Boris Yeltsin

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, politician: born Butko, Soviet Union 1 February 1931; Chief Engineer, Sverdlovsk 1966-76; Deputy, Supreme Soviet of the USSR 1974-90; First Secretary, Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee 1976-85; member, Central Committee, Communist Party of Soviet Union 1981-90; Head, Moscow City Party Committee 1985-87; President, Russian Federation 1991-99; married 1956 Naina Iosifovna Girina (two daughters); died Moscow 23 April 2007.

The hero of the failed coup d'état of August 1991, Boris Yeltsin enjoyed the distinction, otherwise unknown among politicians of the Soviet era, of returning to power after having been sacked in ignominious circumstances. His switchback career was virtually a leitmotif of the perestroika years, his escapades and his populist rhetoric had given him the image of a man who was either too erratic, flamboyant and unstable to pose a real threat to the Communist establishment, or a potentially dangerous rabble-rouser. From that bungled coup he emerged as a master of political crowd-control, a skilled manipulator of the world media, and a statesman of calibre.

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Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born in 1931 in Butko, a village in the Talitsky district of Sverdlovsk (now once again Yekaterinburg) Oblast, the eldest child of poor peasants. When he was five, his father left the land and worked as a labourer at a potash plant at Berezniki, Perm Oblast. There for 10 years the Yeltsins lived in the primitive conditions of Russia's new working class - a 20-to-a-room dormitory, outside lavatory, no mains water. In his memoirs, Against the Grain (1990), Boris Yeltsin attributes their survival through the winters and the war to the warmth and milk from their goat. His brother still works in the region as a farmer.

Both Yeltsin and his wife, Naina, graduated together in 1956 in civil engineering from the Urals Polytechnic in Sverdlovsk, and from 1957 to 1968 he worked there as chief engineer of a construction combine, also joining the volley-ball team.

A member of the Communist Party from 1961, in 1968 he became a functionary of the Sverdlovsk party organisation and in 1977 First Secretary of the Regional Party Committee. He was elected to the Central Committee in 1981, and from June 1983 to February 1988 was one of its Secretaries. With the backing of Yegor Ligachev, and thanks to his Sverdlovsk connection with the then prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, in December 1985 Yeltsin was made boss of the Moscow party organisation, and in early 1986 a candidate member of the Politburo.

His first measures expressed the early zeal of the Gorbachev era for cleaning up the corruption and inefficiency inherited from the Brezhnev period. He attacked the privileges that gave the party élite boundless opportunities to feather their own nests. He closed special restaurants for management, ended the privileged distribution of goods and re-established an equitable waiting list for apartments. By using public transport and living in a modest apartment, Yeltsin cultivated the image of the common man's politician.

In October 1987, at a plenary session of the Central Committee, he made what appeared to be an ill-judged attack on the leadership, singling out Ligachev openly and Mikhail Gorbachev by implication, for their lack of energy in addressing the country's economic problems, and ending his speech with a request to resign as a candidate member of the Politburo. The request was granted with alacrity and was accompanied by Gorbachev's vow that Yeltsin would never hold a top job in Moscow again. Instead, he was demoted to First Deputy Chairman of the State Committee for Construction.

The political momentum of perestroika, however, saved Yeltsin from oblivion. In March 1989 he won a resounding victory in the election to the new Congress of People's Deputies, at which Andrei Sakharov, Russia's most distinguished and most unrelenting dissident, made so momentous an impact. Yeltsin's anti-establishment position developed into outright opposition. At the Nineteenth Party Conference in the summer of 1989 he launched a blistering attack on corruption in the party, and at the 28th Party Congress in 1990, which was being televised to the world, he announced his exit from the party and stalked out of the meeting, an unprecedented act that was widely applauded, for it showed that he understood the public mood as simply anti-Communist.

Henceforth he was the acknowledged leader of the amorphous opposition, and, as Gorbachev teetered between hard-liners and reformers, the latter moved closer to Yeltsin. Whenever elections offered a choice between Yeltsin and a Communist, Yeltsin won decisively. In 1990 he became Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, and in June 1991 was elected President of the Russian Federation in the first such election held in the Soviet Union.

