THE BOLSHEVIK WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD : Boris Yeltsin Staved Off the Coup and Toppled the Communists. But Is He a True Democrat or a New Kind of Demagogue?

AS MIKHAIL S. GORBACHEV, LOOKING A LITTLE WAN FROM HIS HOUSE arrest, approached the lectern of the Russian Federation Parliament Hall, the imposing, presiding figure urged his colleagues to keep quiet. But Boris Yeltsin’s show of courtesy soon evaporated as he barked instructions and jabbed his index finger in Gorbachev’s face. Interrupting Gorbachev, Yeltsin insisted that he read aloud the minutes of the cabinet meeting at which his own ministers had plotted his demise. As the session continued, Yeltsin issued more orders, flashing signs of his superiority.

When Gorbachev hesitated a moment before validating all of Yeltsin’s actions during the emergency, the white-haired president boomed out, “This is serious.” Gorbachev balked briefly in announcing a new appointment, and Yeltsin explained who the man was. “I am supplementing because Mikhail Sergeyevich simply forgets at times,” he snapped. After Gorbachev complained, Yeltsin lectured, with an air of smugness, “Don’t get upset now.” And then, in the climactic moment of this electric political theater, Yeltsin proclaimed, “Comrades, as a diversion, allow me to sign a decree halting the activity of the Russian Communist Party.”

A short flourish of Yeltsin’s pen, and an ukaz was in force, proclaiming a new national era. So it became manifestly, brutally clear that the era of Gorbachev as the Orson Welles of Soviet perestroika --writing the script, directing and playing the leading part--was over.

When Yeltsin started to order Gorbachev around at that meeting of the Russian Parliament, two days after the collapse of the August coup, the scene was rich in historical irony. Less than four years earlier, Yeltsin had suffered far worse treatment at Gorbachev’s hands. It was Gorbachev who had orchestrated his rival’s public condemnation in 1987, in an echo of the Stalinist show trials, and spurred Yeltsin to resign from the Politburo. It was Gorbachev who had described Yeltsin as a “political illiterate.” It was Gorbachev who had summoned Yeltsin from his hospital bed, pumped full of medication, for a second round of public condemnation by the Moscow party committee in which he was stripped of his post as party first secretary of the city.

Now Yeltsin, the supposed “political corpse,” had, by his courageous defiance of the putsch , rescued Gorbachev from oblivion. The chance to give Gorbachev a small taste of the his own medicine must have been irresistible. By comparison with what Yeltsin had gone through, the treatment he meted out to Gorbachev, though it reportedly shocked President Bush and renewed his doubts about Yeltsin, was relatively mild.

Since that moment, Yeltsin has moved fast--too fast for some--to reinforce his power. A mountain of decrees from the Russian president asserted his authority over large areas of the Soviet bureaucracy, effectively crippled by the involvement of virtually all its leading organs in the coup. He declared that he was commander in chief of all troops on Russian soil. He decreed all party property and real estate to be state property. He seized control of newspapers and banned activities by the nation’s big planning agencies. By decree, he recognized the independence of the Baltics. And he subordinated the Russian Councils of Ministers to himself, in yet another decree. Within days, Gorbachev had been forced to shut down the Communist Party, hand over what was left of his government to a caretaker committee and agree to a new transitional power structure dominated by the republics.

For the ascendant Russian Federation president, the real bargaining from now on would not be with Gorbachev but with the other republican leaders. Yeltsin’s biggest problem was that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, instead of being transformed into a loose confederation that would suit the interests of the Russian Federation, was threatening to disappear altogether as one republic after another declared independence.

Yeltsin’s post-coup attack on the old Communist-dominated power structure and his suspension of some newspapers because of his suspicions that they had supported the coup led some to question his democratic credentials. “Yeltsin appears to want to take complete control,” complained Marxist historian and longtime dissident Roy Medvedev. “He is like Bonaparte; there is no room for anyone else.” In fact, some newspapers were quickly reopened, Yeltsin beat a tactical retreat from his attempted takeover of some institutions, such as the State Bank, and Russian liberals moved to clearly define the executive’s authority.

More troubling to some was his attempt to halt the headlong flight to total independence by other republics, by warning them that Russia might insist on revising borders if they refused to join even a watered-down union. In this febrile atmosphere, Yeltsin quickly had to dispatch emissaries to Kiev to mend fences with the Ukrainian leadership, which was warning of a return to a “czarist empire” by Yeltsin and the Russians.

The collapse of the last European multinational empire is probably unstoppable, though it may be prolonged through some kind of unstable transitional period. Whatever the final outcome, Yeltsin’s role as leader of Russia, by far the biggest of the republics, will be dominant. In trying to preserve some kind of economic community and security alliance from the wreckage of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev and Yeltsin are acting as partners. But Gorbachev, as president of a state that is fast decomposing, will likely reign rather than rule. Like a weak czar in old Muscovy, he will still receive foreign ambassadors, but he will be the hostage of an oligarchy of republican leaders, led by Yeltsin, acting like the head of a clan of boyars or noblemen. In fact, the Yeltsin agenda in foreign policy--independence for the Baltics, military withdrawal from Cuba, a cutoff in aid for Afghanistan, deep cuts in defense spending--is already emerging.

