Ex-Russian leader Yeltsin dies
Guided nation through end of USSR, toward democracy
Former president Boris N. Yeltsin, who oversaw the dissolution of the Soviet Union and led Russia on its turbulent post-communist odyssey, died yesterday at 76, the Kremlin announced. The Interfax news agency said he died of heart failure at a Moscow hospital.
Mr. Yeltsin, who was Russia's first freely elected leader, profoundly altered the political and economic landscape of the country during his tenure of just under nine years. The mercurial, bear-like leader had a flair for the dramatic and a talent for keeping both allies and enemies off balance.
In a stroke of political genius and courage, he stood atop a tank outside the Russian parliament building in August 1991 and faced down the might of the Soviet police state. He turned the nation that symbolized totalitarian rule in the 20th century toward democracy and free markets.
But he was unable, or unwilling, to prevent the looting of state industry as it shifted into private hands. A series of unpopular and abrupt economic programs he supported, including so-called shock therapy, cast millions of Russians into poverty.
And by sending tanks against Parliament in 1993, and to the breakaway republic of Chechnya a year later, he set in motion the forces that ultimately would undermine many of the democratic freedoms he made possible by staring down communism.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, summed up the complexity of Mr. Yeltsin's legacy shortly after the death was announced. He referred to Mr. Yeltsin as one "on whose shoulders are both great deeds for the country and serious errors," according to Interfax.
Sarah E. Mendelson, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that while many in the West may view Mr. Yeltsin in a favorable light, Russians are likely to see him differently.
"Russians look at the era as chaotic and humiliating, and at Yeltsin as a poodle for the West," Mendelson said. "While one can understand that view, it's also true that among [Russian] society there was a sense of optimism and a freedom from fear that just does not exist today."
Born in 1931 in the Urals region of Sverdlovsk, Mr. Yeltsin became an engineer in the construction trade. In 1961, at the height of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist political thaw, Mr. Yeltsin became a member of the Communist Party and rose quickly through the ranks. By 1976, he headed the Sverdlovsk regional branch of the Communist Party, a position similar to governor in the United States.
There, he gained the reputation of a reformer, which eventually caught the attention in 1985 of Gorbachev, then the newly appointed Soviet leader.
With Gorbachev as his mentor, Mr. Yeltsin rose to become first secretary of Moscow's Communist Party organization, a job that included membership in the Politburo, the Soviet Union's de facto ruling body. It was as a Politburo member in 1987 that Mr. Yeltsin, spurred by Gorbachev's calls for perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openess), began a vocal campaign against corruption and abuse of privilege among party elites.
Party hard-liners quickly moved to oust Mr. Yeltsin from the Politburo and have him removed to an obscure job running construction in Sverdlovsk. That should have been the end of Mr. Yeltsin's career.
But in the first of what would be many comebacks, Mr. Yeltsin was soon back in the capital, elected in a landslide a member of the first Soviet parliament in which voters were allowed to choose among candidates. There, the increasingly popular Mr. Yeltsin began a two-year campaign that saw him quit the Communist Party and eventually rise to become Gorbachev's main rival as the democratically elected leader of the Russian republic.
The attempt of hard-line Communists to oust Gorbachev in August 1991 gave Mr. Yeltsin the chance he was waiting for; within a few months after he stood on the tank, Gorbachev was ousted from power and Mr. Yeltsin took office in the Kremlin.
At first, the West was slow to take to Mr. Yeltsin, whose reputation as a heavy drinker and penchant for breaches of protocol contrasted with the urbane, staid Gorbachev. But from 1992 on, he enjoyed unprecedented support in the West for a Kremlin chief, despite moves that would have brought harsh protests during the Cold War.
Two years after his famous stand against a hard-line coup attempt in August 1991, tanks again rumbled to the Russian parliament building in October 1993, this time under Mr. Yeltsin's orders to drive out lawmakers who refused to obey his illegal order to disband.
More than 140 people died in the street fighting that ensued. Although Mr. Yeltsin emerged triumphant, democracy in Russia was never the same.
The following year, in 1994, Mr. Yeltsin sent his army into Chechnya, a campaign that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. A defeated and humiliated Russian army withdrew at the end of 1996, although Russian troops resumed fighting in the breakaway region in 1999.
When his presidency was threatened again, by a Communist challenger in 1996 presidential elections, and by heart disease, Western leaders voiced strong support for Mr. Yeltsin and backed his government with billions of dollars of economic aid. They were led by President Clinton, who once compared Mr. Yeltsin's efforts in Chechnya to what Abraham Lincoln did for the United States during the Civil War.
From the West's point of view, Mr. Yeltsin represented the best chance Russia had for a democratic future. Indeed, under his leadership, Russia pursued membership or partnership with the clubs that the West had created during the Cold War with the intent of isolating Moscow: NATO, the European Union, and the Group of Seven industrial powers.
Mr. Yeltsin pursued close personal relationships with Western leaders, especially Clinton, whom he always referred to as "My Friend Bill."
At the same time, Mr. Yeltsin frequently peppered his speeches with references to Russia's need to reclaim its role as a great nation, and sent his lieutenants on missions in Iraq, the Balkans, and elsewhere that often confounded US efforts. Western observers often dismissed these episodes as part of Mr. Yeltsin's need to pay lip service to latent Russian nationalism rather than a sign of inconsistent ideology.
Insiders familiar with Mr. Yeltsin's autocratic leadership style knew that ideology had little to do with it.
"Power is his ideology, his friend, his concubine, his mistress, his passion," former Kremlin spokesman Vyacheslav Kostikov said in 1997.
That is one explanation for the failure of Mr. Yeltsin's reforms. Another is that he took little interest in the day-to-day management of his own initiatives.
"Yeltsin is a good revolutionary, but a bad leader," Sergei Markov, a prominent Moscow political analyst, once said . "He knows how to fight, but he doesn't know how to manage his victories."
A third plausible reason for the disappointments of the Yeltsin presidency is the tragic talent Mr. Yeltsin displayed for planting the seeds of his own destruction.
In 1991, wooing the support of Russian regional leaders, he told them to "grab as much sovereignty as you can swallow." These words later came back to haunt Mr. Yeltsin in Chechnya.
His admitted love for alcohol, which once helped solidify the man-of-the-people image that carried him to power, most likely caused some of the erratic public behavior that aroused shame in his countrymen, and probably contributed to his numerous health woes.
A man who once criticized the doddering Kremlin political elite was widely ridiculed in his later years in office for a halting walk, a puffy, pasty complexion, and a slurred way of speaking that led to rumors of more heart trouble, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, alcoholism, or a combination of the four.
"He is an epic figure in a lot of ways, and then he becomes this sort of tragic everyman," said Mendelson, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
But even as Mr. Yeltsin's physical and political weakness brought louder and bolder calls for his removal, no one dared try to dislodge him from the Kremlin by force.
He continued to surprise Russians right up to the end of his presidency: On Dec. 31, 1999, he announced his resignation more than three months before his second term expired. He named Vladimir Putin -- his last prime minister and a former KGB agent -- as his successor. Putin has since rolled back many of Mr. Yeltsin's reforms.
This report includes material from a Globe article on Jan. 1, 2000, on Yeltsin's legacy that was written by Filipov, the newspaper's Moscow bureau chief from 1996-2004. Correspondent Daniel Muse contributed to this report from Boston, and material from the Associated Press was also used. 