The man credited with smashing the communist system also impoverished his people by his handling of the transition to capitalism.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin who died yesterday aged 76 was among the most controversial of world political leaders. He was seen by his supporters as the man who smashed Russia's communist system and bravely fought for democracy against the coup plotters of August 1991 and a rebellious parliament in 1993.
Critics take a different view. To them he was no democrat but a power-grabbing autocrat schooled as a Communist Party boss and member of the Politburo; a president so prone to debauchery that he embarrassed his country consistently on the international stage, and a leader who oversaw Russia's economic collapse as well as two brutal wars in Chechnya. There have also been strong allegations of corruption in his immediate entourage and family.
Born in the remote village of Butka in the Sverdlovsk region of the Urals, Yeltsin graduated as a civil engineer in 1950 and went on to make a career in the local communist party, eventually becoming city boss in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in 1976. His drive and success, particularly in providing housing, attracted nationwide attention. He was also responsible for the demolition of Ipatiev House in Sverdlovsk to prevent it becoming a monarchist symbol. Tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed in the house in 1918.
At the invitation of Mikhail Gorbachev he moved to Moscow where he became a head of the construction department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a member of the Supreme Soviet and later a member of the Politburo. Differences with President Gorbachev over the pace of reform saw him removed from the Politburo and instead he advanced through the power structures of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR), the largest constituent republic of the USSR.
During the crisis over the Baltics in January 1991, when Soviet forces seized the television headquarters in Lithuania in support of a mysterious Committee of National Salvation which wanted to overthrow the elected government, Yeltsin rushed to the area to show solidarity with the independence movements. He called on Soviet troops not to obey illegal orders. It was a bold move which helped to split the Soviet establishment and prevent the coup attempts going further. Gorbachev, meanwhile, kept silent for 10 days, apparently unwilling to confront the hardliners in the KGB and the military.
The crisis led many radical democrats to conclude that Gorbachev was an obstacle to change. Yeltsin took the same view, calling publicly for Gorbachev's resignation in February 1991. Meanwhile, he strengthened his own power base by persuading a majority of deputies in parliament to amend the constitution and establish an executive presidency for Russia, to be chosen by direct national ballot. Yeltsin won the election handsomely.
The hardliners, led by the head of the KGB, the defence minister and the interior minister, took Gorbachev hostage while he was on holiday in the Crimea two months later. They set up an emergency junta to run the country with the aim of reversing the reforms, reimposing central rule and reversing the republic's drive to independence.
As elected president, Yeltsin was in an unparalleled position to oppose them. With enormous energy and flair he led the resistance, calling on ordinary people to defend the White House, the seat of the Russian parliament. The image of him standing on a tank and inviting the army to break from the coup was the high point of his career. Faced with two potential leaders, the army split, throwing their weight behind the elected president rather than an unconstitutional junta.
The coup hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union and spurred Yeltsin to start his economic reforms. Increasingly, he ignored Soviet law, as he decreed the suspension of the Communist Party and withheld Russian taxes from the central budget. In December he met the leaders of Byelorussia and Ukraine at a hunting lodge in a forest near the Polish border, where they formally announced the death of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev accepted he was finished, and resigned on December 25th.
Yeltsin was now the supreme master of Russia. He agreed to plans by his radical economic advisers for an end to price subsidies to spur the economy towards the market. "Everyone will find life harder for approximately six months, then prices will fall," he told parliament. It was an unfortunate prediction, as inflation rose in 1993 by 2,000 per cent. Millions of Russians saw their savings wiped out. Others found themselves forced to reduce their diet because of the high prices of food. For the next two years the botched economic reform became a battleground between Yeltsin and the parliament.
Initially extremely popular, Yeltsin's hold over Russia's electorate dwindled as the economy weakened, Russia's position as a major power evaporated and average living standards declined. Increasingly authoritarian in his views, the list of close associates fired from their jobs when it became politically expedient is too long to be given here.
Some of his associates, notably vice-president Alexander Rutskoi and parliament speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, became bitter enemies and were in the parliament building when Yeltsin sent in tanks to shell its rebellious members in October 1993. A general election in December of that year returned a Duma which was even more anti-Yeltsin than the demolished parliament but a referendum giving unprecedented powers to the president was passed.
Under the new constitution Yeltsin virtually ruled by decree and his behaviour became more and more eccentric. He spontaneously conducted a military band in Berlin, while simultaneously singing a tune different from the one the band was playing; while under the influence of drink he failed to leave his aircraft at Shannon for a scheduled meeting with then taoiseach Albert Reynolds. Back in Moscow he said: "I feel excellent. I can tell you honestly, I just overslept."
World leaders beat a path to the door of his Kremlin office only to find he was "not at home". Not surprisingly, his health began to fail and in the summer of 1996 he suffered a major heart attack just a week before the second round of the presidential election in which he defeated the communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov. An official Kremlin statement announced he had a sore throat. His absence from meetings was concealed by the supine Russian media.
Yet, though full of bluster, he revealed more of his personal life and private doubts than any previous Russian leader had.
"The debilitating bouts of depression, the grave second thoughts, the insomnia and headaches in the middle of the night, the tears and despair . . . the hurt from people close to me who did not support me at the last minute, who didn't hold up, who deceived me - I have had to bear all of this," he wrote in his 1994 memoir, The Struggle For Russia.
Later in 1996 Yeltsin underwent a quintuple heart-bypass operation and since then his health has been fragile. Nevertheless he continued to rebound from periods of bad health and continued to keep his colleagues on their toes by ensuring that their futures were less than secure. In the space of just over a year Viktor Chernomyrdin, Sergei Kiriyenko, Yevgeny Primakov and Sergei Stepashin lost their jobs as prime minister.
Others such as Gen Alexander Korzhakov found themselves suddenly excluded from the Yeltsin inner circle in which they had found themselves ever since the coup of 1991. Gen Korzhakov, a former KGB officer who headed the corps of presidential guards, gained revenge in print at every available opportunity since then.
Increasingly Yeltsin's entourage included people of unsavoury and sinister reputation. The most prominent of these has been multimillionaire Boris Berezovsky who has been described as Russia's modern Rasputin. Berezovsky, who made a fortune from the assets sell-off and was granted political asylum in Britain after fleeing the current Kremlin regime, said in a statement yesterday: "I have lost my mentor and Russia has lost the greatest reformer in all its history."
Allegations of massive corruption in the Kremlin were countered by the dismissal of the general prosecutor, Yuri Skuratov. When prime minister Primakov appeared to back Skuratov's line of investigation, he too was dismissed.
Reports of payments to Yeltsin and his daughters by a Swiss company which had won a series of Kremlin contracts have not been satisfactorily rebutted. At the end of his career instability in Russia had reached the stage where capital flight was estimated to have reached US$2.9 billion a month. In the course of the Yeltsin era, per capita income fell about 75 per cent, and the nation's population fell by more than 2 million, due largely to the steep decline in public health.
While the highlight of his career was his resistance to the attempted coup in 1991, many would argue that this was more than outweighed by the economic collapse of 1998 and the first Chechen war which raged from 1994 to 1996 and which cost the lives of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. Yeltsin frequently made announcements that the war had ended when it had not. Finally, he drafted in Gen Alexander Lebed to end the conflict. The general did so and was then ditched by Yeltsin when it was expedient to do so.
History is unlikely to look kindly on Yeltsin's period in office. His anti-communism was far from democratic and his management of the economic transition to capitalism succeeded in impoverishing his people while enormously enriching a few oligarchs. And he presided, after all, over the violent deaths of more of his fellow citizens than did any other Kremlin leader since Stalin.