Kremlin Discharges Six Aides Yeltsin’s Photographer, Guards Accused Of Being Drunk On Duty

As President Boris Yeltsin himself can attest, vodka and the Kremlin usually mix. But after a celebratory party in the Kremlin got drunkenly out of hand this month, the president’s personal photographer and several senior members of the presidential security service were dismissed.

On Thursday, the presidential press service confirmed that the photographer, Dmitri Sokolov, and five other aides were dismissed. A terse statement explained that they were guilty of being “intoxicated on duty.”

Office drinking is not usually grounds for discharge in Russia. As the daily newspaper Kommersant put it, the incident seemed strange “because the Kremlin usually forgives ‘little weaknesses’ of its people, especially of those close to the president.”

The fact that the revelers were all cronies of Yeltsin’s ousted close aide Alexander Korzhakov seemed the more plausible offense.

Ever since Yeltsin made his first prolonged public appearance on Sunday, after almost two months in seclusion recovering from pneumonia, Moscow has been awash in rumors that a major Cabinet shake-up is imminent.

Yeltsin tried to show that he was firmly back at the helm by publicly berating Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin before television cameras. On Monday, he said the Russian public was rightfully unhappy with the government and suggested that Chernomyrdin replace some Cabinet officers.

The vodka-soaked Monday Night Massacre was prompted by a power struggle between Kremlin guards still loyal to Korzhakov, the ousted head of presidential security, and Kremlin allies of Anatoly Chubais, the chief of staff. Korzhakov annoyed his enemies this month by winning a parliamentary seat.

The daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported Thursday that a party of television personalities, with Chubais the host, was going on nearby, and that Sokolov ran into a television news host, Sergei Dorenko, in the men’s room, and drunkenly assaulted him.

Dorenko said Thursday that the men’s-room encounter with Sokolov never took place.

He seemed mostly irritated that the function was so abstemious.

“We were served mineral water, cold tea and tiny cat dishes of uninteresting food,” he complained. “I had to go out afterward and get a proper lunch.”