Rough-Hewn Father of Russian Democracy

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Boris Yeltsin was once asked to name his greatest goal as president. He answered that more than anything, he wanted tranquillity for Russia.

Ultimately, it eluded him. But the burly Siberian who was Russia's first freely elected leader did more than anyone to raze the rotting communist superstructure of the former Soviet Union and build from its ruins the framework of a newly democratic and capitalist country.

Yeltsin died Monday at 76, a Kremlin official announced. The Interfax news agency quoted an unidentified medical source as saying that he died of heart failure.

Like Peter the Great, the 18th-century czar he once mentioned as his model, Yeltsin was no towering democrat. In launching a war against the breakaway southern region of Chechnya in 1994, he was responsible for the violent deaths of more Russian citizens than any Kremlin leader since Joseph Stalin. As president, he tolerated -- even authorized -- the excesses of a system in some ways as corrupt and morally adrift as the one it replaced.

Yet like the autocratic Peter, Yeltsin took hold of a stultifying, hermetically closed country and flung open its doors to fresh ideas, methods and influences.

His liberating reforms went radically beyond those attempted by his Kremlin predecessor and rival, Mikhail Gorbachev, and in the 1990s gave rise to a society more free, more diverse, more energized, more entrepreneurial -- and more chaotic -- than any in Russian history. Yeltsin broke the state's chokehold on prices and trade. He took a vast treasure of state-owned factories, mines and oil fields and delivered them into private hands, generating anger, envy and, for a few, enormous profits.

As the country's first democratically elected president, he stood as a guarantor of political freedoms. Millions of Russians went abroad for the first time, voted in elections and learned to rely on themselves rather than the state. But they were disappointed when democracy did not bring prosperity. The early reforms of the 1990s were painful for the elderly, the infirm and those unable to adapt rapidly to the staggering changes. Death rates, suicides, alcoholism, joblessness, prices and crime soared. Birth rates, pensions, health-care standards, factory output and state support for kindergartens and social welfare programs fell dizzyingly.

Tormented by long bouts of ill health, prone to drinking, often isolated, Yeltsin proved incapable of building all of the new institutions Russia needed. He and the reformers he brought to power had been zealous in their rush to destroy Soviet power, but they proved incapable of shaping what followed. Although he instinctively understood freedom, Yeltsin did not create the key element in a democracy, the strong civil society that connects rulers and ruled through institutions such as the press, free associations and the church.

His government also failed to establish the rule of law. Russia was racked by violence, including car bombings and contract assassinations that claimed the lives of criminals, bankers, journalists and politicians. Yeltsin's policies gave rise to a new generation of tycoons, known as oligarchs, who supported his 1996 reelection bid after he turned over shares of the state's most valuable companies to them in exchange for loans.

Yeltsin resigned from the presidency in a dramatic New Year's Eve address in 1999, choosing as his successor Vladimir Putin, an obscure former KGB official. Putin was elected president the following March and has reversed many of the democratic gains of the Yeltsin years, encountering little resistance from Russians. Where Yeltsin encouraged unruly competition in business and politics, Putin has imposed a new order from the top down.

Yeltsin was crass, imperious, clownish and confrontational, a man with a titanic ego and an astounding flair for political theater. He demanded the lead role in every drama in his dramatic life--from his schoolboy days in a bleak town in the Urals to his crowning moment when he scrambled atop a T-72 tank and faced down hard-line Communists attempting a coup in 1991.

"If a game is easy, one cannot see my best performance," he said in a 1993 interview. "But if a game is tense, I can work magic."

Youth in the Urals

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born, reared and launched on his career in Sverdlovsk province, a heavily industrial region in the Ural Mountains, 850 miles east of Moscow. He was born Feb. 1, 1931, in the village of Butka, the first of Nikolai and Klavdia Yeltsin's three children. His early youth was harsh and impoverished, in many ways typical of the Soviet Union of the 1930s, when farmers were being forced into collectives and Stalin's purges touched even the remotest villages.

Yeltsin's grandfather, a blacksmith and church elder, was branded a kulak, or wealthy peasant, and exiled in 1931 to the remote north, where he died after four months. Yeltsin's father, a down-on-his-luck construction worker with a fourth-grade education, was arrested when his eldest son was 3. He spent three years in a prison camp and never spoke about it with his son, whom he beat with a strap. Yeltsin's mother, a seamstress, was warm and loving, and her firstborn was attached to her all his life.

In recollections of his primary school days, Yeltsin painted himself as a little "hooligan" who went out of his way to find trouble. During World War II, he broke into an ammunition dump, stole two hand grenades and tried to break one open with a hammer. The grenade exploded, blowing off two fingers of his left hand.

Tall, broad-shouldered and handsome, Yeltsin became a strong volleyball player. In sports, at school, around the family table, he insisted on being the leader. He graduated from Ural Polytechnic Institute in 1955 -- the first member of his family to go to college -- and married a classmate, Anastasia Girina, known as Naina.

After graduation, he worked as a carpenter, a bricklayer, a concrete maker, a dump-truck driver, a crane operator, a woodworker, a glazier, a plasterer, a painter and a construction foreman. In 1965, he became director of a large factory that manufactured prefabricated houses. To his workers, he was a tough boss who insisted that deadlines be met and brooked no excuses.

In 1976, he became first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Communist Party committee, a post he held for nearly 10 years. By now Yeltsin and Naina had two daughters, but by his own account, home and family came second for him. He regarded them as a source of warmth and support but was mostly absorbed with work and, later, politics.

