The bodyguard then covered up the incident, he told The Moscow Times in an interview published Friday.

Alexander Korzhakov was Yeltsin's close friend and bodyguard for a decade, and wielded enormous power until Yeltsin fired him during his 1996 re-election campaign. Now he is a member of the Duma, Russia's lower house of Parliament.

He first became Yeltsin's bodyguard in 1985 when Yeltsin was a Moscow official. When Yeltsin became president in 1991, he made him head of his security detail.

Yeltsin changed after becoming president, Korzhakov said. Among other things, Yeltsin "would drink all the time -- he would start at 7:00 in the morning."

In his memoirs, Korzhakov wrote that once, after an evening of drinking, Yeltsin crashed his vehicle into a car and motorcycle that had stopped on a country road, tearing off the car's door and striking the motorcycle.

Korzhakov wrote that he quietly had the car repaired and arranged for medical care for the injured motorcyclist.

"But after six months he died," he wrote. "We buried him as well, since he did not have any close relatives."