What's News? 4/24/07

Time for a quickie:

The "new" plan in Iraq isn't working according to plan. (BBC News)

Hamas gets bored and decides to fuck shit up in Israel. (Al Jazeera)

President Bush is (still) delusional. (NYT, 1st text item)

Yeltsin, the father of Communist-run capitalism, dies at age 76 [that's above average in Russia] (NYT, 2nd item)

Va Tech goes back to class. (Wash Post)


April 24, 2007
At Least the Boss Was Satisfied by Gonzales’s Answers

By JIM RUTENBERG and NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, April 23 — President Bush said Monday that the Congressional testimony of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales last week, roundly panned by members of both parties, had “increased my confidence in his ability to do the job.”

Speaking during a short question-and-answer session in the Oval Office, Mr. Bush said of Mr. Gonzales’s performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, “The attorney general went up and gave a very candid assessment, and answered every question he could possibly answer, honestly answer.”

Mr. Bush has repeatedly asserted his confidence in Mr. Gonzales, a longtime adviser, as criticism has mounted over the dismissals of eight United States attorneys.

But his statement on Monday was his first direct comment about Mr. Gonzales since the attorney general appeared before the committee, and it was at considerable odds with an overwhelmingly critical assessment of his testimony by members of both parties. It indicated that Mr. Bush, at least for now, has concluded his attorney general can weather the challenge to his leadership at the Justice Department, barring any evidence of wrongdoing.

That challenge had seemed all the more daunting as of Sunday, when Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the committee whom both sides view as a barometer of support for Mr. Gonzales, appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and said, “The attorney general’s testimony was very, very damaging to his own credibility,” and that his continued tenure was “bad for the Department of Justice.”

Asked to comment on Mr. Bush’s assessment of Mr. Gonzales’s testimony on Monday, Mr. Specter said in a telephone interview, “I’m not going to get involved in evaluating the president’s decision to retain the attorney general.”

Mr. Specter added, “I will continue to work with the attorney general as long as he has that position.”

Several other Republican senators who have been critical of Mr. Gonzales, including Jeff Sessions of Alabama, John E. Sununu of New Hampshire and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.

With many lawmakers working in their home districts, it was unclear whether their unresponsiveness was a result of busy schedules or a concerted effort to avoid a running, tit-for-tat debate with the White House over Mr. Gonzales’s future.

One senior Republican Congressional aide at work in Washington on Monday, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, called Mr. Bush’s statement that his confidence in Mr. Gonzales had grown after his testimony “curious”; another senior Republican aide asked, “Was he watching the same hearing as everyone else?”

White House officials were confronted Monday with questions about whether Mr. Bush’s statements of confidence would ultimately be followed by a resignation, with reporters recalling that Mr. Bush had pledged support for Donald H. Rumsfeld shortly before his ouster as defense secretary. “He’s staying,” the White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said of Mr. Gonzales in one such exchange on Monday morning.

Later, asked if Mr. Bush had seen all the testimony, Ms. Perino said the president had been traveling but had received updates from aides and had seen some of it on television news reports.

Pressure to push Mr. Gonzales out is likely to continue. Although Mr. Gonzales has sought to maintain the impression that the country’s legal business is going on without interruption, several Justice Department officials say that the attorney general and his advisers have been greatly distracted by the uproar.

Some administration allies had even voiced optimism last week that Mr. Gonzales would resign and spare Mr. Bush the discomfort of standing by him as support erodes even within his own party.

Speaking at a news briefing on Monday after announcing an initiative to fight identity theft, Mr. Gonzales indicated he had no such plan.

“I will stay as long as I can be effective, and I can be effective,” Mr. Gonzales said in response to questions about his plans.

He said he “can’t just be focused on the U.S. attorneys situation.”

“I’ve also got to be focused on what’s important for the American people,” he said.

Mr. Gonzales said he needed to spend time on his priorities, like combating terrorism, drug abuse and the danger to children from the Internet.

Emphasizing the point, the White House released a statement late Monday commending Mr. Gonzales and the Federal Trade Commission chairwoman, Deborah Platt Majoras, for their work on identity theft.

Asked how he knew he was still effective, Mr. Gonzales responded: “I think a cabinet secretary or the head of an agency every day should wake up and ask themselves that question: Am I still effective in this position? I think that’s a question that all of us should ask, every day.”