Yeltsin has amassed this immense power and personal prestige after a unique political trajectory, a vastly different one from that of Gorbachev. Yeltsin’s rise, fall and stunning rebirth began in poverty in the Urals, where his first passion was volleyball, not politics. A construction engineer and a latecomer as a Communist Party official, he rose on the strength of his personal flair. Summoned to Moscow in 1985, soon after Gorbachev became party leader, he resigned two years later in a spectacular row. Campaigning in a political wilderness from which none had ever returned, he won a smashing victory in 1989 in the Soviet Union’s first-ever free legislative elections. A year later, he narrowly won election as chairman of the Russian parliament, in the teeth of opposition from Gorbachev. Soon afterward, he dramatically quit the Communist Party altogether, concluding that it could not be reformed. In June, after a year of extraordinary ups and downs, he won a landslide victory as Russia’s first freely elected president, going on to save both Gorbachev and the fledgling democracy.

Opinions are divided on where Yeltsin, now that he effectively is in charge, will take Russia. Is he a democrat at all or just a demagogue? Will he install gallows in the streets, as a former prime minister once predicted? Will he lead Russia into a happy future of Western multiparty democracy and market-driven prosperity? Or will he head it backward into Great Russian chauvinism and czarist autocracy? Now that he has emerged victorious after a career as a rebel, how will he use his power?

FOR A MAN WHO HAS BEEN AT THE LEADING EDGE OF political change in the Soviet Union, there is something rather old-fashioned about Boris Yeltsin. Standing next to Gorbachev, who is just one month younger, Yeltsin looks like an old-school party apparatchik, accustomed to getting his way by thumping the table. He exudes an overwhelming impression of brawn rather than brain. This is what Gorbachev meant when in March he called Yeltsin a “neo-Bolshevik”--a calculated insult.

Vladimir Bukovsky, who was jailed repeatedly for his dissident views, is now a Yeltsin supporter. But his first glimpse of Yeltsin on television astonished him: “I could not believe my eyes. For looking straight into the camera was a typical Bolshevik, a Bolshevik straight out of central casting. Stubborn, overbearing, self-assured, honest, irresistible, a human engine without brakes--he must have jumped from an armored car just a few minutes ago. We have all seen such faces in old photographs, except that they were usually dressed in leather jackets, they usually dangled a huge Mauser from their belts, and they were usually executed by Stalin. Where did they find this man?”

Bukovsky’s description captures perfectly the impression Yeltsin sometimes gives of having been preserved like a coelacanth, a fossil from an earlier, more heroic age of history. In fact, Yeltsin was born in 1931, about the time of the first Five-Year Plan, when Stalin proclaimed, “There are no fortresses the Bolsheviks cannot storm,” and his shock workers built dams and factories with their bare hands.

The first visual impression is not entirely false. For nine years, Yeltsin was one of a breed of Soviet politicians now all but extinct--a provincial party baron with the title of Obkom (Provincial Committee) First Secretary. As the party boss of the key industrial center of Sverdlovsk, he ruled with almost unquestioned authority, even building the country’s tallest Obkom headquarters. Virtually all those who were his contemporaries are now in obscurity, swept away by the winds of change.

But Yeltsin, like the coelacanth, survived. And not by following the traditional rules of Kremlin politics, but by breaking them, by taking risks and defying the leadership. In the process--painfully, slowly--he became a different sort of politician.

Before his election as Russian president, I watched him chair the parliament, in ultrademocratic style. Shunning the hectoring and schoolmasterly tone of Gorbachev, Yeltsin was at pains to appear at his most tolerant: “I propose that we restrict speakers to five minutes on this subject. But, of course, the final decision is yours.” Fumbling, Yeltsin managed to get badly lost in the unfamiliar rules of parliamentary procedure. A man known for his temper, he was determined not to let it show: Democracy was a new script that had to be learned by heart.

This ambivalence in Yeltsin between old and new has made some Russians, mostly intellectuals, distrust him. They suspect that he is an old-style party hack with an opportunistic streak, one who lacks the intellectual equipment to make the shift to democratic politics. Others have been instinctively suspicious of his popularity among the working class. Nationalistic Russians have dismissed him as a “Russophobe” prepared to sell out his fellow Russians in other republics for his own political ambitions.

Yet, for his supporters, it was the same awkward duality that proved that his conversion to democratic politics was sincere. To them, Yeltsin was a man who had wielded power close to the summit of the old regime, then turned his back on it in disgust. He often seemed to be ambivalent about power, both seeking it avidly and mistrusting its corrupting effects under the communist system. He made a show of shunning the trappings of power, and his wife Naya used to stand in lines along with the Muscovites. He has built a second political career partly on the basis of the spectacular failure of his first. From being a party insider, he became an outsider; but unlike most outsiders, he knew what it is like inside the charmed circle of power. Yeltsin’s credibility was largely based on where he had come from.