The crumbling of Soviet authority in Eastern Europe and the Soviet borderlands further encouraged a mood of protest at home, and it was as the personification of this protest that Boris Yeltsin played his greatest part in Soviet history, emerging as the victor in the crisis of August 1991 and Gorbachev's nemesis. When the Soviet President returned to Moscow from the Crimea, where the coup leaders had held him under house arrest, his first appearance in the Russian parliament was brazenly stage-managed by Yeltsin.

On world television, Yeltsin coaxed the diminished Soviet President through a script designed to expose not only the coup leaders but also the Communist Party, which Gorbachev in public only the day before had attempted to protect from accusations of complicity. Yeltsin's triumph presaged the imminent demise of the party at the hands of its own chastened leader. It also unleashed the welter of national independence declarations that made it possible within a few weeks to speak of the "former Soviet Union".

Two years later, and after continuous confrontation with an uncooperative parliament, an embattled President Yeltsin faced the crucial test. The parliament - consisting of the Supreme Soviet and Russian Congress of People's Deputies - had turned out to be resistant to reform. Yeltsin tried to end the deadlock by dissolving both houses and calling for new elections. In response, parliament voted to impeach him. Yeltsin's deputy, former General Alexander Rutskoi, allied with Ruslan Khasbulatov, the Speaker, and a combination of the left and hard right - the so-called Red-Brown Alliance - led hundreds of members of parliament and anti-Yeltsin demonstrators in an occupation of the parliament building, the "White House" that Yeltsin had defended only two years before.

On 21 September Yeltsin ordered the deputies to leave. Most submitted, but a small minority dug in and remained in armed occupation of the parliament building, declaring that they would defend it to the last drop of blood. It seemed inconceivable - to the world at large and the rebels themselves - that force would indeed be used. But on the morning of 4 October, after two weeks of stalemate and broken agreements, and after an armed attack by the rebels on the government's television station, the tanks rolled up and bombarded the building. The rebels surrendered. About 150 people had been killed. But, such was the desire for an end to the deadlock, that the bloodshed was widely accepted as preferable to civil war.

In elections to the newly created legislature, the State Duma, which followed in December 1993, a new demon emerged to menace Yeltsin's prospects of a co-operative Duma. From among a host of newly formed and half-baked "political parties", that of the grossly misnamed Liberal Democrats gained the largest single block of seats. Its leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, had conducted an effective media campaign, aimed at the nationalistic sensibilities of the average Russian, and his victory augured a new phase of confrontation between President and the Duma, as each side struggled to gain control of Russian nationalist opinion.

The fear that failure to achieve political harmony in Moscow would lead to civil war elsewhere in the country became a reality in 1994, when Russian forces invaded Chechnya, a tiny part of the Russian Federation that had proclaimed itself independent in 1991. Euphoric and preoccupied with problems closer to home, Yeltsin at first made no move to bring the Chechens back into the fold. Chechnya, however, was not only a dangerous precedent for other aspiring separatists: it carried the pipelines from Central Asia and the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea into the Russian interior and to export terminals.

Nothing in Boris Yeltsin's early career suggested either the heights to which he would rise or the turbulence he would create, once he reached the centre of power in Moscow. As the title of his memoirs suggests, he regarded himself as a maverick, an apparatchik who did not fit the part. The authoritarian character required of a successful regional party boss was plainly present in him, and the first Chechen crisis of 1994 was the context in which this fear was realised.

When senior Russian officers refused to attack Chechen civilians, and scruffy conscripts complained to the media that they did not know why they had been sent to Chechnya, it became clear that the line of command was flawed, and that Moscow's orders were being openly flouted. The Russian media, however, were behaving as if glasnost still prevailed, with the result that a powerful anti-war mood was created in the public mind, as mothers of young soldiers held protest meetings on the streets. Yeltsin's response was to intensify the fighting, while proclaiming an imminent end to the war by political means. Russian forces were extracted by the intervention of General Alexander Lebed, but the problem itself was left to fester.

