The first time I saw Boris Yeltsin I was unable to move. It was in a university hall in Moscow’s Gertsen Street in 1988.
Yeltsin was a non-figure, sacked and ostracised by the Communist Party leadership for insubordination, but so many people had crushed into the room to hear him that I literally could not take my notebook from my pocket. A student fainted in the heat and was passed bodily over my head; another beside me passed out but was held up by the press of bodies.
It was the first time that the burly populist had emerged in public as a rallying figure for the growing opposition to Soviet rule. In the weeks and months that followed, Russians began wearing Yeltsin badges at street demonstrations.
Yeltsin was an unlikely counter-revolutionary leader. After the Gertsen St rally I went to Sverdlovsk, where he had been Communist Party chief, to inquire about his background, and found that he had been a bit of a hard-liner. People in the Ukranian city took me to see the ruins of the house where the Tzar’s family had been murdered by Bolshevik soldiers. Yeltsin had ordered its bulldozing at the dead of night in 1977 to prevent it becoming a shrine. He spent public funds building a grand, empty edifice for the party known to locals as the “White Tooth”.
Mikhail Gorbachev had promoted Yeltsin to the ruling Politburo in 1985 and made him Moscow party chief, but they soon fell out. He infuriated the Soviet leader by criticising his wife Raisa for interfering in state decisions and castigating him over the slow pace of reform, and was fired. It was the low point of his career, and he attempted suicide.
But as a populist, Yeltsin sensed that Communist authority was waning in the face of public discontent over shortages and the widening economic chasm between the Soviet Union and the Western world. State attempts to discredit him only seemed to produce ‘Yeltsinites’ on the streets – ordinary people who agreed with his criticisms, which had leaked to the increasingly open media.
When Gorbachev held elections for a Congress of Deputies as an experiment in democracy in 1989, Yeltsin easily won Moscow and became leader of a radical opposition called the Interregional Group of Deputies.
It was with the stature that this gave him that I believe Yeltsin saved the Soviet Union from a possible civil war, many months before the attempted coup which made him famous.
Few remember the incident now. The Baltic states had become rebellious, setting up national fronts to agitate for independence. Conservative forces in the KGB and the Interior Ministry were on the brink of staging a bloody event in Estonia, but it was thwarted when Yeltsin flew to the Estonian capital Tallinn, at some risk to himself, to lend his physical presence to the pro-reform movement there. By this stage he had won popular support in the military rank and file in Russia, and the plotters held back.
Much better known is Yeltsin’s role when right-wing forces staged their abortive coup in August 1991. Yeltsin, elected two months earlier as president of the Russian Republic, stood on a tank outside the White House where the parliament sat, and successfully defied the Cold War generals.
It is impossible to underestimate the historic importance of this act. He understood how to use his authority and popularity to prevent the country lurching backwards – though to be honest the inebriated leader of the coup, Gennady Yanayev, was such a derisory figure it is difficult to see how he could have restored communist hegemony.
Yeltsin’s defiance, followed by his speedy and peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union, is an important part of his legacy. If history had stopped then he would be forever a heroic figure and we would all be Yeltsinites. But as we know, his political career as Russian leader was characterised by serious misjudgements.
Having left Russia in 1991 I watched from afar with increasing dismay how he mishandled the economic reforms with his shock therapy in 1992 – egged on by his new friends in Washington. His privatisation programme allowed a few Russians to acquire the country’s assets and become multi-billionaires, but impoverished millions of state employees and pensioners. Such was the level of public discontent that members of the new parliament, the Duma, voted to impeach him in 1993. In 1994 he launched a disastrous war against Chech-nya. And ordinary Russians became embarrassed by his public drunkenness. Yeltsin was only re-elected president in 1996 with the help of those he had enriched. He stood down, incapable of governing, in December 1999. When he did, he handed over power to the young former KGB colonel he had appointed as head of the new secret police, the FSB. Now Boris Yeltsin’s legacy must include the fact that he gave us, Russia and the world, Mr Vladimir Putin.
Conor O’Clery was Moscow correspondent for the Irish Times from 1987 to 1991
