Sometimes, it takes an addict: Boris Yeltsin
Former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, dead of cardiovascular problems at age 76. Except for the fact that he didn’t seem to crave totalitarian power–but given Soviet circumstances, he may have not been in a position to wield it–he exhibited many of the classic symptoms of middle- to late-stage alcoholism while in power. He was erratic and he thrived on crises, seemed bored by normalcy, was guided not so much by reason as gut instinct and was defiant. He went into tirades during which he publicly criticized communist party leadership during Gorbachev’s perestroika, including Gorbachev and even his wife Raisa, resulting in his expulsion from the Politburo. When elected president of the Russian Federation in 1991, he wasted little time in battling hardliners who opposed Gorbachev, who still presided over the failing Soviet Union. When hardliners opposed to perestroika sent tanks into Moscow, Yeltsin climbed aboard one, making a mockery of the rebellion. When the Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 31, 1991, Yeltsin launched the economic reform that led to far freer markets in Russia than ever before, bumbling though it may have been.
During his eight-year tenure as Russian president, he repeatedly promoted and demoted ministers and bureaucrats (at least he didn’t fire and kill them as Stalin did). He disappeared for weeks or months with “health” problems and when he reappeared had bursts of activity and berated his underlings for poor performance during his absence. He disbanded parliament in September 1993, later writing that he was fully aware that his actions were unconstitutional–but by twisting rules, he helped create a new country. He became known as an obvious drunk, even if The Los Angeles Times’ two-(newspaper-sized) page obituary barely alluded even to his drinking (he “would disappear for weeks or months with health problems worsened by a reported fondness for vodka,” in the 20th paragraph; The Economist was more blunt, pointing out in the 3rd paragraph of its far shorter obit that he was “frequently drunk”). In March 1998, The Economist wrote, “Often unpredictable, President Boris Yeltsin’s behavior veered this week towards the incomprehensible. Returning to work from a real or feigned illness on Monday morning, he sacked his prime minister of five years’ standing without appearing to have any very clear idea of why he was doing so….[He also sacked] a first-deputy prime minister, Anatoly Chubais, whom he had pledged publicly a month before to keep in the government until at least 2000.” Yet it was his heavy drinking–we’ll call it alcoholism–that made him the man he was, willing to take risks that few sober people would ever chance. In his case, the world got lucky–although it’s possible that if a sober and determined follower of Gorbachev had taken control, the privatizations that allowed so much to fall into the hands of thugs would have turned out better.