Russians Shamed By Yeltsin's Shaky Step
The Age
Friday September 9, 1994
Moscow, Friday.
It was the nearest any of his supporters had come to saying that the President of the Russian Federation was actually drunk, yet there it was yesterday in print, along with two pictures of Mr Boris Nikolayevich, one showing him all but legless.
Even so, the weekly Moscow News felt it safer to quote the German magazine Spiegel commenting on the ``shaky step" of President Yeltsin.
It was the latest in a crescendo of press comment about Mr Yeltsin's unfortunate decision in Berlin last week to mark the solemn departure of the last Russian troops from Germany by seizing the German conductor's baton and trying to lead the Berlin police orchestra in a stirring rendition of Kalinka, while blowing kisses to the crowd.
Domestic reaction to the President's display was one of ``stupefaction and shame", the newspaper said. Earlier this week another strongly pro-democratic paper, Izvestia, said the President provided a ``cartoon supplement to a historical event".
How things have changed, the President must be thinking as he relaxes at his Black Sea dacha this week. There was a time when being tired and emotional was a political plus, especially when enemies such as the teetotalling Soviet President, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to use it to discredit him.
When Mr Yeltsin fell off a bridge into a lake in Uspyenskoye village, 40kilometres outside Moscow, he said he was pushed by KGB agents. And the more Mr Gorbachev alluded to Mr Yeltsin's drinking, the more popular Mr Yeltsin became. Here at last was a man the ordinary Russian could empathise with. A real Muzhik (a peasant), one of the lads.
But the rot set in this February, in another pro-Yeltsin paper, Sevodnya. The blistering article, which listed the occasions when the President had gone Awol, was titled: ``Mr Absent at the head of the Russian state. A new addition to the collection of Kremlin enigmas."
On one occasion in February, President Clinton tried for three days to get hold of Mr Yeltsin to discuss Bosnia, only to be told that the Russian President was in a place where there was no telephone. - Guardian.
© 1994 The Age