Summoned to Moscow

As a top party official in Sverdlovsk, Yeltsin got to know many of his counterparts around the Soviet Union, including Gorbachev, the party chief of Stavropol province in southwestern Russia. A month after becoming general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, Gorbachev summoned Yeltsin to Moscow as part of a campaign to shake up the party leadership and soon made him Moscow party boss.

From December 1985 to November 1987, Yeltsin shattered the special code of fuzzy language and aloofness that guided Soviet officialdom. He denounced the special stores, dachas and medical services enjoyed by party elites. He rode the buses and subways. He staged a surprise inspection of a state meat store where workers were skimming the best cuts for big shots.

If Moscow intellectuals or Western Sovietologists viewed him as a bit of a rube, most Russians saw him as a muzhik -- a macho peasant, a regular guy. At first, they loved it.

Breaking With the Politburo

Gorbachev and the rest of the Soviet leadership were less charmed. Yeltsin had shaken the status quo. His grass-roots appeal frightened the staid men of the Politburo. Opposites in style, bearing and vision, and rivals for the affections of their countrymen, Yeltsin and Gorbachev grew to loathe each other. Yeltsin saw the Soviet leader as a windbag. To Gorbachev, the man from Sverdlovsk was an uncouth media hound.

In late 1987, Yeltsin resigned as a nonvoting Politburo member and slammed the party hierarchy for dragging its feet on perestroika, or restructuring. In an astonishing attack on Gorbachev, he warned that a "cult of personality" was forming around the Soviet leader.

Retribution was swift and brutal. In a three-hour verbal barrage, 23 of Yeltsin's colleagues, including several reformers he had counted as allies, turned on him, accusing him of grandstanding, slander, sowing panic and excessive ambition. Gorbachev had the last word: "It's amazing how one could develop such an oversize ego, such conceit, to set one's ambition above party interests -- above our cause! . . . And now, Comrade Yeltsin, you got what you deserved."

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.

On June 12, 1991, he was chosen as Russia's first elected president, collecting 57.4 percent of the vote in a field of six candidates. He immediately flew to Washington, where his reception -- and performance -- at the White House were far more impressive than two years earlier.

At his July inauguration, in a ceremony nearly devoid of Soviet trappings, Yeltsin declared that Russia -- with three-quarters of the Soviet Union's territory and more than half its population -- was "rising from its knees." He vowed to make the individual, not the state, "the measure of all things."

The August Coup

The hard-line Communists struck six weeks later. Gorbachev's most reactionary aides, including the Soviet prime minister, defense minister and KGB chief, attempted a coup against him.

As the country and the world held their breath, Yeltsin raced to the headquarters of the Russian parliament to rally opposition to the coup. On Aug. 19, just after noon, he clambered on top of tank No. 110 of the Taman Guards, creating one of the indelible heroic images of the 20th century.

He spoke at first with no microphone. "Citizens of Russia," he began in his booming voice. "The legally elected president of the country has been removed from power. . . . We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup d'etat."

On the radio, he appealed to the soldiers who were poised to attack. "You can erect a throne on bayonets, but you cannot sit on it for long," he said. "The days of the conspirators are numbered."

For three days, Yeltsin barely slept. When the coup collapsed of the plotters' own incompetence, he was a hero. Gorbachev, eclipsed by his rival, was a spent force. Yeltsin introduced a new Russian flag: a red, white and blue tricolor first used by Peter the Great.

A Troubled Presidency

On Dec. 8, 1991, Yeltsin and the leaders of the other Soviet Slavic republics, Ukraine and Byelorussia (now Belarus), signed a treaty that effectively rendered the Soviet Union extinct, leaving 15 newly independent states, including Yeltsin's Russia. Twenty-five million ethnic Russians found themselves stranded outside Russia's borders.

The euphoria that followed the failed August coup yielded to deep fears about the economy. Russians were dealt a harsh blow at the New Year when Yeltsin's new team of bright, young, Western-oriented economists freed most prices from the command system that had set them for decades. Although stores' shelves filled up and long lines for scarce products disappeared, hyperinflation seized the country.

Yeltsin's next reform was in many ways his most profound -- privatizing the colossal industrial archipelago of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin distributed 144 million privatization vouchers to the people. "We need millions of owners, not hundreds of millionaires," he declared. But instead he got the millionaires. Scooping up the state's riches, they made Moscow a boom town full of construction projects, flashy cars and expensive casinos, clubs and restaurants.

Those left behind seethed with anger. Millions of workers at state-owned factories and enterprises were not receiving their paltry pay, or receiving it months late. Government corruption and protection rackets flourished in nearly every major city. The government was hooked on foreign loans. Reforms bogged down. Some allies who had stood with Yeltsin during the August coup now broke with him.

Yeltsin tried to defuse the mounting tension but ultimately parliament rebelled. He dissolved it and called new elections. Many of the lawmakers refused to leave, and their hard-line allies staged defiant rallies. On Oct. 3, 1993, they rampaged through Moscow's streets, attacking police and the main state television station. Yeltsin, after a night of cajoling his generals, called out the army. The next day, tanks shelled the parliament into submission.

In 1996, Yeltsin's standing in the polls was at rock bottom when he rallied for a reelection campaign against the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov. Yeltsin won, and soon thereafter underwent major heart surgery. The next year came a boom in the economy, but in 1998 the ruble crashed and the government defaulted on its debts, an economic crisis that only deepened disenchantment.

In the later years of his presidency, Yeltsin grew isolated and remote, like the party elders he had so harshly criticized. Fewer and fewer Russians paid attention. "Many of our hopes have not come true," he said in his final televised address, asking the Russian people to forgive him. "What we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully difficult."