As an entire country renounced Communism with the fervor of former drinkers forswearing vodka, Yeltsin was ahead of the pack and in the front rank of what often appeared to be a nationwide meeting of Communists Anonymous. Among reformed drinkers, the man who once knocked back two bottles a day has greater credibility than the man who put away only half a bottle. So it was with Yeltsin’s ex-communism--all the more persuasive because of his Politburo past.

Sergei Shakhrai, a close Yeltsin associate who is little more than half Yeltsin’s age, says he retains some autocratic tendencies but is basically easy to work with. “He has one good quality in that he is open to criticism and argument. And he stands by people, irrespective of whether they are party members or not. To go from being an Obkom first secretary to where he is now is a big achievement. There are some things about him that are still the same--the expressions he uses and a certain reserve with people. One of his old habits is that he makes decisions too quickly without hearing all the arguments. He is consistent on the general strategy of democratization and the market, but he makes mistakes in details.”

Millions of ordinary Russians are less critical; in a recent poll, Yeltsin scored a 78% approval rating compared to 56% for Gorbachev. Like Ronald Reagan, he has an ability to make Russians feel good about themselves. But his skill as a communicator owes nothing to TV. Yeltsin is never happier than when he is in the thick of the crowd, pressing the flesh with reckless abandon, amid a chorus of “Yeltsin, Yeltsin.” He inspires feelings of idolatry in middle-aged Russian women, his most fanatical supporters.

Others have judged him more harshly. Historian Medvedev, now a prominent Gorbachev supporter, has compared Yeltsin to Trotsky and Mussolini. “In my view, Yeltsin is not a radical; he is just a political adventurer. He has changed his viewpoint several times, and he is not a man who is capable of stabilizing the situation and finding new paths for the country.” Even after the coup, Medvedev accused both Yeltsin and Gorbachev of “illegitimate and arbitrary” attempts to banish the Communist Party.

Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, the former Soviet prime minister and Yeltsin’s main rival in the election for the Russian presidency, like Yeltsin, worked in Sverdlovsk, but has no time for Yeltsin. “Boris Yeltsin is an awesome man. If, God forbid, he ever succeeds in gaining supreme power, he will stop at nothing. There will be gallows in the streets,” Ryzhkov said in April.

Outside the Soviet Union, too, the world has had problems coming to grips with the Yeltsin phenomenon. One leading American political scientist, Prof. Jerry Hough of Duke University, told a congressional committee in March that Yeltsin was of no more importance than the late Abbie Hoffman. And after the coup, Hough contended that Gorbachev’s powers were still dominant and Yeltsin’s overrated. “Yeltsin,” he said, “has always had a democratic side and a fascist side, and he’s really been showing more the latter in recent days.”

Until August, when they heaped praise on him for his role in standing down the plotters, many politicians, including President Bush and British Prime Minister John Major, treated Yeltsin gingerly, out of fear of undermining Gorbachev. When Yeltsin visited Strasbourg, headquarters of the European Parliament, in 1990, he was treated to an astonishing insult. In what was supposed to be a speech of welcome, Jean-Pierre Cot, a minor French socialist politician, accused Yeltsin to his face of being a “demagogic personality who surrounded himself with a few social democrats and liberals, and above all with many right-wing extremists.” When Yeltsin tried to interrupt him, Cot replied: “We are in a democratically elected parliament here: If you do not want to listen to me, you may leave.” Yeltsin was not amused and canceled a trip to Grenoble.

When Yeltsin journeyed to the United States in June as president-elect of the Russian Federation, nobody insulted him anymore. But he was still dogged by his reputation as the Kremlin bad boy who made life difficult for Gorbachev. President Bush, who had declined to shake his hand before the cameras in September, 1989, welcomed him in the White House Rose Garden, but in his speech, Bush concentrated on praising Gorbachev for his “courageous policies of glasnost and perestroika. “

Despite their doubts, some foreign and domestic observers began warming to Yeltsin the democrat even before he put down the coup attempt. After all, his 1991 election campaign was the third he had fought in three years, and it showed him skillfully adjusting his appeal to different audiences. In the heat of politicking, he gave signs of becoming the Soviet Union’s first consummate Western-style politician.

For instance, during the last campaign, Izvestia asked him about his attitude toward the church. Yeltsin reminded Christian voters that he had been baptized. “My father and mother were believers until we left the village for the town. . . . I have the greatest respect for the Orthodox church, for its history, for its contribution to Russian spirituality, morality, in the tradition of charity and good works--now the church’s role in this is being restored. . . . In church I light a candle, and the four-hour service doesn’t bother me. Neither me nor my wife. And, in general, when I come out of the church, I feel something new, something light has entered me. . . .”

A cynic would recognize this as pure electoral hot air. But it shows Yeltsin wrestling publicly with his own spiritual and intellectual development, his heart permanently on his sleeve. The battle between old and new beliefs that is going on in Russia is also going on inside its elected leader.

