The bottle led to the downfall of Boris Yeltsin, President of Russia between 1992 and the last day of 1999. A shot of the vodka gave Boris Yeltsin the necessary Dutch courage to mount tanks outside parliament in 1991, portraying the heroic, defiant image that would catapult him to ultimate power over the vast territory the world calls the Russian federation.
His drinking in his first term was more amusing than alarming.
He got red faced on vodka shots with President Clinton, played ‘air’ guitar with a Russian rock band, conducted imaginary symphonies, that sort of anecdote inspiring behaviour. His drinking got much heavier in the brutal 1996 political campaign. In 1997, Boris was too drunk to get out of his plane in Britain to meet Tony Blair, the new kid on the World bloc. As the financial meltdown of 1998 consumed Russia, he sequestered himself in the Kremlin with his vodka bottle. When the Chechen secession wars resumed in 1999 in Grozyny and Ingushetia, Boris Yeltsin was too ill at heart and liver to be a player.
Sexual circus
He passed the mantle of power on to a former KGB officer, Vladimir ‘Ice Head’ Putin, who did judo and drank only iced tea.
In Britain the government of Harold Macmillan fell thanks to the ‘Profumo Affair,’ in 1963. John Profumo was the Minister of State for War in the United Kingdom. Educated at the elite Harrow high school and Oxford University,,
Profumo’s Achilles’ heel was his heel of a friend Steve Ward, who introduced Profumo to his sexual circus at a Lord Astor’s country mansion where weekends of debauchery went down with young women, as well as drinks served by a ‘naked man in a mask.’ His affair with a Russian woman brought down the Government.
