. Now Playing. Rosie Gaines.

It’s been 7 hours and 13 days since Boris took his love away - plus the time it’s taken me to finish reading all the obituaries.

It isn’t done to speak ill of the dead, though very many have made an exception in Boris’ case. What’s missing amongst the list of ‘ ills’ is that there’s no mention of the still living. Yeltsin didn’t run, or ruin, Russia single-handed. If he ever ran Russia at all.

By the latter half of the nineties, Yeltsin wasn’t capable of more than two hours work a day. He was described as ‘stumbling, slurring, often ragingly incoherent‘. And that was one of the kinder comments. Frequent spells in sanatoria took him away from the office for up to eight months. He was also reportedly suffering from mini-strokes and manic depression. The rest of the time. as everybody knows, he was out to lunch. If you can remember having a drink with Boris, you weren’t there

Every journalist writing back then notes that Russia was run by ‘The Family’. Yeltsin’s daughter Dyachenko, Boris Berezovsky (known as ‘Rasputin’ for his manipulation of Dyachenko) and Abramovich (known as ‘wallet’) were the Godfathers. They were ably assisted by financial people like Pavel Borodin and Menatep’s Khordokosvsky in helping to pillage and slush Russian assets abroad. It was the Family who set up FIMACO - ‘Financial Management Company’ - in the Channel Islands. FIMACO alone disappeared around 50 billion.

Swiss prosecutors who turned up Berezovsky’s multi-million theft from Aeroflot reckoned another 50 billion at least was stashed here. And then there were the IMF funds that never reached Russia at all, ending up in the Bank of New York, London and the Cayman Islands. And all this at a time when Russia could not pay its miners, soldiers or schoolteachers.

Of course, the West was totally complicit in the scandals. It bent rules for loans to Russia, knowing full well that the money would come full circle. To grease the money-go-round, some Russian mobsters even gave money to Al Gore at fundraisers. The West was enriched by Russian capital flight - which Primakov estimated at over 200 billion during Yeltsin’s tenure.

At the same time, capital flight fulfilled the Clinton doctrine of keeping Russia weak. In all this, the West and the Family cultivated the image of Yeltsin a scapegoat for Russia’s ills. Now many recent obituaries appear to do the same. Well, they would like to gloss over the details wouldn’t they.

So, for me, the obituaries only show the extent to which history is revised by the media. Contemporary accounts painted a completely different picture of the Life of Boris. To me, his life appears more like the Life of Brian. Someone who stood on a tank once by accident and got mistaken for the saviour.