Yeltsin’s intellectual convictions, as expressed in his speeches, place him squarely among the Westernizers, rather than the Slavophiles, in the Russian political tradition. In his speech to the European Parliament in April, he stressed that Russia’s return to Europe after centuries of separation was a return to normal existence. Yeltsin said, “I am convinced that Russia must return to Europe not as a totalitarian monolith but as a renewed democratic state with its diverse way of life, its renewed traditions and spirituality.”

Such a wholehearted embrace of Western values is controversial in a Russian political context, because it rejects the cherished ideal of a “special path” for Russia outside the European mainstream. For 19th-Century Slavophiles, as for their spiritual descendants among 20th-Century Russian nationalists, such sentiments are anathema. For the Slavophiles, the villain of Russian history was Peter the Great, whose determination to make Russia part of Europe they saw as a fatal blow to Russian culture and the spiritual traditions of Orthodoxy.

If Yeltsin often seems to lack the intellectual sparkle of Gorbachev in impromptu speeches, he is more direct and less verbose. When he speaks without notes, he sometimes lapses into a crude, almost Stalinist vocabulary. When he reads a set text before TV cameras, he often sounds wooden. Though he sometimes lacks Gorbachev’s short-term tactical sense, Yeltsin seems to display a greater consistency over the long term.

Thus, Barbara Amiel, in the Times of London, compared him to the slow-moving General Kutuzov in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” whose solid Russian qualities in the end overcome the wily Napoleon. “Of course, Napoleon is the more brilliant general. Kutuzov seems to be the worse for wear and drink and with no great strategic muscle. But he is so much at one with the land and the people and their pain that it does not matter so long as he does not give up.”

HOW DID BORIS YELTSIN PASS FROM ORTHODOXY TO heresy?

No Soviet politician, with the possible exception of Nikita Khrushchev, has given us quite so vivid an account of his childhood and early years as Yeltsin, in his 1989 autobiography “Against the Grain.” The book is by turns bombastic, funny and self-serving; the old Yeltsin and the new Yeltsin battle each other on every page.

It is a Horatio Alger story of self-improvement, Soviet-style, of a rise that began--literally--in a log cabin in the Ural Mountains of eastern Russia. The picture Yeltsin paints rings true: a maverick with a compulsion to succeed, an overachiever with an un-Russian love of taking risks, a thin-skinned and vulnerable man with a streak of self-discipline, a born leader who hates to be second in command but who is sometimes his own fiercest critic.

Yeltsin’s story begins with a Gogolesque tale of how he was nearly drowned in the baptismal tub by a drunken Orthodox priest, only to be rescued by his screaming mother. “The priest was not particularly worried. He said, ‘Well, if he can survive such an ordeal, it means he’s a good tough lad . . . and I name him Boris.’ ”

When Yeltsin describes his childhood as hard and says there were “very bad harvests and no food,” he is referring to something far worse than just the usual rough existence of the Russian countryside. Stalin’s collectivization was accompanied by ruthless requisition of grain from the peasantry, who were often left to starve. While the Ukraine suffered most, areas of Russia such as the Urals also witnessed great suffering and violent peasant resistance. Yeltsin refers to “gangs of outlaws” and adds, “Almost every day there were shootouts, murders and robberies.”

He continues: “We lived in poverty, in a small house with one cow. We had a horse, but it died, so there was nothing to plow with.” For four more years the Yeltsin family survived on the collective farm, thanks to their single cow, but in 1935, “the situation became unbearable--even our cow died.”

The Yeltsin family abandoned their native village, harnessing themselves to the cart for the 20-mile journey to the nearest railroad station. Nikolai Ignatievich, Yeltsin’s father, signed on as a laborer at the site of a new potash plant, joining the expanding proletariat. Home for 10 years was a single room in a drafty communal barracks with no plumbing, where the Yeltsins--grandfather, parents and three small children--slept on the floor.

“Perhaps it is because to this day I can remember how hard our life was that I so hate those communal huts. Worst of all was winter, when there was nowhere to hide from the cold. As we had no warm clothes, it was the nanny goat that saved us. I remember huddling up to the animal, warm as a stove.”

Yeltsin describes his mother as kind and gentle but his father as a quick-tempered man who frequently beat him. “I always clenched my teeth and did not make a sound, which infuriated him.” And he ascribed his hatred of Stalin to a childhood experience: “I remember only too well when my father was taken away in the middle of the night, even though I was just 6 years old.” It is not clear why or for how long his father was arrested, but 1937 marked the high point of Stalin’s purges.

At school, Yeltsin “was always the ringleader, always devising some prank.” His grades were excellent, his conduct atrocious. It is not hard to see a parallel between the Yeltsin of 1990, scandalizing the party with his resignation speech, and the young rebel who stood up at his primary-school graduation to denounce his teacher for cruelty. The result of the scandal was the same in both cases--expulsion followed by a triumphant comeback.

Young Boris seems to have caused his mother a few sleepless nights. He lost two fingers trying to take apart a stolen army grenade. His nose was broken by the shaft of a cart in a mass fight. He would have made an ideal playmate for another towering giant: Peter the Great, who as a teen-ager showed a similar taste for battles, scandals and rude pranks.

