30 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 362.
31 Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 389.
32 L. N. Dobrokhotov, ed., Ot Yel’tsina k . . . Yel’tsinu: prezidentskaya gonka-96 (From Yeltsin . . . to Yeltsin: the 1996 presidential race) (Moscow: TERRA, 1997), 94.
33 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 26. In my interview with him (March 31, 2004), Soskovets would say only that he and Yeltsin had several conversations about the succession question. But Korzhakov (interview with the author, January 28, 2002) and Andranik Migranyan (interview, June 8, 2000) explicitly recalled Yeltsin saying in their hearing that he wanted Soskovets to be president after him.
34 Tat’yana D’yachenko, “Yesli by papa ne stal prezidentom . . . ” (If papa had not become president), Ogonëk, October 23, 2000.
35 Korzhakov (Boris Yel’tsin, 323) notes that she “did not like Soskovets’s tone.” If she had known more about her father’s work as a party functionary, he claims, she would have known that “Soskovets’s style was close to that of the early Yeltsin.”
36 Irina Savvateyeva, “Boris Yel’tsin predlozhil rossiiskim bankam sotrudnichestvo” (Boris Yeltsin suggests cooperation with Russia’s banks), Izvestiya, September 1, 1995.
37 Both Soskovets (interview) and Chubais (second interview with the author, March 30, 2004) stressed the role of Soskovets in getting Yeltsin on board for the law. Potanin (interview with the author, September 25, 2001) said Yeltsin took no interest in the auction process. “[He felt that] this was not the king’s business, it was very dirty stuff. There are dividing some things up over there—so what? I let them go to work, let them figure it out themselves.”
38 The book contract and sponsorship for the club were first revealed in Korzhakov’s memoirs and were confirmed in broad outline in my interview with Berezovskii (March 8, 2000).
39 The cars are mentioned in Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin, 284. Some details from an interview with Korzhakov are provided in Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 201. Berezovskii denied having made the gifts in his interview with me. In my second interview with Tatyana (September 11, 2006), she was adamant that she never received them. She purchased a Niva herself in 1992, she said, before ever meeting Berezovskii, and never owned or drove a Blazer.
40 The other partners in Ogonëk were Oleg Boiko and Aleksandr Smolenskii.
41 The timing is important here. Some accounts of the meeting date it in February but others in early to late March. The actual time—the week of Shrovetide—is established by the recollection by Smolenskii that they ate a Shrovetide repast, since this was the time of year. Sergei Agafonov, “Maslenitsa 1996 goda” (Shrovetide in 1996), Ogonëk, March 20, 2006. In the Orthodox calendar in 1996, Shrovetide (Maslenitsa, in Russian), the feast before the Lenten fast, went from February 19 to February 25.
42 Quotation from Yel’tsin, Marafon, 30.
43 Mikhail Khodorkovskii, interview with the author (June 7, 2001); Agafonov, “Maslenitsa 1996 goda.” There are also good descriptions of the meeting in David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002), 331–33; and Moroz, 1996, 196–97, which corrects Hoffman on some details but gets the timing wrong.
44 Berezovskii had made Naina Yeltsina’s acquaintance in 1993 when a mutual friend asked him to host a benefit reception for a childcare center Yeltsina patronized ; Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007). In an interview with David Hoffman in 2000 (Oligarchs, 333), Berezovskii said he approached Mrs. Yeltsin with a request for help to speak to Yeltsin privately after the Kremlin meeting. He reminded Yeltsin of the request and they met for several minutes.
45 Some of them, desiring to inflate their influence, were to claim later that it did. Berezovskii, for example, told Hoffman (Oligarchs, 333) that Yeltsin reorganized his campaign headquarters “the very next day.” This is rubbish. The reorganization occurred on March 19, almost a month later.
46 Baturin et al., Epokha, 555–56.
47 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 170.
48 It had been in the making for some time. Soskovets told an American campaign consultant on February 27 that one of his tasks would be to advise “whether we should call it [the election] off if you determine that we’re going to lose.” Michael Kramer, “Rescuing Boris,” Time, July 15, 1996. Nikolai Yegorov, the chief of Yeltsin’s executive office and an ally of Korzhakov and Soskovets, broached the possibility of postponing the election with governors in a provincial tour in early March, and prevailed on one of them to write to the chairman of the Federation Council in support of the idea. See Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 181–82. The fear that Yeltsin would die in a hard-fought campaign played into the calculations of the Kremlin conservatives. If Soskovets were already prime minister, he would have become acting president and presumably would have an excellent chance of winning an election. Chernomyrdin would have that advantage if Yeltsin died while Chernomyrdin was still premier.
49 Baturin et al., Epokha, 562.
50 Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 396–402; Sergei Shakhrai, third interview with the author (June 1, 2001).
51 Talbott, Russia Hand, 195; James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2003), 153.
52 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 33; D’yachenko, “Yesli by papa”; Anatolii Chubais, first interview with the author (January 18, 2001). Yeltsin describes the meeting as Tatyana’s idea. But Chubais revealed that the idea was his and that he prevailed upon her to get Yeltsin to agree. Yeltsin dates the key meetings on March 23. There is good evidence in other sources that they were held on March 18.
53 Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy, 402. Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 513, write of the incident: “Contrary to all the wishful thinking in the West about Russian democracy, ‘Tsar Boris’ had no qualms about throwing the constitution out the window.” But he did have such qualms, and he did act on them.
54 Aleksandr Oslon, interview with the author (January 25, 2001). Tatyana’s older sister, Yelena Okulova, played a minor advisory role in helping to arrange Naina Yeltsina’s campaign schedule.
55 Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 361–69. According to Korzhakov, Chernomyrdin offered to take up the suggestion with Yeltsin; there is no record of him having done so. Korzhakov says that without Chernomyrdin’s permission he taped the conversation, which lasted from seven P.M. until almost two A.M., and that the quotations are “almost verbatim” from the transcript.
56 Second Yeltsina interview.
57 David Hoffman, “Yeltsin Vows No Delays in Election,” The Washington Post, May 7, 1996. Korzhakov gave the interview to the British newspaper The Observer. It quickly circulated in Russia.
58 Oslon interview.
59 Dobrokhotov, Ot Yel’tsina, 165–69.
60 An eleventh candidate, Aman-Geldy Tuleyev, the governor of Kemerovo province in west Siberia, withdrew on June 5 and threw his support to Zyuganov.