For Russians, a symbol of weakness and loss

HISTORIANS WILL have a hard time deciding on Boris Yeltsin's legacy. For some, especially for those of us living in the West, Yeltsin will be treated as a reformer who helped to transform Russia into a democratic, market economy. For most Russians, however, he will be remembered as the leader on whose watch the Russian gross domestic product fell by 40 percent, parts of the country began to talk of secession and most important, Russia ceased to be a military superpower. These failures on Yeltsin's part explain why a strong man like Vladimir Putin, who is reversing most of the Yeltsin reforms, is so popular today.

Yeltsin was invited to Moscow by Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid- 1980s to help Gorbachev in his effort to soften some of the more oppressive aspects of the communist system. Yeltsin had been a well-regarded party secretary (governor) of Sverdlosk, a Pittsburgh-type industrial center in Siberia. Soon thereafter, Yeltsin was made the mayor of Moscow and he set off on a muckraking effort to expose the corrupt ways in which his long-entrenched predecessors had run the capital city. This made him a folk hero of sorts, so much so that Yeltsin felt bold enough to announce his resignation from the Communist Party, something that would have been an unthinkable act only five years earlier.

As he began more and more to challenge the status quo, the public mobilized around him. Building on this, Yeltsin decided to run for the Supreme Soviet (the country's parliament) of the Russian Republic and soon became its chairman, in effect the president of the Russian Republic. Anticipating that the USSR and its 15 diverse republics would not endure, Yeltsin focused his energies on the Russian Republic, much to the annoyance of Gorbachev who continued to preside as president of the USSR.

The following year Yeltsin ran for president in the first nationwide popular election in Russian history. His victory gave Yeltsin a legitimacy that Gorbachev, who never ran in such a public way, never had. That also helps to explain why Yeltsin with his popular mandate was one of the few who could dare stand up to the hard-liners in the KGB, Communist Party, and the military when they attempted to take over the country in their coup of August 1991.

Yeltsin was a true hero and the hope was that he would use this momentum to further the move toward democracy and a market system that Gorbachev had just begun. I was in Moscow at the time of the coup attempt and when Yeltsin put down the coup, the public was thrilled and proud of themselves in a way I had never sensed in Moscow before or since. The trouble was that Yeltsin stood by as others, including some American advisers, allowed some of Russia's most prized assets to be turned over to a very few undeserving individuals. Overnight these new owners, who came to be called oligarchs, became billionaires. That explains why Moscow today has more billionaires than New York City. That in itself would not be a problem except that almost none of these Russians were self-made entrepreneurs. Instead almost all of their wealth is due to the fact that they were allowed to take over ownership of what had been the state's most valuable resources. This created enormous resentment within the public at large, particularly because at the same time, the economy collapsed, leaving over one third of the population below the poverty line. All this was accompanied by a financial meltdown in August 1998 when most of the country's major banks were forced to close their doors, the ruble lost its value, and Russia was forced to default on its debt.

But to his credit, even though the press was hard on him, Yeltsin supported freedom of the press and political diversity. He also moved to curb the powers of the KGB, going so far as to turn over the secret plans showing where bugs had been planted in the new US Embassy in Moscow.

While much of this will leave Yeltsin with a legacy that will be regarded positively in the outside world, Yeltsin's legacy within Russia is unlikely to be so kind. He will be thought of as someone who while initially a hero, stood by, often indisposed because he was sick, drunk or in a state of depression, while the country lost its bearings. If anything, he became too permissive and allowed the country to become too disorderly, something anathema to most Russians who strongly crave order. In the process, the weakened economy in turn necessitated a cutback in military expenditures so that Russia lost its standing as a military superpower. Unfair as it may be, Russian historians will probably treat Yeltsin as an unfortunate figure, a failure. But for those of us in the West, he will always be a hero, at least in those early years.

Marshall I. Goldman is professor emeritus at Wellesley College and author of the forthcoming book, "Putin, Petroleum, Politics and Patronage."