Yeltsin’s final triumph as a schoolboy was to pass his exams and enter the Urals Polytechnical Institute despite missing most of his final year because of typhoid, caught on a disastrous summer expedition into the forest. In his story, like all the others, young Boris triumphs, turning defeat into victory like the protagonist of a socialist-realist novel. When he decided to study civil engineering, his grandfather insisted he prove his talents by building a wooden bathhouse single-handedly. He passed the test, as always, with flying colors.

It may be useful to draw some parallels with the career of another ambitious young provincial, Mikhail Gorbachev. Like Yeltsin, Gorbachev came from humble peasant beginnings, though in the rich North Caucasus it is doubtful whether he suffered the same level of privation. But there was a crucial difference: Gorbachev was a third-generation Communist from a family whose commitment to the Bolsheviks dated back to the early 1920s; his maternal grandfather was a pioneer of the collective farm system. Yeltsin’s family appears to have had no such links to the party.

The real divergence in their careers began with their student years. Gorbachev won a Red Banner of Labor award, thanks to his prowess helping his father on the combine harvester. This helped him secure entry into Moscow State University, the country’s elite educational institution, where he pursued the highly political subject of law and seems to have spent most of his leisure time as an activist in the Communist Youth League, becoming a party member at the tender age of 20.

Meanwhile, Yeltsin’s energy and drive were finding an outlet elsewhere: on the volleyball court. Not only did he sleep with a volleyball on his pillow, he tells us that as a student he spent at least six hours a day playing volleyball, not just at the student level but for Sverdlovsk city in the Soviet senior league, traveling all around the country. He also describes a summer holiday spent traveling penniless around the country, hitching rides like a hobo on the roof of passing trains. It is hard to imagine Gorbachev risking his Komsomol career by doing likewise.

While the bookish Gorbachev returned to Stavropol with his wife Raisa to be a full-time propagandist after graduating, Yeltsin switched from jock to hard hat, laying bricks on construction sites. He advanced from site foreman to chief engineer and, despite conflicts with his bosses, acquired a reputation as a man who got things done. It was a rough environment--Yeltsin recounts how he faced down the ax-wielding leader of a gang of convict workers, using only his booming voice.

It was at this point, in the early ‘60s, that he was admitted to party membership, a decade behind Gorbachev. It was probably less a sign of a consuming interest in politics than of professional ambition. As a rising manager, to refuse to join would have been a black mark serious enough to block promotion. But Yeltsin denies that this was just the reflex of a conformist. “I believed sincerely in the ideals of justice which the party espoused,” he wrote.

THE STORY OF HIS GROWING disillusionment with the party may not be quite as dramatic as his boyhood pranks, but it is all important to Yeltsin’s enormous esteem among his countrymen.

Tramping the mud of Urals construction sites, Yeltsin worked around the clock, driving his subordinates hard and himself harder. He built up a fearsome reputation as a tough manager who met his deadlines. In 1969 he accepted, “without great enthusiasm,” a job as a senior full-time Communist Party official, responsible for all construction in Sverdlovsk province, and moved up another notch in 1975 to be a secretary of the provincial party. In 1976 he was ushered into Leonid Brezhnev’s office and told, to his surprise, that he was being promoted to the position of Sverdlovsk’s party first secretary. His was an exceptionally fast rise.

Yeltsin held this key job for nine years, and all the indications are that he was regarded in Moscow as a success. How could such an obvious rebel have succeeded in being popular, with both the rulers and the ruled, amid the toadying conformity of the Brezhnev era? As he makes clear in his autobiography, Moscow left him largely in peace, supervising from a safe distance. Provincial party bosses were judged principally on their records as economic managers, and Yeltsin fitted the Brezhnev-era model of a vigorous delovoy rukovoditel (businesslike leader). In a system without real economic incentives, it was only the initiative of the first secretary that determined whether milk appeared in the shops, housing was built on schedule and factories fulfilled their plans. Yeltsin’s style was to get out and about to towns and districts. Interviewed in 1990 about his party background, Yeltsin said: “I am neither an official nor an apparatchik. I started as a worker and worked my way up step by step. . . . I am primarily a man from the production sector. I understand the people and the common man.” Gorbachev, by contrast, never managed a farm, a factory or a construction site, specializing instead in party organization, agitation and propaganda.

There were occasional unwelcome brushes in Moscow, however. One day Yeltsin found himself forced to comply with what he later described as a “senseless” decision by the Politburo to demolish within three days the house in Sverdlovsk where Czar Nicholas II and his family had been murdered in 1918. “I asked the people who had sent the paper to Sverdlovsk, ‘How am I to explain this to the people?’ At that time I was the youngest province first secretary, and though I had teeth, they had not yet been sharpened.” Yeltsin’s role in demolishing the house was to be held against him by Russian nationalists, years later.

