
Rutskoi’s mocking insinuations turned prophetic: high-level figures within Yeltsin’s Kremlin later told how the decision to attack was made at Grachev’s defense ministry, where Yeltsin was “in an incapacitated state.” According to these sources, “His drunken retinue… propped him up against a wall in one of the ministry’s lounges and gave practically no one access to him.” While his top officials planned the operation, Yeltsin was kept in seclusion, with only Korzhakov acting as go-between.30
In the end, Korzhakov and Defense Minister Grachev cobbled together the necessary equipment and reluctant personnel to storm the White House, jail the parliamentary leaders, and stop the descent into civil war. Korzhakov recalled that in apprehending the conspirators at the White House, “Not one of the Deputies reeked of alcohol, and their outward appearance struck me as quite orderly [akkuratnyi].” The same could not be said of Yeltsin: upon returning from his historic mission, Korzhakov found him drinking in the banquet hall. “I was astonished to discover that the victory celebrations had been going on long before the victory had been won.” When the latecomers presented the president with a trophy of sorts—the rebel Khasbulatov’s personal smoking pipe—a drunken Yeltsin smashed it in the corner of the room and
laughed. More rounds were poured.31
Hundreds of Muscovites died during the so-called October Events. The White House—the recent symbol of Russia’s independence aspirations—was now pocked by artillery rounds and charred black by fire. While Yeltsin’s Kremlin was quick to repaint and repair the building, Russia’s deep political rifts would not be as easy reconciled. The Congress of People’s Deputies was disbanded, and Yeltsin continued to rule by decree until a nationwide referendum provided for a new, more pliable legislature and a new constitution that vested most political authority in the office of the president—a president whose drinking was increasingly out of control.
Insobriety Goes International
By 1994, Yeltsin’s alcoholism had blossomed from an open secret to a national embarrassment. In August Yeltsin was the honored guest of German chancellor Helmut Kohl to commemorate the departure of the last Russian forces from the former East Germany. The Russian delegation landed in Berlin at sunset. That evening Yeltsin suffered one of his periodic bouts of insomnia. Late at night, Yeltsin summoned Korzhakov and Defense Minister Grachev, who reportedly considered “every shot of vodka he took with Yeltsin to be another star on his general’s epaulettes.”32
Apparently Grachev won many decorations that night, as the drinking went through the night and into his public appearances the next day. Throughout the morning ceremony Chancellor Kohl had to repeatedly support the unsteady Russian president, who grew even less steady at the lunch banquet: Yeltsin ordered a coffee to help sober up, which he promptly dumped down the front of his shirt. Fortunately his staffers always carried a spare. Meanwhile, in the square outside the local Rathaus, a police brass band assembled to serenade the departing troops. Before an ensemble of astonished leaders, diplomats, and journalists, the inebriated Yeltsin grabbed the conductor’s baton and “woozily stabbed the air with it for several minutes as the band played on.”33 He then grabbed a microphone and slurred his way through the Russian folk song Kalinka before blowing kisses to a tittering crowd of onlookers.
The media soon broadcast Yeltsin’s buffoonery around the globe. Western audiences were amused, Russians were mortified. This was a public relations disaster for a proud country still stinging from its loss of empire and superpower status. Russia endured unfathomable suffering, the Red Army battled so heroically into Berlin to depose Adolph Hitler a half-century before… and this is how they leave?
A visibly intoxicated Russian president Boris Yeltsin (left) accepts the report of Col.-Gen. Matvei Burlakov on the official withdrawal of Russian troops from Germany as German chancellor Helmut Kohl looks on. August, 31, 1994. Corbis Images/Wolfgang Kumm.
The president’s top advisors considered resigning en masse. Instead, they attempted an intervention. The next month, on a flight to the resort city of Sochi, Korzhakov hand delivered what the press later dubbed “The Letter of the Aides to Their Sultan.” In perhaps the most shocking communique in Russian history, the candid document laid out the enormous challenges ahead of the fast-approaching 1996 elections alongside Yeltsin’s shortcomings displayed at Berlin.
Above all else is the neglect of your health—which has been sacrificed to Russia’s well-known vice. It exacerbates a certain complacency and self-assurance, together creating arrogance, intolerance, an unwillingness to listen to unpleasant information, moodiness and occasionally abusive behavior towards people.
We speak of this sharply and openly not only because we believe in you as a strong individual, but also because your personal fate and your example are intimately tied to the fate of Russia’s transformation. A degraded President would significantly degrade Russia itself. We cannot allow that to happen.34
No diplomatic language could soften such a blunt diagnosis. Yet their practical suggestions were even more galling. Item number one was the “decisive reevaluation of your attitude toward your health and your harmful habits.” To that, they urged Yeltsin to put an end to the “unexpected disappearances and rehabilitations”; set a better example as an open and democratic president; forego the pomp, seclusion, and other “tsarist habits”; and find more cultured ways to relax that do not end at the banquet table.
“So?” the aides in the Kremlin asked those who were with Yeltsin on the airplane: “how’d he take it?”
“Snarling.”
