Maverick embraced democracy

Yeltsin cared about lives of ordinary citizens

Ann Imse, Rocky Mountain News

Published April 24, 2007 at midnight

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Boris Yeltsin became the first elected president of Russia because he was the first Soviet politician to discover the sound bite.

His natural tendency to speak in pithy quotes allowed journalists to clip and paste them into news stories at a time when Russians first became voters. He could draw verbal pictures that resonated on a human level - as when he attacked the Communist Party for providing its bosses with country homes with marble floors and countless bathrooms. He didn't need to say that most Soviet families were sharing a single bathroom with other families.

In his succinct and colorful language, he asked what category of spending this came under in the KGB budget: "Combating spies?"

I covered Yeltsin as an Associated Press correspondent in Moscow from 1988 through 1991, as he rose from a backwater post after being ousted from the Communist Party command for criticism of party corruption, to his historic election victories, to his leadership in resisting the coup that briefly ousted Mikhail Gorbachev as head of the Soviet Union. The coup attempt led directly to the collapse of both the Soviet Union and its Communist Party.

The charismatic, burly bear of a man fit his countrymen's idea of a true Russian. Like Gorbachev, he was one of the first Soviet politicians to care about the sorry life of ordinary citizens.

But he embraced democracy because it embraced him.

With a born knack for campaigning, he discovered he could win elections, and get back the power taken from him when the Communist Party ousted him as Moscow party chief.

In the Soviet Union's first real election in 1989, Yeltsin ran for parliament from Moscow. Party officials promised poll results in 10 days. New York Times correspondent Bill Keller - now editor of the Times - organized foreign journalists to conduct exit polls in Yeltsin's race. We were able to astound Soviet citizens by reporting that same evening that Yeltsin had won with 90 percent of the vote.

Later, as the first elected president of the Russian Federation, one of 15 republics in the Soviet Union, Yeltsin created another iconic image when he literally stepped up on a tank to call on the nation to oppose the 1991 coup. Pro-democracy journalists managed to get the critical film clip on the air, and ensured its wide broadcast by flying copies to local television stations around the country.

Meanwhile, 30,000 citizens responded to Yeltsin's call by surrounding his Russian White House to protect him. I joined the crowd, which was expecting an all-out tank and air assault by Soviet forces. But only a few died that night, because Yeltsin and his allies were speaking to thousands of individual soldiers and officers with a simple, brilliant message: Don't shoot your fellow citizens. Don't start a civil war.

Deprived of a military willing to enforce the coup, the plot collapsed.

Within days, Yeltsin hauled a newly released and shaken Gorbachev before the parliament, and shoved proof in his face on national television that it was Gorbachev's own Communist Party that had staged the coup. Again, it was astonishing theater.

Chastened, Gorbachev outlawed the party the next day. That same evening, the second largest republic, Ukraine, declared independence from the Soviet Union, and the country was broken. The move by Yeltsin and others to dissolve the nation several months later was just the formality.

But Yeltsin's star soon fell, as he lacked both a dedication to democratic reform and any idea of how to switch from communism to capitalism. He ripped away economic restrictions - but had no clue that communist factories could not survive in a free market. For most ordinary Russians, life became freer, but much harder.

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