Elections to the Duma in December 1995 produced a majority of Communists and nationalists. Liberals and reformers were drastically reduced and a new state of confrontation between the Duma and the President was inevitable. As a former party boss, Yeltsin was not trained to find a balance between reform and control, nor to respond to public opinion and legitimate opposition. His unstable behaviour of the 1980s re-emerged in the 1990s. The effects of declining health and alcohol - his drinking was said to be "normal" for a Russian man, i.e. one bottle of vodka a day - were plain to see. The puffy eyes, slurred speech, stiff walk and forced self-control were reminiscent of Leonid Brezhnev in his last years.

Then, after scares during the spring and early summer of 1996 that he had had either a number of heart attacks or strokes or an attack of cirrhosis of the liver, he emerged to conduct a vigorous campaign throughout the country. Ebullient and boisterous, he looked increasingly electable in the face of a threat of a Communist victory led by Gennadi Zyuganov. Opinion polls showed a near 50-50 split, when, in a master-stroke, Yeltsin brought the charismatic General Lebed into the Kremlin as head of his Security Council. As a candidate, Lebed had won 15 per cent of the poll on a law-and-order platform. On the day of the second round in July, it was rumoured that Yeltsin was again ill. The Russian media - most of it in favour of keeping the democratic option open with Yeltsin in power - failed to report it. A majority of Lebed's democratic supporters voted for Yeltsin, unaware that he was sick, recognising that a wobbly reformer was better than a Communist.

By now he had surrounded himself with a range of special advisers, some of them of dubious value, such as a spiritualist medium. The person who became most influential in his administration in the last three years of his reign, however, was Tatiana Dyachenko, his 36-year-old, twice-married younger daughter, a mother of two children - by profession a computer engineer and with no previous political experience.

Tatiana's power in the Kremlin was explained by the fact that she alone saw the man she routinely called "Papa" on a daily basis. In a rare interview with the press, she described her job: "I'm kind of involved in everything. I'm everywhere - everywhere there's a weak link." Yeltsin had brought her into his inner circle in 1996 to energise his election campaign. None of his other campaign officials was thrilled to have her there, but as she seemed to have no personal agenda they could not plot against her. She also kept her natural enemies at bay with her native intelligence and the professionalism she had learnt from the Americans.

The question of Yeltsin's health erupted again in September 1996, when it was announced that he would undergo open-heart surgery, with an American heart specialist, Michael De Bakey, in attendance. A media sensation was caused when his Russian surgeon, Dr Renat Akchurin, revealed on television that the President had suffered a heart attack just before the second round in the election, and that the political consequences of publishing that fact were so serious that it had been kept secret. In the course of his presidency, he would in fact survive no fewer than five heart attacks.

It was also revealed that Yeltsin had had a heart problem since his youth, giving credence to Zyuganov's jibe that the Russians were being asked to vote for "a walking corpse". In the event, Yeltsin made a remarkable recovery. He underwent quintuple bypass surgery and after several months out of the public gaze emerged looking fitter than at almost any time since he had stepped into the public arena.

During the eight months of Yeltsin's virtual absence from his post, the government had been led by the Prime Minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and the Chief of Staff, Anatoly Chubais, while the presidential administration had been guided by Tatiana Dyachenko. With his regained vigour, Yeltsin reasserted his authority, but, with the Duma reduced to a talking-shop and at odds with the government, he looked increasingly like a politician without a policy. As for foreign relations, Gorbachev had been an almost impossible act to follow. His image abroad was enhanced by his intelligence and spontaneous behaviour on foreign visits, while, by contrast, Yeltsin's improvised responses gave rise to doubts about his physical condition.

