Yeltsin’s Ex-Aide Regales Russia With Tell-All

Russia has no equivalent to the British royal family or America’s Kennedy clan, but it does have a Kremlin.

And right now, the telltale memoirs of a former aide to President Boris Yeltsin are providing Russians with their share of gossip and disgraceful misdeeds at the top.

Until he was dismissed as chief of presidential security in a power struggle during the presidential elections last summer, Alexander Korzhakov, 47, spent 11 years as Yeltsin’s closest confidant.

When Korzhakov was kicked out and stripped of his lieutenant general’s rank and pension, he did not take his fall from grace lightly. Instead, he sought revenge.

The result, as published in excerpt form in The Sunday Times of London and several Russian newspapers, is a slashingly brutal, at times luridly intimate, portrait of Yeltsin, his family and Kremlin cronies.