Vodka Politics (62 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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,”
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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 roused 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.
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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.
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“There was no point in trying to bargain further,” thought Kozyrev, after being repeatedly rebuffed: “all I could do was descend the ramp under the lights and flashing of journalists’ cameras, in anticipation of Boris Yeltsin’s appearance, and explain the whole situation to the Irish premier. What is more, I had to think up words of apology as I went along (naturally Korzhakov did not supply anything on this account), as well as the version that the president was not feeling well due to supposedly high blood pressure.”

Kozyrev exchanged meaningful glances with the disappointed Irish Taoiseach. “Well now, if he is sick, there is nothing we can do about it,” concluded the visibly
disappointed Reynolds, “but Mr. Yeltsin, my guest, is on Irish soil, and I cannot miss this opportunity to go on board the airplane for five minutes, shake the president’s hand and wish him a speedy recovery.” Yet that too was impossible. No one could see the Russian president.

And so the Irish summit failed before it began, producing enmity and indignation rather than trust and cooperation. “We Irish, like you Russians, also like to drink, and all kinds of things happen here,” a high-ranking Irish official later confided. “So if your president had come out to see us, we wouldn’t have paid any attention to his state and would have forgiven him, but his refusal to come out of the airplane insulted us to the depth of our souls and showed us that a small country like Ireland wasn’t worth reckoning with.”
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When Yeltsin finally did emerge—at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport—he was peppered with questions. His reply was artless at best: “Well, you see I was sleeping and no one woke me up. But they’re not going to get away with it. And I am well, who said I was sick?” Yeltsin later apologized personally to Reynolds, again claiming that he had overslept.

The truth about what really happened at Shannon remains a mystery. The Aeroflot representative recalled seeing Yeltsin emerge from his compartment in suit and tie eager to go to the talks and was agitated that his handlers, “fearing for the state he was in,” would not allow it. Korzhakov’s muckraking biography claimed that Yeltsin was having chest pains. Yeltsin’s daughter and advisor, Tatyana Yumasheva, later revealed it was a mild heart attack. Still, these conflicting accounts at least agree that the party Yeltsin began in Washington continued on the transatlantic flight.
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