A boor, a bully and a boozer, but Boris was a journalist's dream

My first job as Moscow Correspondent of The Irish Times was to cover the inauguration of Boris Yeltsin as president of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR) in the Grand Kremlin Palace in July 1991.

Elected the previous month with a huge personal vote, Mr Yeltsin took office in a ceremony almost devoid of the trappings of communist rule but with plenty of pageantry, stirring fanfares, an oath of allegiance and a blessing from His Holiness Alexiy II, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.

At the end of his acceptance speech, Mr Yeltsin announced to those present and to the world through television the words: "Russia is Reborn." He had earlier declared in a rousing voice that the president was "not a god, not a new monarch, not a miracle worker. He is an ordinary citizen, but with enormous responsibility for the destiny of Russia."

More than eight years later I watched a grey-faced president Yeltsin announce his resignation and, slowly and with great difficulty, tell the Russian people: "I want to ask forgiveness for your dreams that never came true. Also I would like to beg forgiveness for not having justified your hopes."

For me, the first unsettling moment came in the immediate aftermath of the coup when he boorishly humiliated the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the Congress of People's Deputies. His body language on that occasion was that of a bully. If there's one thing worse than a bad loser it's a bad winner, and that was how Mr Yeltsin was behaving. One began to feel for the first time that there were very serious character flaws at work.

In 1993, after a showdown with parliament and a firefight at the TV station in Ostankino to the north of Moscow, Mr Yeltsin sent in the tanks to shell the Russian White House. For two weeks after the event we were locked up in our apartments as a curfew was imposed.

In September of 1994 a colleague and I found ourselves in Abkhazia, a region which had broken away from Georgia and set up its own unrecognised state. Few things worked. There were no phones and running water was rarely available. One night, as the jackals howled in the bandit-infested hills behind us, we watched Mr Yeltsin on television from Seattle, Washington. He was very much under the weather.

Mr Yeltsin was due in Shannon next day. If he was tipsy even before he got on the plane, what state would he be in when he arrived? Our decision was a wise one. We hightailed it across the border into Russia, where there was a hotel where the phones worked. We made it just in time to touch base with Dublin, when Mr Yeltsin left his welcoming party in the lurch by staying put on his plane. At his press conference in the Kremlin a few days later, Mr Yeltsin answered every question that did not refer to Shannon.

From 1995 onwards I was based back in Dublin but "commuting" frequently to Moscow. During the presidential election campaign in 1996 something happened which made my flesh creep. A Russian who had connections with the security services told me attempts could be made to halt the electoral process. I was told to watch out for two things: a bomb on the metro and a sudden illness afflicting Mr Yeltsin in the final days of the campaign.

Four hours after our conversation a bomb exploded on the Moscow metro. Shortly before voters went to the polls in the election's second round, Mr Yeltsin suffered a serious heart attack. All attempts to reach my contact since then have failed.

After that, the sacking of prime ministers - five between 1997 and 1998 - became Mr Yeltsin's favourite pastime. He was a journalist's dream, the difficulty not being finding something to write about but deciding what to leave out. It is a strange thought, but in his absence could Moscow become a boring posting?