Moscow, December 25, 1991

Looking back at this time in his life Yeltsin will later recall “enervating bouts of depression, agonizing reflections late at night, insomnia and headaches, despair at the grimy and impoverished look of Moscow and other cities… the criticisms in the media, the badgering in the Russian parliament, the weight of decisions.” He is constantly dissatisfied with his work, “and that is a frightful thing.” His mind is never at rest, and he becomes more open with himself in the small hours than in the office during daylight, “when all his buttons are buttoned.” He finds that at two in the morning “you recall all sorts of things and mull over matters that are not always so pleasant.”⁶

This December morning he has many matters to contemplate, some pleasant, some less so. Today he will emerge triumphant from his long and nasty feud with Mikhail Gorbachev. He acknowledges to himself that the motivations for many of his actions are embedded in his bitter conflict with the Soviet president. Just recently his assistant Valentina Lantseva pleaded with him to stop the love-hate relationship with the man in the Kremlin. He retorted, “Stop teaching me how to live!” Never again will he have to negotiate with Gorbachev, endure his windy lectures, put up with his criticisms, take lashings from his profane tongue. Gorbachev, the charming and sophisticated world statesman, can turn the air blue with his profanity. Yeltsin, the hard-drinking, backwoods Siberian, regarded as a buf foon in many international circles, never uses swear words and intensely dislikes those who do.

Today he must disport himself on global television as a statesman and show that the world has nothing to fear from him—and, indeed, owes him esteem. Before the day is out, he will have his hands on the nuclear suitcase now in Gorbachev’s possession, and the world will know that his are a safe pair of hands. He will appear presidential, magisterial, and generous to the man he is casting into the political wilderness.

He will also have to deal in the next few hours with a number of crises in his own ranks that threaten the stability of his government and his radical plans for a newly independent Russia.

Usually Yeltsin manages to snatch a few more hours’ sleep before rising, dressing in T-shirt and shorts, and breakfasting in the kitchen on thin oatmeal porridge and tea followed by eggs, onions, and tomatoes fried in butter. His wife, Naina, and thirty-year-old daughter, Tanya, prepare the meal. They have no servants in the state apartment they occupy on the fourth floor of a nine-story block at 54 Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street in north central Moscow, overlooking the abandoned monastery of the Transformation of the Savior in a busy district near Belarus Station. At its center is a spacious sitting room with silver-and gray-striped wallpaper and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves weighed down with sets of blue-, brown-, and green-bound volumes of Russian classics, including Yeltsin’s favorites: Chekhov, Pushkin, and “village writer” Sergey Yesenin, whose poetry no self-respecting Russian family would be without. The room has a large rubber plant and is decorated with landscapes from the Urals and a muchadmired oil painting of wild daisies. There are piles of audiotapes of Yeltsin’s favorite singer, Anna German. He likes the Polish artist so much that when he listens to her performing her popular number, “Once a Year Orchards Blossom,” his normally stern face assumes a lyrical expression.

The apartment also has a roomy hallway, two large bedrooms with separate bathrooms, a tiny guest bedroom, a sizeable kitchen with balcony, and a small office crammed with files from Yeltsin’s time as Moscow party chief and with room only for an armchair and desk. A small heap of copies of his autobiography, Notes of a President, published the previous year in English as Against the Grain, sits on the floor.

The residence was allocated to Yeltsin when he came to Moscow from Sverdlovsk six years ago as a rising member of the nomenklatura, the subset of top communist cadres who ran the country until recently. Yeltsin and Naina share the space with Tanya, her second husband, Leonid Dyachenko, and eleven-year-old grandson, Boris, who sleeps on the living room sofa when there is a guest staying. Yeltsin is proud of little Borka because he is a real scrapper and a leader among his classmates.