Moscow, December 25, 1991

The furniture is solid and durable, made in Sverdlovsk—or Yekaterinburg, as it is now called, since the prerevolutionary name was restored three months ago. Yeltsin boasts that it is “much better quality, and sturdier too, than Moscow-made junk.” Nonetheless, Naina, or Naya as he calls her, has been known to give a cushion to visitors so they do not rip their clothes on the spring poking out through a hole in the sofa, and one of the kitchen stools has a nail protruding. They have three phones. The one for incoming calls is working again—it was turned off after the Yeltsins lost their phone bills in the confusion of the coup in August.

Alexander Korzhakov, Yeltsin’s beefy security chief and drinking partner, constantly worries that Tverskaya Street is not a secure location for the president. “It is easy to shoot at the entrance, easy to block his car, and easy for neighbors to see everything through the windows if the curtains are not drawn.” Tanya was once assaulted by a man who watched her dial the security code in the main door, then followed her inside, and “jumped at her.”⁷ Like Gorbachev, the Russian leader also has a state dacha, Arkhangelskoye-2, off the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway, on the banks of the Moscow River some twenty miles outside Moscow. But he prefers to reside in the city apartment during the week, despite the limited space and the noisy polluted streets outside, and the family only goes to the dacha on weekends.

Yeltsin, too, is preparing to move. He and his family will take possession of the presidential dacha when the Gorbachevs move out, and give up their smaller country home, which belongs to the Russian Federation. He has decided that the Soviet leader’s mansion should become the future residence of the Russian president. Not being on good social terms, Yeltsin has never been invited to the Gorbachevs’ city apartment on Lenin Hills, a choice suburb next to Moscow University (since renamed Sparrow Hills), and he does not know whether he will appropriate it as well until he makes an inspection and decides whether he would prefer it to the one he has now.

After Yeltsin showers, Naina blow-dries and combs his hair and helps him dress in an expensive white shirt, blue patterned tie, and smart, dark-colored made-to-measure suit. He sits down for his wife to lace his shoes, a chore he finds difficult because of his bulk. His black shoes are, as always, buffed to a mirror-like sheen.⁸

When Yeltsin was elected president in June of the Russian republic, the largest of the fifteen republics that made up the Soviet Union, his vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, a former air force colonel, decided Russia’s top official should dress with greater elegance. Rutskoy used his own military coupons to purchase an expensive new suit and several high-quality shirts. Yeltsin accepted the gifts but insisted on meeting the cost. Rutskoy used to embarrass him like that. One day he came into Yeltsin’s office and said with a horrified look, “Where did you get those shoes? You shouldn’t be wearing shoes like that. You’re the president.” And the next day he appeared with six pairs of Italian shoes.⁹

Before going out into the hallway the bear-like Russian chieftain meekly subjects himself to a final inspection by his wife and daughter. Every morning Naina makes sure that her Borya’s tie is straight, that there are no flecks of dust on his shoulders, and that his splendid helmet of hair is perfectly in place. After the grooming, she always puts a ten-ruble note in his breast pocket so Yeltsin can pay for his own snacks or lunch.

Boris runs Russia, but Naina runs the household. She is the khozyaika, the woman of the house, so much in charge at home that the most powerful man in the country hands over his pay packet every month, as he has done since they were married thirty-five years ago in Sverdlovsk, and she gives him an allowance out of it. “Without her,” Yeltsin admits, “I would never have borne up under so many political storms… not in 1987, not in 1991.”¹⁰ But in all other matters Boris makes the decisions. “He always has the last word,” she explained once, “and he protects us like a stone wall.”¹¹

In the evening the ceremony is performed in reverse. The women line up to welcome him home, take off his clothes up to his underwear, and put on his house slippers. “The only thing he does is raise his arms and legs,” observed Korzhakov. In the opinion of his assistant, Lev Sukhanov, Naina is the most long-suffering wife in the country. “What she had to experience in connection with her husband no one else has experienced. She felt all the effects of his struggle with the party machine, which I can affirm was absolutely ruthless and fought dirty.”¹²