THE LOW POST: Death of a Drunk

Everything about the historical figure Boris Yeltsin reeked of death and decay; it was his primary characteristic as a human being. I remember clearly talking with former general and Secretary of the Security Council (who served under Yeltsin) Alexander Lebed at Lebed's dacha in Siberia -- here is what Lebed had to say about Yeltsin the man:

He's been on the verge of death so many times...His doctors themselves are in shock that he's still alive. Half the blood vessels in his brain are about to burst after his strokes, his intestines are spotted all over with holes, he has giant ulcers in his stomach, his heart is in absolutely disgusting condition, he is literally rotting...He could die from any one of dozens of physical problems that he has, but contrary to all laws of nature -- he lives.

I still remember the way Lebed pronounced the word "rotting" -- gnilit -- scrunching up his smashed boxer's nose in moral disgust. He was shaken by the memory of just having been near Yeltsin. This from a hardened war veteran, a man who had coldly taken lives from Afghanistan to the Transdniester. The stink of Boris Yeltsin was the first thing capable of giving Alexander Lebed shell-shock.

Yeltsin outlived Lebed, a physically mighty man who could break rows of jaws with his fists but was chewed up and spit out like a sardine when he took on the Russian state. He likewise outlived the Petersburg Democrat Galina Starovoitova, the reporter Anna Politkovskaya, the muckraker Artyem Borovik, the Duma deputy Yuri Shekochikhin, the spy Alexander Litvinenko -- they were all too human in one way or another for today's Russia, and died of unnatural causes at young ages, but not Yeltsin. While all of those people were being murdered or dying in mysterious accidents, Yeltsin spent his golden years in an eerie state of half-preserved, perpetual almost-death. I saw an intern cutting video for a Yeltsin obit at my father's offices at NBC Dateline a full ten years ago. They expected him to go at any minute. He didn't. A few years later Yeltsin got sick and again the papers here and in Russia prepped the obits. He survived, and his handlers -- people like the ball-sucking Valentin Yumashev (the real author of at least two Yeltsin "autobiographies," by the way) -- tried to prove to the Russian people (and Yeltsin's enemies) that the boss was still viable by releasing video footage on state channel ORT of the prez driving a snowmobile in the country. I remember that footage, it was one of the funniest things ever put on television. I am certain that they stapled Yeltsin's hands to the handlebars; the boss had a blank face and a little ski-hat and seemed crudely propped up on the snowmobile seat. They gave him a push and Yeltsin drifted aimlessly across the snow. The footage lasted for about ten seconds and the last thing you saw was Yeltsin's back. So much for the death-watch.

This pattern repeated itself over and over again, and eventually I got so fed up with it that, when he got sick again in 1999, I ran a cover in my Moscow newspaper The eXile that showed a picture of a wobbling Yeltsin over the headline, "DIE, ALREADY!!!" But he didn't. He survived and lived to turn over power to the next vampire, the Thief Mark VII, Vladimir Putin. Then he disappeared somewhere to spend seven glorious years drinking himself to death -- a Soviet version of Leaving Las Vegas, set in Switzerland and the south of France. Like all the great Russian monsters, like Stalin and Lenin and Brezhnyev and Andropov and a million other czars big and small, he died peacefully of natural causes while murders raged all around him, a piece of fat noiselessly clogging his heart while he slept in his stolen bed.

The obituaries this morning I read with great amusement. Here is a line from the Associated Press:

Yeltsin steadfastly defended freedom of the press, but was a master at manipulating the media...

Boris Yeltsin, defender of the freedom of the press! That should be news to Dmitri Kholodov, erstwhile reporter for Moskovsky Komsomolets, who was killed by an exploding briefcase in 1994 while investigating embezzlement of the Western army group connected with Yeltsin's close drinking buddy, then-defense minister Pavel Grachev. The day after Kholodov was killed, Yeltsin got up on national television and called Grachev "one of my favorite ministers." That was what Yeltsin thought of reporters and the free press.