Boris Yeltsin loved vodka, and freely admitted he had a drinking problem.
“Fairly early on, I concluded that alcohol was the only means to quickly get rid of stress,” he wrote in his 2000 memoir, “Midnight Diaries.”
Yeltsin admitted he was drunk in 1994 when he picked up a baton and began conducting a military orchestra in Berlin.
“I snapped,” he wrote. “I remember that the weight would lift after a few shot glasses. And in that sense of lightness, I felt as if I could conduct an orchestra.”
In September 1989, Yeltsin made his first trip to the United States. It was an 11-city tour that became a public-relations nightmare.
At the White House, he thew a tantrum, demanding to be given an audience with President George H. W. Bush. He got a brief one.
At a symposium at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he appeared drunk.
Back in Russia, Yeltsin showed up soaking wet at a police station outside Moscow.
He claimed hooligans had thrown a bag over his head and tossed him into a river.
The buzz was – no surprise – that he was several sheets to the wind.
One blog writer yesterday quipped: “Twenty years after his liver, the rest of Boris Yeltsin dies.”