“And as long as I think that I can be effective,” he said, “and the president believes that I should continue to be at the head of the Department of Justice, I’ll continue serving as the attorney general.”

Mr. Gonzales added, “I’ve already indicated that I’ve made mistakes, and I accept responsibility for that.”

Mr. Bush has said all along that he would leave it to Mr. Gonzales to regain his credibility with Congress. And Mr. Gonzales’s testimony was viewed within both parties as a sort of screen test of whether he could remain in his job.

Members of the Senate committee expressed exasperation as Mr. Gonzales invoked a faulty memory more than 50 times when pressed about his involvement in the removal of the United States attorneys, saying he could not say how the idea of dismissing them originated or remember the details of a late November meeting with senior staff members at which the plan for the dismissals was discussed — and which he had attended, according to administration documents.

“If the attorney general’s hearing performance increased the president’s confidence in his ability to lead the Justice Department, then he’s setting the bar fairly low,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, in a statement on Monday.

He repeated his suspicions that the White House had removed the prosecutors because of partisan concerns that they were either not doing enough to prosecute Democrats on voter fraud charges or going too far in pressing corruption charges against Republicans. The White House denies those accusations.

In defending Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Bush said the Justice Department was fully within its rights to replace the prosecutors, who serve at the pleasure of the president. And, he and other officials said, after releasing thousands of internal documents and submitting to questioning in the Senate, no evidence of illegality on Mr. Gonzales’s part had surfaced.

“The attorney general broke no law, did no wrongdoing,” Mr. Bush said. “And some senators didn’t like his explanation, but he answered as honestly as he could. This is an honest, honorable man, in whom I have confidence.”

Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, said in an interview that as far as the White House was concerned, the public was not paying much attention to the debate over Mr. Gonzales and that there was “a disconnect” between what he termed Washington’s fascination with the issue and the public’s interest in it.

“There’s no traction with the public because there is no serious allegation of wrongdoing,” Mr. Bartlett said.
And, if Mr. Gonzales were to step down, officials argued, it would wrongly lead the public to conclude that he had done something wrong.

David Johnston contributed reporting.


April 24, 2007
Boris N. Yeltsin, Who Buried the U.S.S.R., Dies at 76
By MARILYN BERGER

Boris N. Yeltsin, the burly provincial politician who became a Soviet-era reformer and later a towering figure of his time as the first freely elected leader of Russia, presiding over the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Communist Party, died yesterday in Moscow. He was 76.

His death, at a hospital, came at 3:45 p.m., the Kremlin said, making the announcement without ceremony, a reflection of the contradictory legacy of Mr. Yeltsin’s presidency in the view of many Russians, including his successor, the current leader, President Vladimir V. Putin.

Medical officials told Russian news agencies that Mr. Yeltsin had died of heart failure after being admitted to the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow. He had suffered heart problems for years, undergoing surgery shortly after his disputed re-election as Russian president in 1996.

In office less than nine years, beginning with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and plagued by severe health problems and an excessive fondness for alcohol, Mr. Yeltsin added a final chapter to his historical record when, in 1999, he stunned Russians and the world by announcing his resignation, becoming the first Russian leader to give up power on his own in accordance with constitutional processes. He then turned over the reins of office to Mr. Putin on New Year’s Eve 1999, and after that was out of the public eye.

Mr. Yeltsin was at once the country’s democratic father and a reviled figure blamed for most of the ills and hardships after the Soviet collapse. The last Soviet president and, for a time, his rival for power, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, speaking yesterday, called Mr. Yeltsin’s “a tragic fate.”

“I express the very deepest condolences to the family of the deceased on whose shoulders rest major events for the good of the country, and serious mistakes,” Mr. Gorbachev told the Interfax news agency.

Mr. Putin released a statement late Monday declaring that Mr. Yeltsin had given the country democracy as the first elected president of Russia. “Under this title, he has taken his place in the history of this country, and of the world,” Mr. Putin said. He made no mention of Mr. Yeltsin’s role in his own rise to power. He declared April 25 a day of national mourning.

