Only Russia could have produced a man like Korzhakov and ended up giving him so much power

Thomas de Waal

• Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn to Dusk by Aleksandr Korzhakov
  Interbook, 477 pp, £9.95, December 1997, ISBN 5 88589 039 0
• Romance with the President by Vyacheslav Kostikov
  Vagrius, 352 pp, £10.50, October 1997, ISBN 5 7027 0459 2

Alexander Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin’s former chief bodyguard, operated out of a poky cubby-hole in the Kremlin with room for barely anyone but himself. Vyacheslav Kostikov, Yeltsin’s press secretary, was given a grand office once occupied by the first Soviet President, Mikhail Kalinin. Both men were alter egos of the Russian President, but it was Korzhakov, his darker other half who hatched dirty plots to keep him in power and was spectacularly sacked when the plotting got out of hand, who in his time wielded the power. Kostikov belonged to that part of the Russian intelligentsia which supported Yeltsin as a ‘democrat’ from 1989 onwards – by ‘democrat’ they meant a politician of sufficient strength to defeat the Communist Party. Both men have now written their memoirs: they are highly partisan and Korzhakov’s in particular is a study in sour grapes. But they are essential reading if one wants to understand the nature of post-Communist power in Russia and the character of ‘the boss’.