Impeachment Russian Style

Talk about high crimes and misdemeanors... Next month... as the United States Senate begins its trial of President William Jefferson Clinton... Communists in the Russian legislature will try to impeach President Boris Yeltsin for crimes ranging from treason... to genocide reports CBS News Correspondent David Hawkins.

Treason... for dissolving the Soviet Union in 1991... Yes, the Communists are still mad at him about that...

Abuse of power... for sending tanks against the Russian parliment in 1993...

Murder... for pressing an unsuccessful war in Chechnya, where more than 80,000 people were killed...

And... if you can believe it... genocide... for the early deaths of two-and-a-half million Russians... blamed on Yeltsin's mis-management of the economy...

By comparison... fooling around with a young intern...even lying about it under oath... seems to most Russians like a pretty trivial reason to dump a president.

Russians joke that they'd like nothing better than to find out that their president was chasing women around the Kremlin.... At least then they'd know that Boris Yeltsin was healthy... alive and well.

As for lying... if you collected all of Yeltsin's lies, cracked the Communist Party leader recently... it'd take two railway trains to cart them around.

Still, political analysts here say the threat to impeach Yeltsin is just a political sideshow... for politicians getting ready for new elections.

"it's just a natural channel for frustration. They need an outlet to show they are unhappy. They need someone to blame. A scapegoat. says political analyst Andrei Kortunov

So there's little or no fear in the Kremlin that Yeltsin will ever actually be removed from office... no matter how serious the charges. The Russian constitution's rules on impeachment make it almost impossible to impeach a president here, because... well... the president wrote them.