Fired Bodyguard Pens Revenge on Yeltsin

If revenge is a dish best eaten cold, then Alexander V. Korzhakov, the hard-liner President Boris N. Yeltsin sacked as his chief bodyguard last summer, is hoping for a feast this week.

The former KGB general today publishes a book of memoirs about his 11 years as Yeltsin’s most faithful servant. Excerpts published in the Russian press portray Yeltsin as an alcoholic lord of misrule and his reign as a confused lurch from one vodka-sodden crisis to the next.

“I think the public should know about the people who rule them,” said the smirking, round-faced Korzhakov at a Tuesday press launch for the 500-page work, “Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn to Sunset.”

Once feared as the most powerful man in Russia after Yeltsin, Korzhakov now openly wishes the president ill. He knows more Kremlin secrets than most and, as a member of parliament, also has immunity from prosecution.

Whether his book will have the sensational impact he apparently wants, on a people bored by public squabbling and scandalmongering among politicians for whom they have scant respect anyway, remains to be seen.

Earlier attempts to punish the president for humiliating him have gone nowhere. Last spring, Korzhakov sued Yeltsin for slander but lost his case. He subsequently alleged, in an interview with the British newspaper the Guardian, that Yeltsin had twice tried to kill himself. Yeltsin denied it.

On Tuesday, Korzhakov was evasive about whether he had written his book as an act of revenge, saying he needed to earn money because his pension payments have stopped.

He was more explicit about threats he said have come from the president’s immediate circle. Yeltsin’s family and current aides offered him $5 million not to publish the book, he alleged, and he said Yeltsin ordered the head of the secret police, Nikolai D. Kovalev, to stop publication.

Yeltsin’s press officials could not be reached to comment on those allegations, but Natalia Konstantinova, who until recently was a spokeswoman for the president’s wife and daughter, said she doubted that the Yeltsin family would have tried to buy off Korzhakov.

“Perhaps some people would like to sue me,” Korzhakov said Tuesday. “But I promise that any such trial would not be closed, and that I would say everything I want to openly. I would also be able to submit tapes and diskettes and some of the other mementos of my past life. So let those who would like to file suits think twice before they act.”

The published excerpts from Korzhakov’s book, which will have a print run of 150,000, do shed light on some of Yeltsin’s quirkier behavior. For example, he recounts the president’s notorious failure in 1994 to leave his plane at Ireland’s Shannon Airport to meet the Irish prime minister; the episode was not, as was widely suspected at the time, the result of too much drinking. Rather, according to Korzhakov, Yeltsin passed out in the plane with a suspected heart attack.

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Mostly, however, the book seems to be court scuttlebutt: servants being ordered by the president to ignore doctors’ orders and buy him vodka, Korzhakov diluting the vodka with water or Yeltsin embarrassing his compatriots by guzzling vast quantities of wine at state banquets.

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 in London’s Sunday Times.

So far, there has been only disdainful silence from the Kremlin in reaction to the book.

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.