Moscow - As a boy Boris Yeltsin blew off two fingers playing with a hand grenade - and that was just the beginning of a lifetime of antics that made the Russian president the wild man of world politics.
Throughout Yeltsin's historic rule, high-stakes statesmanship and clowning were never far apart.
His fondness for the bottle, while nothing unusual in a nation legendary for drinking, fuelled a hard-living style that ultimately destroyed his health and reputation, at times reducing the Kremlin leader to a laughing stock.
Perhaps most famous was an incident in August 1994, when Yeltsin stole the show at celebrations marking the retreat of Russian troops from Soviet-era bases in reunited Germany.
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Following lunch with then German chancellor Helmut Kohl, a clearly well-oiled Yeltsin snatched the baton from the conductor of a Berlin orchestra and took over conducting, with time to blow kisses at the astonished crowd.
Embarrassed Russians cringed again just a month later when Yeltsin, touching down in Ireland after a trip to the United States, failed to get off the plane to meet the Irish prime minister.
The partying president's habit got going well before he brought down the Soviet Union and took over the Kremlin as president of the new Russia.
After a visit to the United States in 1989 Italy's La Repubblica newspaper claimed Yeltsin behaved as if the country were "a bar 5 000km long."
At first Yeltsin's larger-than-life behaviour endeared him to Russians. They loved his energy and his bravery when he clambered onto a tank to face down Soviet hardliners in 1991.
But the man who had mutilated his left hand while playing with a stolen hand grenade in boyhood in the end lived too dangerously.
Ill health knocked him from the public eye at key moments, including the start of the war in Chechnya in December 1994.
He also disappeared at the height of his bruising re-election battle in 1996 against Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. Aides said he had a cold - it turned out later he'd had suffered a heart attack, his third in total.
The whole world then held its collective breath when Yeltsin underwent a quintuple heart bypass in November that year. Doctors could not guarantee beforehand that the 65-year-old was fit enough to survive.
During Yeltsin's latter days in power he was a shadow of his former self, his speech slurred, movements slow, face blurred, a figure of fun for Russia's then freewheeling media.
In his memoir, "Midnight Diaries," Yeltsin admitted to drinking, saying alcohol was "the only means" to overcome stress in a hurry. "I remember that the weight would lift after a few shot glasses."
His longtime bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, was quoted in 1997 saying that he watered down Yeltsin's vodka. Korzhakov also claimed that Yeltsin twice tried to commit suicide, once by jumping off a bridge into the Moscow River and later by locking himself in a sauna.
When the clean-living, judo black belt Vladimir Putin took over from Yeltsin in 1999, the contrast in style could not have been greater. - Sapa-AFP
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