…and finally lands at Shannon
The mood was heavy. People were crying. It was a state funeral in Moscow, a city made for bereavement. Red carnations colored the road between the church and the Novodevichy Cemetery, where the procession would head. In the crowd, old ladies wearing babushkas interwove between Bill Clinton and George Bush Senior. In front of them was Vladimir Putin, on whose thin young face one can almost see the dismantling of democracy being worked out and bare-chested horseback pictures being staged.
It was an event that Boris Yeltsin would have livened up by chucking back a couple of shots or by stealing the microphone from the priest to sing a Billy Joel tune. He might have done so were he not the one in the coffin. He was big and stocky even in the box, a white-haired Russian Bear, replete with snout, puffy cheeks, and beady ursine eyes. His wife spoke into his ear for a minute (getting in one last nag, no doubt. You forgot to take out the trash, Boris). He was lowered into the ground and the Russian national anthem played. Boris Yeltsin had landed at Shannon.
Boris Yeltsin’s early life reads like Paul Bunyanesque legend. “The boy from the Urals” was almost drowned during his baptism by a drunken priest. Subsequently, his parents named him “Boris” because he was a fighter (Borets in Russian). During World War II, he snuck into an ammo dump to steal a hand grenade and proceeded to blow off two of his fingers. Though he still managed to give a bone-crushing handshake. When he owned a construction company, he climbed and pacified an out-of-control crane in a heavy storm. His later life acts didn’t disappoint, with him making speeches on tanks and suppressing communist coups.
For Americans, Boris Yeltsin was the face of a new Russia. Because for fifty years, Russia was our scary enemy. They were the arrogant, dark-eyed bad guys, gutturally threatening Rocky Balboa, being foiled by Rocky and Bullwinkle, and hijacking Air Force One. But now, this charismatic guy with a broad disarming smile was smashing every stereotype we had of Russians. He wasn’t humorless, calculating, or beating Apollo Creed to death, he was pounding beers and then dancing on stage with the abandon of a drunk uncle at a wedding. He had a friendship with our President, who belly laughed behind him as he (gutturally) called the American Press “a disaster.” He and President Clinton went to hockey games together, bear hugged each other, and wore the matching hockey jerseys Yeltsin had bought them, with “Clinton 96” and “Yeltsin 96” printed on the backs. They were, evidently, schoolgirl besties. And we loved it.
While it’s a grave injustice to minimalize the man to a drunken caricature, the anecdotes are just too good. And we don’t need anecdotes when we have videos. In these, he’s an anachronism, existing at the tail end of the tail end of a time before a tweet or a twelve second video clip would dismantle a thirty-year career. How would today’s easily triggered audience deal with Boris picking up a woman and dropping her into the ocean as if she were a popsicle stick? Or tapping the heads of and poking the bellies of female aides? Or stealing a baton from a conductor and conducting with a red, boozy face? A quick perusal on YouTube finds a full video compilation of him wobbling, slurring, downing shots and beers, or doing something cringeworthy by today’s standards. Clinton later wrote in his autobiography that he was laughing so conspicuously during Yeltsin’s “disaster” comment to draw attention away from how inebriated the Russian President was. He also wrote that while staying at the White House, President Yeltsin was found by security outside in his underwear trying to hail a taxi to go get a pizza. These acts would destroy someone else, but it somehow only makes us like him more. Who hasn’t had the drunken urge for pizza, after all? I only hope they ordered in for him. He was a larger-than-life legend, whose liver was larger than him.
But the reality behind the humorous anecdotes is that he drank to deal with anxiety, stress, and depression. He had the worst job in one of the hardest periods in Russian history. He was suppressing coups before he got in and firing tanks at his own parliament after he got in. He was saddled with the job everyone wanted done but nobody wanted – to bring the depressed and dilapidated Soviet Union from communism to a golden capitalist future, to a good relationship with the West, to make Russia into a place where any little boy or girl could grow up into an oligarch and buy their very own American Republican politician. The depth of his anguish showed as he resigned on December 31, 1999 and did something remarkable – he apologized for failing. He had a hard job to do and he didn’t carry it off the way he had really wanted and he was sorry for not doing well. The very act of accepting responsibility, holding himself accountable, saying that he had failed in his promises, and apologizing makes Boris Yeltsin beyond remarkable amongst current politicians.
But he wasn’t always so straight shooting. On a flight to Ireland in 1996, President Yeltsin got too drunk on the plane to handle a diplomatic meeting with the Irish Prime Minister. So instead of landing and creating a humiliating situation (and probably an international incident), the airplane continuously circled over Shannon Airport to give him time to sober up and become presentable. Ever since, “circling over Shannon” has been Irish slang for when someone is desperately trying to sober up. When the Irish create a drinking idiom in your honor, you are not a part of Hammered History, you are Hammered History. And for that, his courage, and his many other exploits and efforts, the man deserves a drink raised in his name.
The Boris Yeltsin “Circling over Shannon” Cocktail:
Vodka
Ingredients:
Vodka
Instructions:
Pour vodka into a glass
Drink it
Repeat until you are no longer able to visualize Vladimir Putin bare-chested on horseback.
