Rough-Hewn Father of Russian Democracy

His political career in ruins, Yeltsin was hospitalized that November with heart pains and what he later called a complete physical breakdown.

Wilderness and Return

Though he recovered physically, Yeltsin, at 56, was a political outcast, sidelined at the State Committee for Construction. Miserable, restless and bored, he shuffled paper and gave interviews to Western journalists.

He could not admit defeat. At the 19th Party Conference on June 28, 1988, Yeltsin mounted his boldest challenge yet to Gorbachev and the party. He attacked the leadership's timidity. The country, he said, needed direct elections for top positions; age limits for senior officeholders; greater pluralism; and a comprehensive examination of "the moral health of the leaders of the party and the state."

Gorbachev took Yeltsin's challenge as an affront, but it was also of some use to him. Yeltsin had become a battering ram against the most conservative party leaders, whom Gorbachev dared not assault directly.

Yeltsin declared his candidacy for the new Congress of People's Deputies, the first Soviet legislative body ever chosen in multi-candidate elections. Despite Gorbachev's opposition, Yeltsin won nearly 90 percent of the citywide Moscow vote in March 1989, crushing the party-backed candidate.

Yeltsin was back and unrepentant. The 2,250-member Congress picked him for the Supreme Soviet, a smaller, standing parliament. This time he owed his power not to the party but to an adoring public. The Soviet Union had never seen anything like it.

Time of Turbulence

In September 1989, Yeltsin made his first trip to the United States, an 11-city tour that was a public relations disaster. At the White House he threw a tantrum, insisting that he be given an audience with President George H.W. Bush (he was, briefly). At Johns Hopkins University he appeared to be drunk. Soviet state television played the tape for all to see.

Back in Russia, he showed up soaking wet at a police station outside Moscow, claiming "hooligans" had thrown a bag over his head and pitched him into the river. It was whispered that he had really been drunk or the victim of an extramarital tryst gone wrong. None of it fazed Yeltsin, whose assault on the party's primacy was now at full throttle.

Yeltsin was a founder, along with the dissident Andrei Sakharov, of an opposition faction within the parliament, a Soviet first. In spring 1990, he was elected to the new Russian parliament and again defied the party hierarchy by winning the body's chairmanship despite opposition from Gorbachev. In June, the parliament declared Russia's sovereignty. And in July, Yeltsin stood at a Soviet Communist Party congress, announced he was quitting after nearly 30 years and walked out of the hall without glancing back. The 4,700 delegates sat in stunned silence.

His resignation was graphic proof that the party was fast losing its grip on power. Thousands, then hundreds of thousands, of the party's 18 million members followed suit.

At War With Gorbachev

By 1991, Yeltsin was openly at war with Gorbachev. The Soviet leader, his popularity at home fading, was surrounding himself with hard-liners. In January, when Soviet troops violently crushed a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration in Lithuania, Yeltsin denounced the attack. The following month he called on Gorbachev to resign.

Among other complaints, he accused Gorbachev of trying to maintain the rigid Soviet structure and withholding power from the Russian republic. Having thereby uncorked the nationalist genie, Yeltsin would be revisited by it often during his presidency.