Yeltsin Insider Writes Scathing Tell-All Memoir -- Ex-Bodyguard Calls Russian President Heavy-Drinking, Suicidal Embarrassment

MOSCOW - Alexander Korzhakov, who for 10 years was Boris Yeltsin's personal security chief, political adviser, tennis partner and sauna buddy, has written "Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn to Dusk," a searing account of the Russian leader's time in power.

From tidbits gleaned yesterday at a news conference held by Korzhakov and from excerpts published in Russia and abroad, it's a drink-and-tell memoir. Yeltsin did the drinking and Korzhakov does the telling.

Korzhakov was fired in June last year and since then has lashed out at just about everyone left in Yeltsin's entourage. His close relationship with Yeltsin makes him well-placed to shed light on some strange goings-on during Yeltsin's first term, many Russians believe.

According to already-published excerpts, Korzhakov writes that after a 1994 meeting with President Clinton, Yeltsin suffered a heart attack on the flight home. Nonetheless, Yeltsin tried to meet with Irish officials at Shannon Airport, but Korzhakov forbade it. Yeltsin sat in his underwear on the plane and burst into tears, Korzhakov says. Stories that Yeltsin was drunk at the time were wrong, he adds.

However, he says, Yeltsin was drunk and not ill when, during a state visit to Germany, he grabbed a baton from the conductor of a police band and began to conduct the band himself.

At home, Korzhakov says, Yeltsin secretly sent orderlies out to buy vodka against doctors' orders.

During an August 1994 state visit to Germany, the book says, an already drunk Yeltsin had lunch with Chancellor Helmut Kohl and "drank so much red wine that the German waiter could hardly keep up. He talked absolute nonsense and gesticulated wildly, while I sat opposite him dying of shame," Korzhakov wrote in an excerpt quoted by London's Sunday Times newspaper.

Korzhakov has given several interviews recently, and excerpts from the book have appeared in both Russian and foreign publications.

In June, Britain's Guardian newspaper quoted Korzhakov as saying that Yeltsin attempted suicide in 1990 by jumping off a bridge into the Moscow River, and tried again two years later by locking himself in his sauna.

The first public reactions have been scornful. "After reading this text, you want to wash your hands or even take a shower," said the irreverent monthly Top Secret, one of three Russian publications to gain access to parts of the book before publication.

"What doesn't fit here is the author's endless outpourings of self-glorification, his insistence that he is a Russian patriot who thinks day and night about the fate of his country. . . . A Russian patriot shouldn't say all these disgusting things about the leader of the state."

Korzhakov alleges that business mogul Boris Berezovsky, now deputy secretary of the country's Security Council, offered him $5 million not to publish his book. Korzhakov said Yeltsin himself had ordered the head of the secret police, Nikolai Kovalev, to stop publication.

Compiled from Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Associated Press reports.