IN late 1996, just over a year before the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Boris Yeltsin received a document that might have spared Bill Clinton the embarrassment of impeachment proceedings.
Among papers on his desk in the Kremlin lay a coded report from Russian intelligence warning that the Republicans intended to exploit Clinton's notorious "penchant" for young women by planting a female "provocateur" in his entourage. The aim was clear, it said - to ruin Clinton's reputation and force him out of office.
"I thought about telling him but it could after all have been a normal provocation," said 69- year-old Yeltsin in an interview this weekend. "I wasn't sure whether some of the details were sufficiently precise. If I had warned him I could have hurt him unnecessarily, and I didn't want to do that. I have always believed in him and in his honesty, and I thought that Clinton could deal with this situation himself."
During a meeting with Clinton long after the impeachment attempt against him failed, Yeltsin apparently contemplated giving the American leader a copy of the coded report as a souvenir - but refrained so as not to "traumatise" him.
The story of this bizarre tip-off is one of the stranger tales recounted by the former Russian leader in The Midnight Diaries, an account of his last four years in office, which is published this week. No less intriguing is Yeltsin's admission that he "occasionally" turned to alcohol to alleviate the stress of the post he occupied from 1991 until he stepped down at the end of last year in favour of Vladimir Putin.
In his book, Yeltsin, who has rarely appeared in public since his resignation, admits being drunk when he shamed himself at a ceremony in Berlin in 1994 by conducting a military band in front of the world's media. He also describes how his closest aides were so appalled that they wrote him a letter saying he had gone too far in embarrassing his country.
The uncharacteristic confession is believed to have been included on the insistence of the American publishers, who demanded that Yeltsin deal with the question of his notorious drinking problem.
"I could not stand drunk people, but at some moment I felt that alcohol is really a means, which takes stress away quickly," Yeltsin writes.
"The times before the Berlin incident were hard for me. Exhaustion and tension were looking for a way out. There, in Berlin, when the whole of Europe was celebrating the last of our troops leaving [Germany], I suddenly felt that I couldn't stand it any more. The responsibility was exerting pressure, the atmosphere of the event, the historical moment. Suddenly . . . I gave in."
In the book Yeltsin firmly rejects allegations that he accepted bribes from a Swiss construction company in return for a lucrative contract to renovate the Kremlin. To show how simply he lives, he even lists some of his most valuable possessions, including the family fridge, a tape recorder, a tennis racket and a set of scales.
The former president, who had a quintuple heart bypass and survived several heart attacks, now lives at a secluded state dacha outside Moscow with his wife Naina and daughters Lena and Tatyana. In the grounds he keeps horses given to him by heads of state during his two terms in office.
In the interview, in today's issue of the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, Yeltsin criticised the way Putin handled the aftermath of the tragedy of the Kursk, the nuclear submarine that sank in the Barents Sea killing all 188 crew members.
He said Putin visits him regularly for guidance on how to run Russia. "Putin has made mistakes but I am very impressed by how he often comes to me for advice," Yeltsin said. "He calls me, comes to my residence. Only the day before yesterday he visited me to seek my advice on really important strategic questions."
When not discussing world politics, Yeltsin, who still suffers from poor health, spends his days playing with his grandchildren, fishing and resting. One favourite pastime, however, is apparently causing concern in his entourage.
"I have managed to find a way to satisfy my passion for driving - I drive a small electric buggy," he writes in the book. "And I reach high speeds. I especially love driving down a hill directly at a tree and swerving to one side at the last moment. That's my way to relax.
"I was recently given a guard to come with me on one of these risky trips. But when I swerved he couldn't hold on and fell out of the buggy. I had to say sorry."
