YELTSIN’S FORMER PRESS SECRETARY RESIGNS AMBASSADORIAL POST AFTER MEMOIRS PUBLISHED.

Vyacheslav Kostikov has resigned his post as Russian ambassador to the Vatican following publication in the mass circulation Argumenty i fakty of extracts from his account of the years he spent as President Yeltsin’s press secretary. The book depicts ruthless in-fighting inside the presidential apparatus with Yeltsin’s senior aides — Aleksandr Korzhakov, Sergei Filatov (recently replaced by Nikolai Yegorov) and Viktor Ilyushin — struggling for access to the president. Kostikov portrays the president himself as devoid of principle, driven only by desire for power and strongly influenced by those around him. "Boris Nikolaevich does not have and never had any democratic convictions of his own," Kostikov writes. "Sometimes I think about him as a tragically lonely man, especially now that the democrats have left him, the democrats who, in fact, made Yeltsin Yeltsin." (4)

Russian Government Rejects Industrial Proposals.