Mr. Yeltsin left a giant, if flawed, legacy. He started to establish a democratic state and then pulled back, lurching from one prime minister to another. But where Mr. Gorbachev sought to perpetuate the Communist Party, Mr. Yeltsin helped break the party’s hold over the Russian people. Although his commitment to reform wavered, Mr. Yeltsin eliminated censorship of the news media, tolerated public criticism and steered Russia toward a free market. The rapid privatization of industry led to a form of buccaneer capitalism and a new class of oligarchs, who usurped political power as they plundered the country’s resources.

But Mr. Yeltsin’s actions ensured that there would be no turning back to the centralized Soviet command economy, which had strangled growth and reduced a country of talented and cultured people and rich in natural resources to a beggar among nations.

Not least, Mr. Yeltsin was instrumental in dismembering the Soviet Union and allowing its former republics to make their way as independent states.

His leadership was erratic and often crude, and as a democrat he often ruled in the manner of a czar. He showed no reluctance to use the power of the presidency to face down his opponents, as he did in 1993, when he ordered tanks to fire on a Parliament dominated by openly seditious Communists, and as he did again in 1994, when he embarked on a harsh military operation to subdue the breakaway republic of Chechnya. It began a costly and ruinous war that almost became his undoing and that was ferociously revived in 1999 and still being waged when he resigned that year.

His relationship with the United States was a complicated one. President Clinton seized on the fall of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to advance American interests, and he and Mr. Yeltsin maintained a strikingly good rapport. In his dealings with Mr. Yeltsin, Mr. Clinton was protective, careful not to tempt old-line Communists to try to turn the clock back to dictatorship. There was some success between the two countries on nuclear issues, the removal of Soviet troops from the Baltic states and Moscow’s cooperation with NATO as it expanded toward the borders of Russia itself.

Yesterday, expressions of condolence poured into Moscow. Tributes to his democratic leadership were tempered by criticism of the corruption and lawlessness of the 1990s, the two devastating wars in Chechnya that began on his watch and, perhaps most of all, the feeling that Russia had lost its stature on the world stage.

Still, Mr. Yeltsin received grudging praise even from old enemies, like the nationalist leader and presidential challenger in 2006, Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, who said the country was never freer than it was under Mr. Yeltsin. Boris E. Nemtsov, a liberal politician who was a deputy prime minister under Mr. Yeltsin, described him as “a very rare leader” in Russian history who believed in open political competition.

Although Mr. Nemtsov criticized parts of Mr. Yeltsin’s legacy, like the wars in Chechnya, he noted that Mr. Yeltsin had listened to dissent. “What is a pity is that his successor killed his initiatives and his successes,” Mr. Nemtsov said.

Heroism and Weakness

The Yeltsin era effectively began in August 1991, when Mr. Yeltsin, as president of the Soviet republic of Russia, clambered atop a tank to rally Muscovites to put down a right-wing coup against Mr. Gorbachev, a heroic moment etched in the minds of the Russian people and television viewers around the world; it ended with his electrifying resignation speech on New Year’s Eve 1999.

Those were Mr. Yeltsin’s finest hours in an era marked by extraordinary political and economic change. To turn around the battleship that was the Soviet Union — with its bloated military-industrial establishment, its ravaged economy, its despoiled environment and its antiquated health and social services system — would have been a herculean task for any leader in the prime of life and the best of health.

But Mr. Yeltsin, a dedicated but imperfect reformer, was a man in precarious health whose frequent disappearances from public life were attributed to heart and respiratory problems, heavy drinking and bouts of depression. These personal weaknesses left a sense of lost opportunity.

Still, a former United States ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack F. Matlock Jr., said that Mr. Yeltsin, along with Mr. Gorbachev, deserved credit for what he called a “tremendous achievement.”

Together, he said in an interview, “they destroyed the most monstrous political system in the history of the world, a regime with extensive resources to keep itself in power.”

Mr. Yeltsin was the most populist of politicians. He rejected the notion of forming a political party, insisting that he was elected by “all” of the people. But it was a position that left him weak at the task of building coalitions to further necessary reforms. He sometimes played with the truth and surrounded himself with cronies.

