It was supposed to be the unveiling of the book Boris N. Yeltsin least wants to see: a portrait of the Russian leader as an isolated, vodka-soaked derelict, written by a man who rarely left his side for more than a decade.
But when Alexander V. Korzhakov Yeltsin's former chief bodyguard, close adviser and rumored drinking buddy - appeared last week at a scheduled launch of "Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn to Dusk," all he had was the new book's sleeve.That left reporters, anxious for lurid new details about life in the Kremlin, to judge Korzhakov's work by its unflattering cover photo (depicting a shirtless, humorless Yeltsin in a baseball cap emblazoned with the words "Farming Credit Services, Wichita, KA") as well as recently published excerpts that portray the hapless exploits of a hard-drinking and heavily manipulated president with a court of scheming cronies and a history of depression and at least one suicide attempt.
Tuesday's event was not without allegations of Kremlin foul play. Korzhakov, a former KGB general with a score to settle after his humiliating ouster from Yeltsin's inner circle during an election campaign last year, charged that the book's delay was the work of Kremlin thugs who forced a publishing house to halt printing.
He also said that Yeltsin's daughter and official imagemaker, Tatyana Dyachenko, had offered him $5 million to kill the book, the publication of which would probably damage the Kremlin's efforts to portray the president as a new man after quintuple bypass surgery last fall.
The hush money, Korzhakov said, was to be paid by financier Boris Berezovsky, a member of Russia's Security Council whose presence in the Kremlin is central to the book's main allegation: that Yeltsin has become the puppet of a voracious covey of magnates bent on destroying the man and the country for their own business interests.
The Kremlin denies that it tried to stop the book. A Yeltsin spokesman this week called Korzhakov "a sick man" and suggested the president might take his former aide to court over the allegations in the book.
Korzhakov said he has tapes, disks and documents to back up what we writes.
"I think the people should know the people who rule them," the balding, beefy Korzhakov, sporting a beige polo shirt instead of the suit he once wore while escorting Yeltsin, told reporters. "I will be one of the first to write about our leaders while they are in office."
But more than a civics lesson, Korzhakov promised a true portrait of a man he claims to know better than anyone outside the Russian first family does.
"Many people have written about Yeltsin," he said. "But they did not know him. What they could see was a mask. Only his family, Korzhakov's family and Yeltsin's personal friends knew him . . . Boris Nikolayevich was ruined shockingly quickly by all the attributes of absolute power: flattery, material goods and a complete lack of self-control."
Korzhakov, 47, stuck with Yeltsin during his battles within the ruling Communist Party elite in the 1980s and was rewarded for his loyalty with rapid promotions that left him, by most accounts, the second-most powerful man in Russia by the end of Yeltsin's rocky first term. Thanks to his privileged access to the president, Korzhakov also reputedly amassed large sums. Prosecutors last summer were looking into another former Kremlin aide's charges that Korzhakov had tried to embezzle $40 million, but had to drop their investigation when the former bodyguard won a seat in parliament, which carries immunity.
Certainly, for its unflattering picture of a ruling Kremlin leader and his family, Korzhakov's 420-page tome will be nothing if not a yardstick of the new limits of freedom of expression in Russia - if it comes out, as promised, this week.
In excerpts published in The Sunday Times and the Russian paper Komsomolskaya Pravda, Yeltsin is rarely described without a drink in his shaky hand. One bender allegedly takes place while the street battles of 1993 are still raging; another a year later sets off a previously unreported heart attack that Korzhakov says forced Yeltsin to skip a meeting with Ireland's prime minister. Bouts of drinking and depression led the president to attempt to take his own life during the disastrous Chechen war, Korzhakov writes.
Yeltsin's wife, Naina, is portrayed plying the president with cognac despite doctors' orders. Tatyana, his imagemaking daughter, makes him dance at a 1996 election rally despite his weak heart, because of advice given by American election advisers.
One episode describes how financier Berezovsky allegedly tries to gain access to the president's inner circle by giving Tatyana increasingly expensive cars as gifts. Another has him trying to convince Korzhakov to kill off political and business rivals. And later, Berezovsky prevails upon Yeltsin to have aides physically intimidate a rival banker, the head of Most Bank, a task which Korzhakov says he dutifully fulfilled, but with no particular relish.
Korzhakov's own murky past saps some of the credibility from episodes he describes, particularly one in which he cuts the president's vodka with water to try to preserve the ailing leader's health. And his attempts to distance himself from the planning of the 1994 raid on Most Bank contradict the barely masked glee with which he spoke about the event in subsequent interviews.