Yeltsin runs for reelection as president of Russia in 1996, amid widespread expectations that he will lose because of a collapse in his popularity and his poor health. He almost puts the election off because of a vote in the Duma on March 15, 1996, to renounce the decision of the Russian Supreme Soviet of December 12, 1991, approving the Belovezh Agreement—which raises questions about the legitimacy of the new Russia. His daughter Tanya helps talk him out of shutting down the Duma and delaying the election for two years, which could provoke a civil war.
His main opponent is Gennady Zyuganov, the candidate of the Russian Communist Party. Zyuganov campaigns to revive the socialist motherland, lumping Yeltsin and Gorbachev together with a world oligarchy as the destroyers of Russia. Convinced that “the country needs Gorbachev,” the former Soviet leader ignores the sage advice of his loyalists and runs as head of the fledgling Social Democratic Party.
The sixty-five-year-old Yeltsin stops drinking, loses weight, and manages to summon up one more great burst of energy to campaign for reelection. American and European leaders troop to Moscow to boost their free-market champion. Yeltsin’s campaign is helped by financial donations from the oligarchs, a timely announcement of a $10 billion loan from the IMF, the anticommunist bias of the television networks, and television advertisements produced with the expert advice of the American PR firm of Ogilvy & Mather. The Russian president wins reelection by 54 percent to Zyuganov’s 40 percent.
Gorbachev is humiliated by his performance in the election. With one section of the population accusing him of betraying socialism in the name of reform, and the other of sabotaging reforms to defend socialism, Gorbachev receives a mere half of 1 percent of the vote. In a further snub, Yeltsin removes his name from the guest list for his inauguration.
In his second term, Yeltsin’s Kremlin court becomes a hive of intrigue. It is a period of political and economic chaos during which Russia’s natural resources are being sold off to favored insiders at fire-sale prices. Yeltsin grows ever more irascible, yields power arbitrarily, and treats his staff abominably. Aides assume that as head of his security, Alexander Korzhakov is monitoring their phone calls, and they communicate with each other only in scribbled notes. Always suspicious of overfamiliarity, Yeltsin drops his preindependence collaborators one by one. He lets Gennady Burbulis go because his grey cardinal is annoyingly appearing every day “in my office, at meetings and receptions, at the dacha, in the steam bath.” Korzhakov survives for five years but is fired after a scandal over election funding. He writes an unflattering book,
Yeltsin’s first, and only, formal contact with Gorbachev after December 1991 comes seven years later. In 1999 he sends a telegram of sympathy to the sixty-eight-year-old ex-president as Raisa Gorbacheva lies dying of leukemia in University Hospital in Munster, Germany. “I want to express my deep concern for the ordeal that your family is going through,” he writes. “I know well how hard it is to experience the illness of a loved one. More than ever, in moments like these, mutual support, warmth and caring are needed. I wish for you, my esteemed Mikhail Sergeyevich, strength and perseverance, and, for Raisa Maximovna, courage in her struggle against the disease as well as a speedy recovery.”
Gorbachev shows the telegram to his old friend the Italian journalist Giulietto Chiesa as they stroll in a park near the hospital in Munster. “These are kind words, a very nice gesture,” he remarks.[323]
The illness of Raisa touches a chord in Russia, especially as she is struck down by a disease with which her charitable work is associated. When Gorbachev asks his staff to approach the new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, for help in getting a passport for Raisa’s sister, Lyudmila, so that she can be available in Germany to become a bone marrow donor for Raisa, Putin’s response is instantaneous.
Gorbachev tears up talking with Chiesa about these acts of kindness. He thought it would take a whole generation before they understood, he says, taking a crumpled cutting from
The transplant cannot be made, and Raisa dies four weeks later, on September 20, 1999, at age sixty-seven. She is buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Yeltsin does not go to the funeral but issues a statement commemorating “a wonderful person, a beautiful woman, a loving wife and mother who is no longer with us.”
Vladimir Polyakov, the ex-president’s press secretary, believes the sympathy for the Gorbachevs has a political as well as a humanitarian side. “People need a certain amount of time to evaluate the past. He [Gorbachev] entered our lives so unexpectedly, and when he left, almost as suddenly, people needed a scapegoat. But if it had not been for Gorbachev, Yeltsin would still be sitting in Sverdlovsk as the regional Communist Party secretary. And if Yeltsin had been elected general secretary of the party in 1985 instead of Gorbachev, no changes would have happened in Russia. Now people are asking for forgiveness for not understanding that before.”[324]
In November 1996 Yeltsin collapses and has a quintuple heart bypass operation. He is never the same afterwards. On December 31, 1999, he announces that he is leaving the remainder of his presidency in the hands of Vladimir Putin, who has risen from mayor’s aide in St. Petersburg to a senior position on Yeltsin’s staff, then head of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, and finally prime minister, in which role he has promoted a second war against Chechnya. For the first time in history, a Russian leader steps down voluntarily. Yeltsin tells Russians, “I want to beg forgiveness for your dreams that never came true. And also I would like to beg forgiveness not to have justified your hopes.”
His departure from the Kremlin is as low key as Gorbachev’s eight years previously. Yeltsin returns to his office after a farewell lunch at 1 p.m. and presents Putin with the squat fountain pen with which he signed decrees. “Take care of Russia,” he says and leaves the Senate Building for good.[325] Both Yeltsin and Gorbachev are invited to attend Putin’s inauguration as acting president but avoid each other.
On the tenth anniversary of his abdication, Gorbachev’s contempt for the republic leaders who conspired with Yeltsin to break up the Soviet Union remains undiminished. “I was shocked by the treacherous behavior of those people, who cut the country in pieces in order to settle accounts and establish themselves as tsars,” he tells reporters in Moscow on December 25, 2001. He could not oppose them at the time, he says, because that might have led to civil war in a nation brimming with nuclear weapons. “And what is Russia without the Soviet Union? I don’t know. A stump of some sort.”
Asked if he is happy, Gorbachev admits to not knowing what happiness is but remarks that fate allowed him to lead a process of renewal that involved the whole world. “God! What other happiness could there be!”
The former Soviet president meanwhile is embarking on a lucrative new profession as a model for advertising agencies. In December 1997 he appears in an advertisement for Pizza Hut, for which he is paid $150,000. It includes a scene at a cafe table in which customers argue whether Gorbachev brought freedom or chaos to Russia and concludes with an old woman saying that because of him the pizza topping goes all the way to the edge of the crust, at which all cry out, “Hail, Gorbachev!”[326] Gorbachev cites the need for funds for his foundation as the reason for subjecting himself to this indignity. In 2005 he makes a cameo appearance in the video game series