Then, in failing health and under suspicion of enriching himself and his inner circle at the expense of the state, he resigned. In a speech that surprised the world, he asked forgiveness for his mistakes and turned over the government to Mr. Putin, a loyal aide and former officer of the K.G.B. In return, Mr. Yeltsin — and, it was rumored, his family — received a grant of immunity from criminal prosecution and credit for leaving the Kremlin voluntarily.

Mr. Yeltsin left with his fondest wish for the Russian people only partly fulfilled. “I want their lives to improve before my own eyes,” he once said, remembering growing up in a single room in a cold, communal hut.

In fact, in the chaos that accompanied the transition from the centralized economy he had inherited from the old Soviet Union, most people saw their circumstances deteriorate. Inflation became rampant, the poor became poorer, profiteers grew rich, the military and many state employees went unpaid, and criminality flourished.

Mr. Gorbachev had sought to preserve the Soviet Union and, with his programs of glasnost and perestroika, to give Communism a more human dimension. Mr. Yeltsin, on the other hand, believed that democracy, the rule of law and the market were the answers to Russia’s problems.

A big man with a ruddy face and white hair, he was full of peasant bluster — what the Russians call a real muzhik — and came to Moscow with a genuine warmth and concern for his countrymen. On a visit to the United States in 1989, he became convinced that Russia had been ruinously damaged by its state-run economic system, in which people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. Visiting a Houston supermarket, he was overwhelmed by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.

A Russia scholar, Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote that Mr. Yeltsin was in a state of shock. “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands,” Mr. Aron wrote in his 2000 biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life.” “ ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.”

Mr. Yeltsin became a hero to the Russian people and a world figure that day in August 1991 when he climbed atop a Soviet Army tank and faced down right-wing forces who were threatening to overthrow Mr. Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader.

Long a thorn in Mr. Gorbachev’s side and soon to become his most powerful rival, on that day Mr. Yeltsin was Mr. Gorbachev’s ally. “Citizens of Russia,” Mr. Yeltsin declared. “We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anticonstitutional coup d’etat. We appeal to citizens of Russia to give an appropriate rebuff to the putschists.”

Thousands of Muscovites came out in the streets to support him, and the coup was defeated. But not long afterward he became the instrument of Mr. Gorbachev’s downfall and with it the dissolution of the Soviet state.

Mr. Yeltsin’s accomplishments are all the more remarkable given the odds against him. Bill Keller, who covered the Soviet Union for The New York Times from 1986 to 1991 and is now the paper’s executive editor, observed that when “Yeltsin emerged in the mid-1980s as the Communist Party boss of Moscow, a rambunctious, crowd-pleasing reformer, Western officials viewed him as an uninvited guest at the Gorbachev honeymoon.”

“What a flake!” Secretary of State James A. Baker III was said to have remarked after meeting Mr. Yeltsin. “He sure makes Gorbachev look good by comparison.”

To scholars on the left, he was an irksome distraction from the attempt to humanize Communism; to scholars on the right, his origins as a Communist functionary in the hinterlands made him suspect. “A typical provincial apparatchik” was the judgment of Dmitri K. Simes, a leading Russian scholar.

Yet Mr. Yeltsin had apparently been underestimated. He survived expulsion from the Communist Party Politburo in 1987, the Communist coup attempt in 1993, a failed effort to subdue Chechnya in 1994, a new challenge from the Communists in 1996, economic collapse in 1998 and a Communist-led drive to impeach him in 1999.

He also survived frequent bouts of influenza, bronchitis and pneumonia, quintuple bypass surgery in 1996, continuing heart problems, a bleeding ulcer, uncounted missed appointments and even the spectacle of toppling over at official ceremonies, due, it was widely believed, to overindulgence in vodka and bourbon.

Mr. Yeltsin may well be remembered less as a builder of institutions than as a destroyer of them. He dismantled the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, put an end to the centralized Soviet economy and crushed the putsch that threatened to return the country to the old ways.

But he could only begin the transition to a democratic, capitalist Russia based on the rule of law. The system he put in place, after fending off both legislative and military challenges, remains fragile, often incoherent and based on personality.

Nevertheless, Mr. Yeltsin brought about fundamental economic change: a market economy, however distorted and corrupt; an emerging younger class of business executives; and, in the last years of his presidency, a gradual reduction in crime.