During the heyday of Brezhnev’s absurd personality cult, Yeltsin was pressured to install a museum at a house where the bemedaled general secretary had briefly worked as a land surveyor. “I asked: ‘And the baptismal font in the town where he was born--did you line that with gold?’ That was perhaps the first time I showed my disobedience--I did not submit to the decision of the Central Committee. They called me to Moscow and put me through the wringer.”

Generally, Yeltsin’s political power was unlimited, and the power of the party ensured that his every command was obeyed. Persuasion and political skills were hardly needed, only the ability to give orders. “Everything was steeped in the methods of the ‘command’ system, and I, too, acted accordingly. Whether I was chairing a meeting, running my office or delivering a report to a plenum--everything that one did was expressed in terms of pressure, threats and coercion.”

Still, the record of Yeltsin’s Sverdlovsk period and his popularity there serve as evidence against the charge that he was no more than a typical Brezhnev-era apparatchik. L. Pikhoya, a staffer in Yeltsin’s 1989 election campaign for a parliament seat, recalled: “Back in the 1970s, he was one of the few leaders unafraid of meeting the people and, indeed, actively sought out various encounters. He met with us sociologists at the beginning of each school year, presenting the party’s plans and listening to our suggestions and grievances in a get-together which would last five or six hours. At that time, no one had thought of glasnost , yet he appeared on television to answer letters and to take phone calls.”

In April, 1985, a few weeks after the appointment of Gorbachev as party general secretary, Yeltsin was summoned to Moscow to be head of a section in the Central Committee construction department. He was recommended by Yegor K. Ligachev, Gorbachev’s No. 2 in the party. He had turned down previous job offers in the capital, but this time he reluctantly packed his bags. “I had never had any ambition or even wish to work in Moscow,” Yeltsin wrote later, an interesting admission from a man frequently charged with Napoleonic ambition. His new job of supervising construction work duplicated what he had done in Sverdlovsk, but this time the responsibilities covered the whole Soviet Union.

Soon named a Central Committee secretary, a party executive job, he joined the inner circle of the leadership, gaining his first glimpse of the spoils of high office. He was offered the luxurious dacha that Gorbachev had vacated on his promotion to party chief. In December, 1985, Yeltsin was summoned by Gorbachev and the other Politburo members and told he was to replace Viktor Grishin as head of the Moscow city party organization and, by virtue of that, become a candidate member of the Politburo. Yeltsin realized he was being used as a weapon to remove and discredit a major Gorbachev rival.

Despairing of the party apparatus, Yeltsin soon tried to activate the moribund city soviet, or council, by reminding its deputies of their responsibilities to the voters. This was an open heresy, because deputies were supposed to act as faithful guardians of the party’s interests, not those of the voters.

The party and city bureaucracy in Moscow began to resist Yeltsin’s attempts at reform. One editor said the sabotage of Yeltsin’s initiatives extended to letting fresh fruit and vegetables rot in warehouses instead of putting them on sale, and sending trains loaded with fresh produce back to the Caucasus without being unloaded.

Yeltsin was in conflict with a whole political culture, whose rules and rituals he had come to detest. “This was a man at the top level of the leadership who seemed to me a real dissident,” Mikhail Poltoranin, a political ally, said of Yeltsin.

Yeltsin’s problems with his party superiors were mounting, too, as they blocked personnel changes and democratic reforms he sought. Furthermore, he had little in the way of concrete results to show the capital’s residents how he had improved their lives. After a while, the only question was how the final breach would occur. His increasingly outspoken speeches about corruption and the slowness of perestroika led to worsening relations with Gorbachev, who was not prepared to tackle the party apparat head-on. “There can be no doubt that at that moment Gorbachev simply hated me,” Yeltsin wrote later about one of their quarrels.

Yeltsin was pushed over the brink by another big run-in, with Gorbachev lieutenant Ligachev, at a Politburo meeting at which Ligachev objected to Yeltsin’s tolerance of demonstrations and set up a commission of inquiry into how he was running Moscow. Yeltsin wrote to Gorbachev, who was on vacation, to tell him of his decision to resign. “My style, my frankness and my past history reveal me as being untrained for work as a member of the Politburo,” he confessed. He appealed to Gorbachev to do something about Ligachev’s way of running the party apparatus; there were too many members of the Politburo whose apparent support for reform was insincere, he said.

The showdown came in October, 1987, when a major speech Gorbachev had been working on for months was unveiled before the Central Committee. Yeltsin was convinced, afterward, that the attacks on him “had been prepared in advance” and described his resignation speech as a preemptive strike because he knew he was going to be fired. There is no evidence, however, that Gorbachev had been planning to get rid of him at this meeting.

Yeltsin’s conduct was what Poltoranin later called the “gesture of despair” of a man under severe strain. He had been working 18-hour days almost nonstop. Although it was not until nearly three weeks later that Yeltsin collapsed and was hospitalized, apparently with a heart problem, it is likely that he was already near the end of his tether.

