Politics & Power Quote by Boris Yeltsin

Power is sold as access; Yeltsin describes it as amputation. The line’s force comes from its plain, almost checklist cadence: first, second, third. He strips the presidency of glamour by treating it like an occupational hazard report, the way a miner might talk about lungs or a pilot about fatigue. That procedural rhythm makes the last clause land harder, because it arrives not as melodrama but as a detail someone “supposes,” an aside that sounds like reluctant candor rather than a crafted lament.

The subtext is equal parts confession and warning from a man who knew how quickly a political ecosystem turns predatory. “Ordinary life suffers” isn’t quaint nostalgia; it’s an admission that the job requires permanent displacement from normal moral feedback. “Temptations to ruin you and those around you” gestures at the specific corruption of post-Soviet power: oligarchic money, factional intrigue, the way aides and family become leverage points. The phrase “those around you” quietly indicts the collateral damage of leadership, where loyalty becomes currency and intimacy becomes risk.

The rarely discussed third point is the most devastating because it’s structural, not personal. At the top, relationships degrade into vectors of influence: everyone wants something, everyone is watched, everyone becomes a potential liability. Friends imply equality and unguarded speech; presidents live on asymmetry and consequence. Coming from Yeltsin, it also reads as a late-life attempt to control the narrative: not a plea for sympathy, but a sober reminder that a leader’s loneliness isn’t tragic romance - it’s the price tag of command, and a source of misjudgment when flattery replaces truth.