MOSCOW, Aug 12: A former KGB General who stood behind President Boris Yeltsin for more than a decade before falling into disgrace is publishing memoirs that promise to regale the reader with more tales of bawdy Kremlin life.

Alexander Korzhakov, the former head of the presidential security service, is releasing his nearly 500-page book, Boris Yeltsin: From dawn to sunset today.

In the past, Korzhakov has described the Russian leader as suicidal and unfit to govern, and this new book is expected to be no kinder to his former boss.

The irreverent tabloid Sovershenno Sekretno (top secret) claims to have gotten a look at the book, which it said is so packed with dirt on the President that after reading it ``you feel like washing your hands or taking a shower''.

Yeltsin in June 1996 abruptly fired Korzhakov, the loser in a Kremlin power struggle, and later dismissed him from military service. In the book's preface, according to the tabloid, Korzhakov addresses the question of whether he was motivated by revenge. He says he was at first, but the more he wrote the more he was driven by a desire to tell the true story.

The book claims to shed new light on murky scandals of the past, such as when Yeltsin was unable to leave his plane at Shannon airport to meet the Irish Prime Minister in 1994.

The President is described falling down while making his way from his bed to the toilet on board the aircraft, frightening his wife and doctors, who suspected he had a heart attack or a stroke, the tabloid said.

The book apparently portrays Yeltsin as a drunken buffoon, who has a habit of playing the spoons on the heads of dignitaries.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.