If Gorbachev’s perestroika had a script, this was the moment when one of the leading actors threw it away and began to improvise, to the horror of the author. It was the moment when the sacred rituals of the Soviet political elite were suddenly called into question. The plenum was about to end after Gorbachev’s report, without any debate, when Yeltsin asked for the floor. After giving support to Gorbachev’s report, he began criticizing the way the party leadership was operating, protesting against the use of “bullying reprimands and dressings down.” It was a somewhat clumsy accusation, considering Yeltsin’s own often brutal treatment of his subordinates.

Yeltsin’s main point was an accusation that Gorbachev’s perestroika had so far produced little for the Soviet people except words. “Having said all that, I sat down. My heart was pounding and seemed ready to burst out of my rib cage. I knew what would happen next. I would be slaughtered, in an organized, methodical manner, and the job would be done almost with pleasure and enjoyment.” It was.

He was denounced not only by conservatives but by old friends, as well as liberals such as then-Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze. Yeltsin was denounced for “political imma turity,” for being a party latecomer, for rising too far, too fast. A party official took him to task for his populist style. His predecessor as Sverdlovsk party chief branded him a megalomaniac. “One gets the impression of some kind of permanent dissatisfaction, some kind of alienation,” chimed in one Politburo member. Then, Gorbachev went on the attack, accusing Yeltsin of putting personal ambitions above the party and comparing him to Khrushchev. After Yeltsin’s fumbling response, Gorbachev proposed stripping him of his major posts but keeping the door slightly ajar to future rehabilitation. As Yeltsin wrote, “If Gorbachev didn’t have a Yeltsin”--a radical to prod him--”he would have had to invent one.”

In Western culture, the resignation of a politician over a point of principle or even a personal difference carries no disgrace. But in the Soviet tradition, it was a subversive act, revealing that the monolithic unity of the party was only a facade. Yeltsin’s subversion lay not in his language so much as in the way he broke the rules of the game by voluntarily renouncing membership in the highest level of the nomenklatura , the party establishment. By quitting, he was saying goodby to the dacha , with its marble floors, gardeners, cooks, and the big black limousine--breaking the golden chains that were supposed to keep him in line.

The story of how Yeltsin fought his way back after his disgrace is that of a political awakening that affected millions of other Soviet citizens. Following a period of depression, he gradually regained the spotlight. After chafing under the yoke of party discipline for so long, he campaigned in his first democratic election at age 58. Using his peasant cunning, he managed to sidestep the obstacles placed in his path by the party apparat and got himself registered as a candidate for the Moscow constituency. Once this hurdle was overcome, his natural flair for the campaign hustings won him an astonishing 89% of the vote.

He is not a man who underwent a road-to-Damascus conversion to democracy, nor is he an intellectual whose communist god suddenly failed him. He began with an attack on the privileges of the nomenklatura . When he finally ditched communism, it was a lengthy and painful inner struggle. His first trip to the United States two years ago, with its glimpse of freedom--and American supermarkets--helped anchor his conviction that the Soviet system was a failure that could not be reformed.

In winning the prize of chairman of the Russian parliament against the opposition of a large Communist majority in 1990, he proved that he could build coalitions not only with like-minded partners but also, when it counted, with his opponents. His victory was narrow, but in the year he spent as parliamentary chairman he exploited every avenue to win support, lobbying all who might be useful. Then, only last June, Yeltsin won his third straight election, trouncing all his rivals to emerge victorious in Russia’s first-ever election of a democratically chosen president.

Not surprisingly with such results, the ballot box is now his favorite political weapon. Some of the architects of the new Soviet democratic movement are fluent English speakers who can sprinkle their conversation with references to Jefferson and Madison; not so Yeltsin, who speaks only Russian. His embrace of democracy came not from books, but on the street.

AS THE DUST SETTLES after the explosion of August, it is evident that the house that Gorbachev tried so hard to “restructure” finally came crashing down in rubble. As Yeltsin told the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies in March, perestroika proved to be only the final phase of stagnation. Gorbachev was left clinging to the wreckage, a diminished figure whose policy had failed, as more farsighted observers in the West had predicted.

Democratization led inevitably not just to the end of the Communist system but, with astonishing speed, to the break-up of the imperial state. History’s verdict on Gorbachev is likely to be colored by future events over which he will have little control. If the peoples of what was the Soviet Union find their way through this new Time of Troubles, he will have earned their gratitude as the man who showed them the road. If chaos and bloodshed follow, he will be remembered as the emperor with no clothes.

Summing up Yeltsin’s historical place right now is more difficult. In Yeltsin’s autobiography, he said he sometimes felt he had led three different lives--the first as a manager and party official, the second as a political outcast and the third as an elected politician. Yeltsin’s career reveals him to be a complex figure: a man with a strong sense of personal destiny but who claims he feels dissatisfied with himself 95% of the time; a man struggling to reconcile his authoritarian and abrasive personality with the search for a new, democratic order; a man who had always considered himself a Soviet citizen and never thought of himself as a Russian, who finds himself at the head of a newly aware Russia.

Yeltsin’s record shows an acute political intuition, an ability to read power relationships and a populist flair for discerning the mood of the Russian people. He has little time for abstract concepts, but his early diagnosis that Gorbachev vacillated too much in pursuing perestroika was vindicated by events.

