OREANDA-NEWS. Boris Yeltsin's ex-assistant Georgy Satarov said, that the former President of Russia stopped heavy drinking in 1995 after suffering a heart attack. According to Satarov, the politician was an introvert.

«He burned out all the problems in himself. An introvert doesn't share what hurts», the political scientist said in an interview with the YouTube-channel «School of Civic Education».

At the same time, Satarov explained, that it was impossible to get Boris Yeltsin drunk. «This does not mean, that he did not allow himself to drink some alchohol when it was really hard or he got tired, and so on», said ex-assistant.

Earlier, Satarov said, that the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, had good reasons to choose Vladimir Putin as his successor. The head of state needed a person who could «preserve what was achieved». The 1998 default came as a shock to Yeltsin. And if before that he considered Boris Nemtsov and a number of other politicians as his successor, then after the default, the president needed to transfer power into the hands of a person who could preserve what the country had come to at the time of the crisis. Having made this decision, Yeltsin began to look for options among law enforcement officials, and one of the candidates was Putin.

However, later, after his resignation, Yeltsin was critical of Putin's activities on the sidelines. So, he reproached him with the desire for popularity.