From Russia, with Drunk.

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Unlike most of you I’ve never met Boris Yeltsin. Now that he’s dead my chances are probably not going to get much better. On one hand, fewer people will be clamoring to see him since, well…he’s dead, so his social schedule should lighten up. On the other hand, well…he’s dead. But if the stories about his drinking are correct he’s not likely going to putrefy until Captain Kirk, in a future all full of socialism and half-nekked green chicks, hits grade-school.

I note the passing of Mr. Yeltsin with more than casual interest since he was a pivotal figure in one of the first truly historic events of my adult life; the end of the Cold War. Also, he reminds me of Uncle Buddy.

I don’t actually have a specific uncle named ‘Buddy’, and I’m guessing that very few of us do. However, if we have more than one uncle, one of them is almost certainly an Uncle Buddy. This is a sliding scale of course, depending on where you fall in the socio-economic scale, but trust me; you have an Uncle Buddy.

Uncle Buddy is the friend or relative who tells inopportune booby jokes at holiday dinners when your mom is listening. Uncle Buddy was the slightly creepy, older friend you had in college; it made you mildly uncomfortable that someone his age was hanging with you, but he always scored the good weed. Uncle Buddy always throws up on furniture when he drinks. If you are a member of a higher and more cosmopolitan set, Uncle Buddy doesn’t get the cartoons in The New Yorker and still insists on putting perfectly good Brie in the damned refrigerator.

Uncle Buddy was the first person you knew who had their own place but he lives there even now and the couch still smells like pickles.

Boris Yeltsin, without question, must have been an Uncle Buddy.

I remember The Great Man Theory of history from school; briefly, it states that history is the collection of facts surrounding great people. You don’t read about World War II generally, you read about Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Tojo, etc… because they were the ones around whom the story unfolded. They were the movers and the shakers from whom the great events of time cannot be divided.

This is not Boris Yeltsin.

If Yeltsin stumbled into greatness, it was because he slipped in squirrel dung while crossing the front lawn of obscurity. This is not to diminish the importance of Yeltsin, mind you, as his singular moment in Russian history was huge. In the August coup attempt of 1991, Russian hardliners sequestered Mikhail Gorbachev and sought to take over the government. Yeltsin, then the mayor of Moscow, gathered a throng of supporters and declared his defiance to the old order upon the hood of a main battle tank – a tank belonging to the opposition. This unmitigated and uncompromising declaration of support for the new Russia was the final nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union – and the specter has not risen against since.

But clearly, the man had to be fall-off-his-ass drunk to climb up on the other guy’s tank.

After the August Coup, Yeltsin went on to show what an Uncle Buddy could do in office. Clearly out of his depth and with his free Executive hand firmly clenching a lovely cocktail, disaster ensued. His attempts at economic reform created a Russian middle class, but plunged millions into the kind of poverty that leads to people living in Cheez-It boxes and selling their organs for expired chicken loaf. Further, he undertook a war in Chechnya that makes Dubya look like Neville Chamberlain.

And of course, he drank – a lot.

Uncle Boris got drunk and groped at the glasnosts of his female staff. Yeltsin got drunk and danced on stage like a methamphetamine-fueled monkey during folk concerts and Yeltsin even got so wasted that he could not leave his plane during a state visit with the Irish Prime Minister.

You need to be exponentially more hooched-up than the worst day of Orson Welles in order to be too drunk to meet the Irish.

As I’ve mentioned in one other post, I tend not to write about something “until the patient is dead”. I do this mostly because I like to see where the reaction to a thing falls. In this case, while the reviews have been lukewarm, everyone seems to agree that the real legacy of this Uncle Buddy will be when he stood (in my opinion, drunk beyond lucidity) on a Russian tank and refused to break. Chechnyan horrifics and the kleptocratic economy, at least in the western press, seem to have been shuffled behind the curtain.

For some other Uncle Buddys currently flatulating their way through office, Boris may give them hope.

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