Yeltsin’s own flaws--impulsiveness and a prickly sensitivity to real or imagined insults--are well advertised. He has a Reaganesque dislike for detail (he supposedly didn’t read last year’s hotly debated “500-day” economic plan before endorsing it) and a rough, undiplomatic manner. But he has shown an ability to learn from his mistakes and take advice. His strengths, clearly displayed during his resistance to the coup, include courage and decisiveness.

Those who focus narrowly on personal qualities may argue that an outsized ego and an autocratic personality would seem to disqualify him as a genuine democrat. Those who look exclusively at his personal beliefs, as expressed in his public speeches, will put him squarely in the democrats’ camp. And if a democratic politician is one who is prepared to submit to the verdict of the voters, then Yeltsin passes easily, even if he does not act like a Western politician. Finally, for democracy to take root, there has to be not only the election of a legitimate leader but the growth of a new society and democratic movements.

Like Lech Walesa in Poland, Yeltsin has managed to form a coalition to bridge the traditional gulf between the workers and the intelligentsia. But just as the transition from opposition to power divided Walesa’s Solidarity movement, Yeltsin may find it impossible to keep both groups on his side for long. Tough choices will have to be made among the varying interests of industrial workers, emergent businessmen, private farmers, foreign investors.

Russia’s deeper challenge may be the reconstruction not of society but of the state. Amid the disintegration of the old Soviet Union, Yeltsin has to find a working formula for a new kind of Russian government. Borders, citizenship, sovereignty, minority rights and future defense arrangements--the most difficult single issue--all have to be negotiated amid economic chaos. Even shorn of the other 14 Soviet republics, Russia may still be too much of an empire, too large and too diverse to be a democratically run nation-state.

More than 20 million Russians live outside the borders of the Russian republic, and, for the first time in centuries, they risk being no longer protected by the mother-state. If angry Russian minorities demand self-determination and union with Russia, the result could be a reawakening of the ugly side of Russian nationalism, which Yeltsin has so far held in check.

Handling the “Russian question” with the other republics will require the kind of finesse that will test Yeltsin to the limit. This is a sensitive and potentially explosive issue, and his actions soon after the coup show that he is not always sure-footed in dealing with the other republics.

It hardly suited Russian interests that the most conservative Communist-ruled republics, such as Byelorussia and Azerbaijan, which had never shown any interest before in breaking away, were now in a hurry to proclaim independence in order to insulate themselves from the new anti-Communist wind blowing from Moscow. And unless the Ukraine and Russia could find some form of agreement, even a loose confederation would be hard to achieve.

Yeltsin’s first reaction was a statement issued by his spokesman warning that Russia reserved the right to renegotiate borders with any other republic that seceded. The statement was aimed principally at the Ukraine, with 11 million Russians inside its borders, mostly in the Crimea and the industrialized Donbass region, and at Kazakhstan, with 6 million Russians making up two-fifths of its population.

At a different time, as a negotiating ploy to help secure guarantees for Russian minorities, the statement might have served a useful purpose; in the highly charged post-coup atmosphere, its immediate effect was disastrous. In Kiev, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, under pressure from nationalist critics for his hesitation in condemning the coup, seized on Yeltsin’s statement to warn about the danger of an emerging Russian “czarist empire.” President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan joined the outcry, warning that a demand to renegotiate borders could provoke a war. Yeltsin dispatched his vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, and Leningrad Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak to Kiev to mend fences with the Ukrainians, and later Yeltsin had talks with Nazarbayev. Repairing some of the damage, Yeltsin also promised TV viewers that “imperial attitudes are a thing of the past.”

Speaking to the Congress of People’s Deputies in September, he declared that Russia would protect the interest of Russians beyond its borders but added: “The Russian state, having chosen democracy and freedom, will never be an empire, nor an elder or younger brother. It will be an equal among equals.”

Thus, as Charles de Gaulle 30 years ago reconciled the French to a state that no longer included Algiers or Oran, Yeltsin will have to reconcile the Russians to a future in which Kiev, Odessa and the Crimea may be part of an independent Ukraine. Within the arbitrarily drawn borders of the Russian republic, Yeltsin will have to resolve the same contradiction as Gorbachev in the Soviet Union--between democratizing his empire and keeping it together. It may be almost impossible to find a democratic constitutional settlement that will balance the need for a cohesive Russian nation-state against the strivings of Tatars, Bashkirs and other national groups for enhanced statehood.

But if Yeltsin, with his mass popularity and democratic mandate, cannot achieve these twin goals, then the chances of anyone else’s succeeding are slim.

No politician is fully tested until he has not only fought for power but captured it and used it. For a born rebel, the real examination begins when the long passage through the political wilderness is over, and there is no one left to rebel against. If Boris Yeltsin fails in his declared aim of leading the rebirth of Russia, he will go down as just another samozvanets , or pretender. If he meets the challenge and succeeds, he may join that special category of rebels who, like Churchill and de Gaulle, return from the wilderness in the middle of national collapse with the aura of men who were right before their time.