104 Igor Malashenko, interview with the author (March 18, 2001).
105 Viktor Shenderovich, interview with the author (February 26, 2004); Shenderovich, Kukliada (Puppet games) (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Fonda Russkoi poezii, 1999), 21–44; David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002), 291–94. The script for “Lower Depths” is in Shenderovich, Kukly (Puppets) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 137–44. Hoffman emphasizes Korzhakov as the instigator of the formal charge, but Shenderovich (interview) said it was made at the request of Chernomyrdin.
106 Shenderovich interview. The Hamlet skit is in Shenderovich, Kukly, 6–15.
107 Shenderovich, Kukly, 121–22.
108 I am grateful to John Dunn of the University of Glasgow for the total number of Yeltsin roles. See his “Humour and Satire on Post-Soviet Russian Television,” in Lesley Milne, ed., Reflective Laughter: Aspects of Humour in Russian Culture (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 181–222.
109 Shenderovich, Kukly, 136.
110 Author’s interviews with family members.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1 The nickname for the route when Stalin was driven up and down it daily was the amerikanka, “American way,” in reference to its satin-smooth blacktop. Stalin’s two main dachas were located off of it, which was one of its attractions to the communist elite. The area it ran through had little industry, was upwind and upriver of Moscow and its pollution, and contained many villas and gentry estates from tsarist times that were adaptable to new needs.
2 As noted in Chapter 10, Yeltsin was in Building No. 14 for about eighteen months in 1994–96. During the reconstruction of Building No. 1, the focal fireplace in the president’s ceremonial office was also redone in malachite at his request. Ivan Sautov, director of the Tsarskoye Selo estate near St. Petersburg, supervised the renewal. “Yeltsin was very satisfied and personally thanked many of the builders and subcontractors. He is after all a construction engineer and understands this kind of thing.” “U nas tut vsë nastoyashcheye” (Everything here is genuine), interview with Pavel Borodin in Kommersant-Daily, March 24, 1999. Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev all had their Kremlin offices in Building No. 1, though in different rooms than Gorbachev; Brezhnev’s place was in Building No. 14.
3 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 166.
4 Quotations from ibid., 167–68.
5 Examples here would be American presidential theory, France’s dual executive, and German federalism and electoral legislation.
6 “My mozhem byt’ tvërdo uvereny: Rossiya vozroditsya” (We can be certain that Russia will be reborn), Izvestiya, July 10, 1991.
7 “Obrashcheniye Prezidenta Rossii k narodam Rossii, k s”ezdu narodnykh deputatov Rossiiskoi Federatsii” (Address of the president of Russia to the peoples of Russia and the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation), Rossiiskaya gazeta, October 29, 1991.
8 Stalin told a relative in the 1930s that the Russians “need a tsar, whom they can worship and for whom they can live and work.” He compared himself to Peter the Great, Alexander I, Nicholas I, and the Persian shahs. Georgia, his birthplace, was for centuries part of the Persian empire. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Random House, 2003), 177.
9 Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001); Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999).
10 Boris Nemtsov, Provintsial (Provincial) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997), 81–82. The incident in Nizhnii Novgorod is more fully described in Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia’s Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (Toronto: Doubleday, 2000), 38–40.
11 These are the components of the regal bearing given in Arnold M. Ludwig, King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 179–80.
12 The appellation ignored Boris Godunov, whose life was fictionalized in Alexander Pushkin’s play and Modest Mussorgsky’s opera. Godunov reigned from 1598 to 1605, during the Time of Troubles preceding the Romanov dynasty.
13 His granddaughter Yekaterina related in the late 1980s that when she asked Yeltsin’s help with a personal problem (removing the bodyguard attached to her when she enrolled in university), “The tsar resolved the problem in his own manner” and ordered the guard removed. “Sensatsionnoye interv’yu rossiiskoi ‘printsessy’” (Sensational interview with a Russian princess), Moskovskii komsomolets, January 9, 1998. The piece was first published in Paris Match in December 1997.
14 Boris Nemtsov, first interview with the author (October 17, 2000). The exchange in Stockholm occurred on December 2, 1997, in Yeltsin’s second term.
15 Pavel Voshchanov, interview with the author (June 15, 2000). That incident occurred in February 1992, just before Voshchanov stepped down, when he questioned a personnel decision by Yeltsin.
16 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002)
17 Aleksandr Livshits, interview with the author (January 19, 2001).
18 Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 424.
19 Yegor Gaidar, second interview with the author (January 31, 2002).
20 Boris Fëdorov, Desyat’ bezumnykh let (Ten crazy years) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1999), 131.
21 Livshits interview.
22 The Kremlin had constitutional authority over 30,000 positions in the executive branch (Donald N. Jensen, “How Russia Is Ruled—1998,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 7 [Summer 1999], 349). But the number Yeltsin attended to was several hundred.
23 Yeltsin concerned himself with golden parachutes only for functionaries who had been close to him. In 1993, for instance, he made Yurii Petrov head of a new State Investment Corporation, in control of several hundred million dollars of capital. When Viktor Ilyushin stepped down as senior assistant in 1996, he was appointed deputy prime minister, and when he left that position he was hired as a vice president of Gazprom. But most of the departed easily found opportunities in the new private sector. As Oleg Soskovets, the ranking member of the Korzhakov group, with whom Yeltsin broke in 1996, put it, “In contemporary Russia, you can use your knowledge outside of the public service. They give you something to occupy yourself with, thank God.” Interview with the author (March 31, 2004).
24 Officeholders are given at http://rulers.org/russgov.html. Not counted here are the new defense minister and the new head of internal security appointed in late June 1996.
25 Baturin et al., Epokha, 339.
26 Yeltsin allies from the democratic opposition to the Soviet regime criticized the appropriation of the health directorate. See, for example, Ella Pamfilova, “Grustno i stranno” (Sadly and strangely), in Yurii Burtin and Eduard Molchanov, eds., God posle avgusta: gorech’ i vybor (A year after August: bitterness and choice) (Moscow: Literatura i politika, 1992), 188–89.