A forceful voice for change in Russia

Former President Boris N. Yeltsin, 76, the Soviet apparatchik who made history by clambering atop a tank to stop a hard-line coup in 1991, then led the new Russia through its first tumultuous decade of democracy, has died of heart failure, government officials announced yesterday.

While most Westerners will remember the tall, snowy-haired Yeltsin for that bold, telegenic act, which helped to slay the oppressive Soviet Union, he remains a flawed, sometimes reviled, figure in modern Russia.

Despite establishing the first multiparty state in Russia's thousand-year history, and rapidly privatizing the massive centralized Soviet state economy, he continues to be blamed for unleashing years of chaos, corruption and crime, as well as the savage Chechen war.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last president, and the man displaced by Yeltsin's abrupt ascendancy, summed up Russians' mixed feelings in a statement issued yesterday through the Interfax news agency minutes after he learned of his rival's death. He described Yeltsin as one "on whose shoulders are both great deeds for the country and serious errors."

No matter how much bitterness Russians still harbor against Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, the colorful, sometimes buffoonish Siberian-born engineer will go down as one of the great characters of 20th-century history. He effectively undid the results of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, helped end decades of harsh Communist rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and set the new countries on their rocky paths to free-market democracy.

Just as important, he became the first Russian leader to relinquish power voluntarily, when he turned over the leadership to his handpicked successor, Vladimir V. Putin, in a surprise New Year's Eve address in 1999.

Many had expected the sickly Yeltsin, who underwent a much-publicized quintuple heart bypass in 1996, to die in office. But after toasting his successor in a televised farewell, he lived an additional eight years, although he was rarely seen again in public.

Some now believe that his painful economic reforms laid the foundation for Russia's current urban prosperity.

"Russia has lost the greatest reformer in all its history," declared Boris Berezovsky, a multimillionaire businessman who benefited from his alliance with Yeltsin and now lives in exile in London.

If Yeltsin's accomplishments were as immense as Russia, so were his failures. The father of Russian democracy behaved with the unpredictable arrogance of a czar, issuing sweeping decrees one day and withdrawing into an alcohol-induced depression the next.

On his watch, a mix of former Soviet bosses and wily "New Russians" such as Berezovsky divvied up the state's riches, while ordinary middle-class Russians were reduced to penury by his economic reforms. Rival business gangs went on assassination rampages, to the horror of a population that had grown up with little violent crime.

Yeltsin tarnished his democratic legacy when he used military force in 1993 to quell a parliament bucking his reforms. Three years later he sent tanks and bombers into the separatist province of Chechnya, launching an apparently endless conflict that has cost tens of thousands of lives.

Still, his stock among Western historians has steadily risen since Putin took office and began to curtail democratic freedoms in the name of restoring law, order and economic stability.

Yuri Y. Mamchur, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute who runs the Real Russia Project, said today's flawed democracy might not exist if Yeltsin had proceeded more cautiously. "Yeltsin shook everything up," Mamchur argued, and the chaos may have been the necessary price of that rapid democratic start.

In comparison with Putin - who has jailed opponents, virtually eliminated an independent media, and renationalized the property Yeltsin struggled to privatize - Yeltsin was a model of democratic tolerance.

During the worst moments of the Chechen war, when his popularity ratings had sunk into the single digits, he allowed private television stations to broadcast images of the carnage on the nightly news.

"What set him apart was that he very often defeated his opponents, but he never trampled them," said liberal politician Grigory Yavlinsky, in a clear reference to the beatings that occurred during a recent anti-Putin rally.

In 1996, Yeltsin insisted that free presidential elections go ahead, although many believed he had no chance for a second term. Instead, he won in a landslide - but the victory cost him dearly in political credibility.

In exchange for their backing and the money to wage his campaign against Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, Yeltsin had to cut a humiliating deal with a small but powerful circle of business insiders known as the oligarchs, allowing them to take ownership of valuable state companies. Putin has spent most of his tenure undoing that deal.

Hobbled by ill health and the loss of political power, Yeltsin accomplished little in his second term, except to obtain some breathing room for Russia's democratization process.

But for all his mistakes, Yeltsin understood what had to be done at a crucial moment in history, historian Richard Pipes said in an interview before Yeltsin's 1996 bypass operation. "He combined a faith in democracy with a cunning sense of politics," Pipes said.