With Chubais deprived of his post as Deputy Prime Minister in autumn 1997, the mantle of the President, should he have then died, would have fallen on the shoulders of the quietest man in the leadership, the solid-looking but immobile Viktor Chernomyrdin. The Prime Minister, however, made the same error as had Lebed, namely, of revealing his presidential ambitions. In addition, Boris Berezovsky, a business tycoon and one of the powerful group of "oligarchs" now regarded as Russia's real rulers, had been in conflict with Chernomyrdin over a number of major oil and other deals, and his interests harmonised with those of Yeltsin's daughter, Tatiana, who saw that Chernomyrdin's inertia and corruption had tarred her father's regime with the same brush: if her father was to go down in history as the maker of a new and prosperous Russia for all, the reform process had to be accelerated and made meaningful. Chernomyrdin was therefore dropped and was succeeded by the Energy Minister, Sergei Kiriyenko, a former oil- refinery manager and an unknown and unlikely quantity, aged only 35.

During the summer of 1998 the dire condition of the industrial and rural economy grew steadily worse, with wages months and even years in arrears. Barter was the order of the day, as the gap between haves and have-nots widened alarmingly. Then, in August Russia was struck by the tidal wave of the market fall in the Far East. Russian banks went under or suspended trading, while many foreign-currency savings accounts sank without trace, hitting legitimate Russian dollar-earners along with their "Mafiya" compatriots; Western banks ceased trading with their Moscow counterparts, and Western credit-card companies stopped sending new cards to their Russian customers.

Yeltsin sacked Kiriyenko and offered up the unlamented failure, Chernomyrdin, to the Duma for approval. Ignominiously rejected twice, Chernomyrdin declined Yeltsin's offer of a third attempt. The sclerotic President then turned to his Foreign Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, a throwback to the Soviet era and more at home in the world of intelligence and Middle East diplomacy, but seen by many as both a safe pair of hands and a likely presidential successor.

Nineteen ninety-nine was a year of decisive importance for Yeltsin. Rarely appearing in public, when he did so he seemed decrepit, inarticulate and in need of physical support. Retirement seemed a sensible next move. In an act reminiscent of the last empress's "ministerial leapfrog", he suddenly sacked Primakov in the summer and appointed an unknown aide called Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB intelligence officer and former deputy to the corrupt former mayor of St Petersburg. Yeltsin was at the time facing the threat of investigation into his own and his family's financial probity, so that the thought of retirement was overshadowed by the threat of criminal charges. He needed protection and expected Putin to provide it.

Meanwhile, in September, the Chechen issue again erupted, this time after three massive bomb attacks in Moscow had destroyed entire apartment blocks. Public fear and indignation that part of the country was being run by an army of terrorists who could menace the very capital itself prompted a new Caucasian campaign, pursued by Prime Minister Putin with extreme vigour. With Russian casualties kept to a minimum by using aerial bombardment, the government's popularity rocketed. Putin was named as Yeltsin's heir.

Rumours of Yeltsin's impending resignation circulated among the chattering classes, and, on New Year's Eve, he announced it. His guarantee of immunity for himself and his family in his hand, he could now retire from politics. In his resignation speech he asked for Russia's forgiveness, "because many of our hopes have not come true, because what we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully difficult. I ask you to forgive me for not fulfilling some hopes of those people who believed that we would be able to jump from the grey, stagnating, totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilised future."

The state over which Yeltsin presided had installed a democratic political system, albeit one in which powerful sectional interests wielded excessive influence. But, by any economic measure, society as a whole had benefited only marginally, and growing numbers had fallen far below the poverty line. Corruption and criminality were rampant throughout the political and economic structures and deterred the Western bankers who had fed them.

Yeltsin's credentials as a democrat were seriously blotted by the time of his resignation, and he made no serious effort to redeem himself in retirement. On a private visit to Oxford in 2004, the discussion with a small group of students and Russian specialists was not memorable. He did not re-emerge into public life after it. Yet, if Mikhail Gorbachev is remembered as the Communist leader who did not act to prevent the foundations of the Soviet Union from being fatally weakened, Boris Yeltsin will go down in history as the man who gave the edifice the last push.

Harry Shukman