After taking it all in, Yeltsin raged at his advisors and even Korzhakov: “How could you allow this?!” While he later admitted the letter was a wake-up call, it apparently took some time for it to sink in. The brooding president refused to shake hands with his advisors and in some cases refused to even speak with them for upwards of six months.35 Driving the point home, Yeltsin excluded the offending aides from his high-profile visit to North America and Europe the following month—a trip that would end in even greater embarrassment.
Bill And Boris
You could not blame Richard Nixon for being gruff. In January 1993, not only did the Republican former president observe his eightieth birthday; he also had to watch the inauguration of Bill Clinton—a Democrat—over Nixon’s close friend, George H. W. Bush. Now here he was just days later offering advice to Clinton’s team on engaging Russia. Dismissing Yeltsin’s competitors as “crazy communists and fascists,” Nixon encouraged the new administration to support him. “He may be a drunk, but he’s also the best we’re likely to get in that screwed-up country over there.”36 Having squared off with the bombastic Nikita Khrushchev in the so-called Kitchen Debate in the 1950s and experienced his own liquor-filled encounters with Leonid Brezhnev in the 1970s, Nixon was in a unique position to evaluate the Russian leaders and their peculiarities.
“He’s preaching to the converted,” laughed Clinton upon hearing Nixon’s advice. “In fact, he’s preaching to the preacher!” Clinton had called Yeltsin just days earlier, saying a solid relationship with Russia was America’s top foreign policy priority. Yeltsin hardly listened, and his responses were slurred and incoherent. “A candidate for tough love, if ever I heard one,” Clinton later chuckled to his advisor Strobe Talbott. Just to be on the safe side, of the fifty phone conversations between the two presidents over the following eight years, Clinton’s aides were sure to schedule all of them before dinnertime in Moscow.37
Within months the two presidents hit it off in Vancouver at the first of a series of high-level summits. Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos recalled the Americans’ astonishment at how much alcohol the Russian president dared to hold: three scotches on the boat ride followed by a straight wine lunch—ignoring the food and going straight for round after round of alcohol. While some thought it undiplomatic to keep score, little did they know that this was part of a centuries-old tradition: foreign envoys from von Herberstein to Ribbentrop and de Gaulle, and even Nixon and Kissinger, had all tallied the drinks of the Russian leaders, and all with equal amazement.38
Writing his last article before his death in 1994, Nixon offered a cold rebuke to Clinton’s Russia policy: “Most important, the U.S. should be candid with Russia when our views do not coincide. We are great world powers and our interests will inevitably clash, but the greatest mistake we can make is to try to drown down differences in champagne and vodka toasts at ‘feel-good’ summit meetings.”39 Yet such warnings were roundly ignored, both in Washington and European capitals.
Many European leaders joined in Clinton’s anthem: “Yeltsin drunk is better than most of the alternatives sober.” If that meant Yeltsin showed up to a summit meeting with a hangover, so be it. When he shelled his own parliament? “I guess we’ve just got to pull up our socks and back Ol’ Boris again.” The separatists in Chechnya? Clinton likened them to the Confederate south in the U.S. Civil War, by extension casting Yeltsin as a modern-day Abraham Lincoln.
“I want this guy to win so bad it hurts,”40 said Clinton. It showed.
In this context, Clinton was willing to overlook all sorts of indiscretions, even the outrageous events of Yeltsin’s September 1994 visit to Washington. On the first night, Clinton was rous
ed by reports of a major predawn security breach at Blair House—the presidential guest house. Secret Service agents had found a drunken Yeltsin alone on Pennsylvania Avenue in his underwear, apparently trying to hail a cab to get some pizza. The next night guards apprehended a drunken intruder trying to sneak into the Blair House basement. A tense standoff between Russian and American agents ensued. After everyone’s credentials were sorted out, it became clear that it was just Yeltsin, again. Asked whether Clinton ever saw fit to speak to Yeltsin about his alcoholism, Clinton demurred—unsure of his place or the political consequences.41
Thankfully, there were no journalists or cameras… this time. That wasn’t the case on the return trip, which included a brief two-hour stopover with the prime minister of Ireland, Albert Reynolds, to ink economic agreements at the famed Dromoland Castle near Shannon. Around 12:30 p.m. on a cold and drizzly autumn afternoon, the plane carrying the Russian advance team approached the Shannon airport. But after half an hour, Yeltsin’s plane still had not descended through the low clouds.
Nikolai Kozyrev, Russia’s first ambassador to Ireland, was understandably worried. He rushed to find the senior Aeroflot representative, who explained that “aircraft No. 1 bearing the Russian president had long come into view, but for some reason it was not landing, it was circling over the airport” in an inexplicable delaying tactic. After an hour the plane finally broke through clouds and landed safely.
Once their hosts quite literally rolled out the red carpets for the Russian president, Ambassador Kozyrev dashed past the color guard, the international press corps, and a crowd of flag-waving onlookers, and boarded the plane to invite Yeltsin to meet the waiting Irish delegation. Instead he was intercepted by Yeltsin’s burly bodyguard Korzhakov outside the president’s compartment. “You can’t go in there, the president is very tired,” Korzhakov insisted. Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets—disheveled, distressed, and being hastily prepared in the back of the plane—would conduct the negotiations instead.42
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