Politically, too, his reforms had impact. The legislature began to shape politics, the news media kept most of their newly acquired freedoms, and political rivals competed openly in elections.

In his lifetime, the worst that many in Russia and the West had feared — a Communist revival or new fascism built on chaos — never materialized, although press freedoms have been curtailed under Mr. Putin and fears about the fragility of democracy in Russia have been stirred.

But Mr. Yeltsin failed when it came to the undramatic work of hammering out the political and economic framework needed to consolidate the new Russian state. His refusal to establish a new political party left him without a structure for his reforms.

“Yeltsin’s understanding is a tabula rasa,” said Vitaly T. Tretyakov, editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, one of Moscow’s most respected newspapers. “In economics, his knowledge is nil — nil. In how to construct a state, zero. It’s really the same in all fields. It’s not his fault, of course. To come to power, he had to contest everything. But leading is a different matter.”

Stymied by War and Resistance

Mr. Yeltsin was an adept politician, regarded as better than Mr. Gorbachev. But perhaps because of an embarrassingly boisterous style, he never received the respect and affection in the West accorded Mr. Gorbachev, who was loved for his Western manner and his willingness to end the cold war’s nuclear standoff.
Mr. Yeltsin was more of a democrat than his predecessor, but drawing on old habits from his years as a Communist Party boss, he surrounded himself with acolytes. They rarely told him what he did not want to hear, and led him into adventures like Chechnya.

Mr. Yeltsin’s evolution as a politician was ultimately stymied by the fierce opposition to the changes he brought and by the unpopular war he began in Chechnya, which he was unable to win and was unwilling to end.

His campaign to subdue the secessionists in Chechnya, starting in December 1994, left as many as 80,000 people dead. It undermined his moral authority and threatened his hold on power. It exposed the breakdown of the once-vaunted Russian military machine. And it raised concern about the stability of a country still holding a huge nuclear arsenal.

The killing of civilians and widespread human rights abuses in Chechnya tainted the image of a democratic Russia in the West.

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin first came to public attention in 1985, when Mr. Gorbachev brought him to Moscow from Sverdlovsk (now once again called Yekaterinburg), where he was party chief. He breezed into the capital, a bumptious provincial, and was soon jumping on trolley buses and demanding to know why they were not running on time and charging into stores to harangue managers over empty shelves.

When he was appointed by Mr. Gorbachev as head of the Moscow City Party Committee, Mr. Yeltsin declared war on bribery and corruption, fought against the privileges the party elite considered its right, and worked to get food — particularly fresh vegetables — into stores and private markets.

He sought to make the city more attractive and livable, with street cafes and fruit stalls. He encouraged a freer press.

It was when he brought his brusque manner and open criticism to the inner workings of the Communist Party that he fell afoul of his mentor, Mr. Gorbachev, creating a rupture that was never healed.

Mr. Yeltsin took the unusual step at a closed party plenum in 1987 of launching a personal attack on his conservative rival, Yegor K. Ligachev, and denouncing the lethargic pace of reform. His speech was not published, but his words percolated into the Moscow rumor mill.

Mr. Yeltsin’s break with the party had begun, and it was that moment that Mr. Gorbachev chose to humiliate him. He called Mr. Yeltsin away from his sickbed to face criticism from the Moscow Party, which then dismissed Mr. Yeltsin as Moscow Party leader and forced him to resign from the Politburo. Mr. Gorbachev gave him to a job in the construction bureaucracy.

Though Mr. Yeltsin was never rehabilitated by the party, Mr. Gorbachev and the party unwittingly provided the vehicle for his resurrection, by establishing an elected Parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies. Mr. Yeltsin saw his chance and ran for office as an underdog and victim. Campaigning on television, he denounced the privileges of the party elite and in 1989 won a Moscow citywide seat in the Congress with a remarkable 90 percent of the vote.

Once in the Parliament, Mr. Yeltsin won the admiration of pro-democracy intellectuals, built alliances with nationalist leaders and established himself as the vital voice of Russia’s future, while casting Mr. Gorbachev as the ghost of the Soviet past.

Then in the spring of 1990, in another landslide, Mr. Yeltsin was elected to the Russian legislature, which voted him president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. But Mr. Yeltsin wanted a popular mandate and called for elections. He stunned his fellow delegates when he resigned from the Communist Party and still won the popular vote for the presidency on June 12, 1991.