Yeltsin always had a gift for divining the public mood. He was the first Soviet politician to understand the value of playing to the crowd, the first to develop a mass personal following outside the Communist Party structure, the first to recognize Russia's longing to become what he called a "normal country" - a favorite phrase of Russians.

Yeltsin was much less adept at the day-to-day business of governance. He destroyed the last remaining empire but never quite developed a complete vision for what to build in its place. He was "great in a crisis because a crisis requires a tactician," a former press secretary, Pavel Voshchanov, once said. "But he is not a strategist. He never thinks about tomorrow."

Most crucially, according to Michael McFaul, a Stanford University Russia expert, he never used his authority to create a large, pro-reform political party that would carry on his work after he left the scene, such as the one established by Charles de Gaulle.

The public welcomed his early reforms with an enthusiasm bordering on delirium, but their mood was soon tempered by hardships of economic shock therapy. To his credit, Yeltsin managed to keep Russia from descending into anarchy and bloodshed, even as hundreds of factories stopped operating and decorated war veterans were forced to line up at soup kitchens. For all the dire predictions of wholesale starvation and mass protest, Russians demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to cope with privation.

"If not for the strong will of Boris Nikolayevich, . . . Russia could have plunged - for many, many years or even decades - into civil war or Communist dictatorship," Vyacheslav Kostikov, another former press secretary, told an interviewer yesterday.

Yeltsin's determination was probably set early in life. He was born Feb. 1, 1931, into a peasant family in Butka, a small farming settlement in the Ural Mountains that to this day has no running water. It was a time of famine and upheaval, caused by Joseph Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture. Yelstin grew up in communal barracks where each family was allotted one room. The six Yeltsins slept on the floor, along with the goat.

Despite childhood privation, he earned a diploma in construction engineering from the Urals Polytechnic Institute. He turned down the job of construction foreman traditionally offered to graduates and instead hired on at a building site as an ordinary laborer, saying he wanted to learn all the trades.

He didn't join the Communist Party until 1961, when he was 30. But he moved up steadily, becoming party boss in the industrial Sverdlovsk region in 1975.

There was no evidence of the rebel in his early resume. In 1978, he accepted Moscow's orders to demolish the famous house in Sverdlovsk where the last Russian czar and his family were murdered. To circumvent protests, Yeltsin had it bulldozed in the middle of the night.

Ironically, it was Gorbachev who set his rival on the course of reform. After Gorbachev took over the Soviet leadership and launched his program of reform, known as perestroika, or restructuring, he tapped Yeltsin, then 54, as the party secretary in charge of construction and energy.

Yeltsin went at the task with zeal, firing 60 percent of Moscow's administrators. He launched investigations into organized crime. He publicly condemned the party elite's abuse of its privileges.

And he started showing up in unexpected places. In the most famous of those appearances, he joined a grocery line to buy veal. When at last his turn at the counter came, Yeltsin was told there wasn't any. Waving a document showing the store had just received a large shipment that morning, he revealed his identity and demanded to know what had happened to the meat. The other shoppers, accustomed to being turned away by surly shop clerks, cheered.

Although the event was obviously staged, Moscow citizens were impressed. The man who had been Gorbachev's prodigy was beginning to develop his own independent following.

Yeltsin pushed things too far, and was obliged to resign from the Politburo in 1987. But he made a comeback two years later when Gorbachev held the Soviet Union's first contested legislative elections and Yeltsin won a seat in the Russian parliament.

In September 1989, Yeltsin headed to the United States - including a visit to Philadelphia's Liberty Bell - to view democracy up close. He traveled the country, dropping quotes like bread crumbs as journalists followed his every step. "Communism is just an idea, just pie-in-the-sky, and we shouldn't try to implement it here on Earth," he proclaimed.

The Bush White House scheduled only a 15-minute meeting with Yeltsin because it feared offending Gorbachev. And the rookie world traveler committed several faux pas, throwing tantrums and appearing drunk at some appearances.

Still, Moscow intellectuals began to group around Yeltsin, schooling the rough-edged provincial in the basics of democratic thought. At the time, historian Yuri Afanasyev described him "as a way to overcome the existing regime, not just by repainting an old facade but by eradicating the entire system."

Pipes, the historian who wrote a revisionist history of the Bolshevik Revolution, maintains that Yeltsin will be remembered as an even greater leader than Gorbachev.

"Even though Gorbachev was instrumental in destroying the Soviet Union, it collapsed against his will," Pipes said. "Yeltsin decisively broke with communism, and launched Russia on the road to free enterprise."

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