He was always a heavy drinker, but until his health problems got bad in the mid-Nineties, he could usually hold his liquor. The real problem was that he was a man of action who did not have an idea in his head. A lot of people kept trying to put ideas in there, but they just fell out of the other side. So he freed Russia from communism, but he did not give it much else to work with instead.

Boris Yeltsinwas brought to Moscow in 1985 to clean up the corruption in the capital by the man he eventually removed from power, the communist reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev. But the times were right for ambitious men to aim a lot higher, and Yeltsin was nothing if not ambitious. So, by 1988, he had quit from the communist party’s ruling body, the politburo. He ran for the all-Moscow seat against the official communist candidate in the first free election in Soviet history, and won in a landslide.

I first met Yeltsin soon after that in the basement cafeteria of the Supreme Soviet, just inside the Kremlin walls, which was the easiest place for foreign journalists to find and interview deputies to this new-fangled beast, the Congress of People’s Deputies. It was one of the stars of the nascent Russian democratic movement, Galina Starovoitova, who introduced us, and the contrast between the two of them was quite stunning.

Starovoitova (who was murdered some years ago in a contract killing) was a genuine democratic hero, an intellectual who dedicated her life to the ideal of a free society. Yeltsin was a charming bruiser who ran mostly on instinct and was all too aware of his considerable charisma. Yet he was in practice the leader of her little band of democrats, the Inter-Regional Deputies Group.

Big decisions

The IRDG flourished for less than a year, and it had less than a tenth of the deputies to the Congress, most of whom were still communist party hacks. Its leaders, including famous dissident figures like scientist Andrei Sakharov and historian Yuri Afanasiev, were using their unprecedented access to the media to spread democratic ideas to the furthest corners of a country where such notions had been suppressed for seventy years. But they knew those ideas alone would not produce a democratic majority in any Soviet election in the future.

Yeltsin, on the other hand, could win the election, but he had no ideas at all. So they made him their leader, and, during that year, you rarely saw him without some leading light of the IRDG by his side Everybody meant well, I think, but the transplant did not take place, and by 1990, Yeltsin had moved on.

In the following two years, he did two things that should have earned him the gratitude of both Russia and the whole world. Standing on a tank outside the White House in Moscow in August, 1991, he turned back the hardline communist coup attempt that almost reversed the flow of history. And he did it practically single-handedly, by the force of his own personality.

The coup was amazingly incompetent, but it could have succeeded nevertheless, in which case we would still be dealing with a ramshackle communist-ruled Soviet Union, sinking ever deeper into poverty and corruption and fighting insurgencies all around its perimeter.

Yeltsin’s other great accomplishment was to wind up the Soviet Union and set all of its constituent “republics” free. He did it for purely tactical reasons, but it was the last great act of decolonization, and it spared us a generation of bloody struggles as the old Russian empire gradually fell apart. But then Yeltsin should have died or at least retired because he was a disaster and an embarrassment as the president.

But he did get the two big things right and that counts for a lot. History may take a kinder view of him than Russians do today.