Yeltsin: The man who beat Communism

It is the classic historian's question: do individuals or impersonal forces move nations? Anyone who saw Boris Yeltsin, as I did, descend the steps from the Russian parliament and clamber on to the tank to address a message of defiance to the small crowd of Muscovites below, will retain not a sliver of doubt. Individuals move nations - brave, foolhardy, strangely guileless individuals, such as Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.

That scene from 19 August 1991 is preserved in slow motion in my memory, as it must be in the memory of everyone who was there. That morning, Moscow seemed a zone of timeless uncertainty. A state of emergency had been declared before dawn. According to a clumsily formulaic announcement, the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, had been removed from power due to ill health. A committee had taken over and a state of emergency declared.

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Tanks had rolled into Moscow amid the Monday morning rush-hour traffic and converged on strategic locations: the Kremlin, the KGB headquarters, the defence ministry and the White House, the cavernous building of the Russian parliament. Anticipating the paraphernalia of military coups, ID checks, barred roads, I decided for no particular reason, to make for the White House.

Armoured vehicles were positioned around the building. Diplomatic cars, whose arrival apparently predated the tanks, filled the car park. Then suddenly there was movement: a small group started to come down the steps. Yeltsin was in the centre; aides on either side seemed to be trying to dissuade him. He walked slowly and very deliberately, towards the tanks. A few pleasantries with the guards, and he was on the top, reading from a scrap of paper. "I do not accept this coup," was the crucial sentiment I remember now.

Until the world allowed itself to be diverted by the drunken buffoonery of Yeltsin's last years in office, this was the image that defined him. It is also his rightful legacy. Without Yeltsin's challenge, the coup against the Soviet President might have succeeded, the Soviet Union might have staggered on, with an increasingly fearful, and repressive, Politburo in charge.

Yeltsin called the plotters' bluff. He rallied the nation. He anathematised the Communist Party and pronounced it summarily dissolved. The bizarrely incompetent coup still had two full days and two agonisingly tense nights to come, but one man in Russia had refused to accept it. At the emergency committee's embarrassing press conference that afternoon, a few brave young Russian journalists followed suit. The sparse crowd outside the White House grew through the rainy evening, as people came after work intent on seeing the night through. Young men offered themselves to fight, swearing allegiance to Russia and its President on a Bible. Those were truly the days Soviet Communism was smashed. They were also the days when Russia was reborn.

Boris Yeltsin was from that point on the unchallenged ruler of Russia. Gone was the awkward duopoly of rival Soviet and Russian power, which had been made all the more unpredictable by the clashing personalities of the bull-headed Yeltsin and the smoothly calculating Gorbachev. Yeltsin held the advantage. He brought Gorbachev back from his Crimean captivity, but he was ruthless in chopping the power from under him. He taunted him before the Russian parliament. He endorsed the independence declarations of the Baltic states. Through the autumn, he allowed pillar after pillar of Soviet hegemony to fall. Russia, Ukraine and Belarus renounced the treaty that founded the Soviet Union. The gold reserves (and foreign debt) passed into Russia's control. The KGB lost its sway; one by one, small, scared agents defected (including the British ambassador's driver). The centralised supply system broke down. The West prepared for famine, the collapse of all communal services and waves of refugees trying to escape across the Finnish border.

Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991. His departure was elegant, and sad. He bequeathed the Kremlin, and Russia, with evident reluctance to a man he neither trusted nor liked. Yeltsin, true to form, did himself no favours on his big day. Gorbachev and his staff had to wait around for several hours before Yeltsin was found. The strain of his imminent new responsibilities had, it was said, driven him to seek out his usual solace.

In the Russia of those tense post-Soviet days and weeks, however, it was Yeltsin's strengths, not his weaknesses, that prevailed. That the West's elaborate precautions, whether for refugees, civil war or famine, were mostly unnecessary is in large part because Yeltsin was embraced by Russians as the father of their newly revived Russian state. There was a special bond that linked Yeltsin and "his" Russia. He and they spoke a common language, they had common priorities; this bombastic, bear-like leader suited his people and the times.

That relationship was to sour. Yeltsin won re-election in 1996 against the odds, and largely thanks to a media campaign that was expensive in every sense of the word. His health was failing, although his multiple heart by-pass eventually gave him a second lease on life. To the despair of his diplomats, he was unreliable abroad. Russians might have laughed with the rest of us, but they felt embarrassed that the West so easily forgave his drunken antics, as if this was only to be expected of a Russian.

Boris Yeltsin will be remembered by most Russians who lived through the Eighties and Nineties, with much affection and, yes, with not a little respect. He was a unique character, a tough Siberian, a Russian through and through, and a leader who obeyed instinct, not design. A man of action, he did not plot and plan. He did not have anything that could be described as a philosophy - either of life or of Russia's destiny. Nor was he a dissident as the term is generally understood. He did not start out as an opponent of the Soviet regime; he ended up in opposition as a frustrated regional leader who chafed at the rigidities that prevented what he saw as common-sense reforms. And in truth his legacy was mixed. He presided over enormous freedom, but also over chaos, crime and economic collapse.

Yeltsin's years in power have been assessed and reassessed several times already. But there is a risk now, in the light of what many see as the retreat from individual freedoms under Vladimir Putin, that Yeltsin will be remembered for the wrong things and in the wrong way. Contrary to the myth that some have cultivated, he was not a democrat as most people would understand the word, nor was he a principled proponent of free speech or the free market. Nor, though, was he the drunken exhibitionist of the televised clips that were aired time and again last night.

He was a man of the heart, not the head. When he came to power, he did what he thought was good for Russia. And in the crucial decisions - on personal freedoms, for instance - he was more often right than wrong. Having slain the dragon of Soviet communism, his next great merit was to have left an enervated Russia largely to its own devices. How much of a choice he actually had in those extraordinary and volatile years will be for the next generation to judge. But I doubt that I was the only one to have raised a glass in fond memory last night.

Mikhail Gorbachev, FORMER SOVIET PRESIDENT

"I express the very deepest condolences to the family of the deceased, on whose shoulders rest major events for the good of the country and serious mistakes. A tragic fate."

Vladimir Putin, RUSSIAN PRESIDENT

"The President today phoned Naina Yeltsin and expressed the deepest condolences to her and those close to the first president of Russia," a Kremlin spokesman said.

Tony Blair, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER

"Former president Yeltsin was a remarkable man who saw the need for democratic and economic reform and in defending it played a vital role at a crucial time in Russia's history."

Boris Berezovsky, EXILED RUSSIAN MULTIMILLIONAIRE

"Russia has a lost a brilliant reformer. No one has done as much for Russia as Yeltsin. He was unique and absolutely Russian in his soul, in his impulsiveness and in his intellect."

Baroness Thatcher, FORMER TORY PM

"Without Boris Yeltsin, Russia would have remained in the grip of Communism and the Baltic states would not be free. He deserves to be honoured as a patriot and liberator."

George Bush, US PRESIDENT

"President Yeltsin was a historic figure who served during a period of momentous change. He played a key role as the Soviet Union dissolved, helped lay the foundations of freedom in Russia."

Angela Merkel, GERMAN CHANCELLOR

"Boris Yeltsin was a large personality in Russian and international politics, a courageous fighter for democracy and freedom and a true friend of Germany."

Chechen separatists, CHECHEN SEPARATIST WEBSITE

"We would like to remind people that the government of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria included Yeltsin in its list of war criminals. He is wanted for crimes against humanity."