That vote made him the first legitimately elected leader in the thousand years of Russian government, and provided him with an extraordinary forum for attacking Mr. Gorbachev’s policies.

It was two months later, in August 1991, that Mr. Yeltsin strode from his office in the Russian republic’s headquarters, the White House, to thwart a right-wing coup, an act of heroism that saved Mr. Gorbachev but also sealed the Soviet leader’s doom. From atop a T-72 tank, Mr. Yeltsin declared: “The legally elected president of the country has been removed from power. We proclaim all decisions and decrees of this committee to be illegal.”

His ability to rally Muscovites that night suggested that a democratic spirit was taking hold in a land that had known nothing but czars and commissars. Five days later, Mr. Gorbachev effectively closed the Bolshevik era when he resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party and dissolved its Central Committee.

Mr. Yeltsin saw himself as a man with a mission. “The system gave birth to me, and the system changed me,” he once said. “Now it is time for me to change the system.” Toward that end, days after he thwarted the coup, Mr. Yeltsin signed a decree suspending the activities of the Communist Party. And he created a Constitutional Court as a guarantee against the arbitrariness of the Soviet system, though the court later proved a pliable reed and revived the party.

But even as Mr. Yeltsin had taken for Russia the mantle of Soviet power, he entered uncharted territory, and his country was already in a shambles. He had to build a state in a country where the people with experience had been loyal to the system he had just destroyed. “I can’t say that we had to start from scratch,” he wrote, “but almost.”

Russia had moved from too strong a state to too weak a state. It had moved from autarky to dependence on goods from abroad. Under enormous pressures of economic disintegration and political disarray, Mr. Yeltsin set about to negotiate the dismantling of the Soviet Union and its republics.

Mr. Yeltsin first let the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia go their own way, ending Mr. Gorbachev’s increasingly violent efforts to keep them tied to the Soviet empire.

By the end of that year, with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine, he broke the Soviet Union apart and negotiated what became the Commonwealth of Independent States. But the grouping, dominated by Russia and plagued by ineffectiveness and lingering suspicions, was eventually all but abandoned as a useful instrument.

Faced with an embittered Russian nationalism at home, Mr. Yeltsin reasserted Russian economic rights and tried to defend the rights of Russian nationals left stranded and unhappy in the new countries.

And under his command, Russia organized an independent (if demoralized) army and took control of most of the Soviet nuclear inheritance as well as the Soviet Union’s seat on the United Nations Security Council.

He also took on the Soviet debt. Mr. Yeltsin continued to pursue Mr. Gorbachev’s policy of cooperation with the West, not least because economic aid could come only from that direction. He reaffirmed Russia’s adherence to arms control treaties and to extensive arms reductions.

In his second term, despite resilient opposition from nationalists, he acquiesced in an expansion of NATO toward Russia’s western border.

But his critics complained that he had ceded too much autonomy to the West and that he had been outmaneuvered by Ukraine, which gained control of much of the Black Sea fleet and its share of the former Soviet nuclear arsenal.

Cronies, Cars and Country Houses

In time, the Boris Yeltsin who was admired for showing he could grow with each new responsibility seemed to become less flexible as president, more impulsive, less democratic, ever more reliant on cronies. It was said, for example, that he frequently took the advice of his longtime bodyguard, Aleksandr A. Korzhakov, a former K.G.B. officer and mysterious éminence grise, who had access to top-secret information and monitored everything that went in and out of Mr. Yeltsin’s office.

In 1995 Natalya Ivanova, editor of Znamya, a highly regarded journal of literature and comment, said in an interview, “Some people learn all their lives, and some people stop learning. Sadly, Yeltsin stopped learning in 1991.”

At that time, when Mr. Yeltsin at first moved into the Kremlin office of the party general secretary, he said he felt uncomfortable in the lush surroundings. He explained in the second volume of his 1994 autobiography, “The Struggle for Russia,” that the move to the Kremlin was required for security purposes. But the luxurious trappings of office contradicted the populist platform on which he had been elected.

What was more, the abandon with which his subordinates parceled out the old perks of office — the cars, the country houses, the resort vacations — suggested that for all the talk of change, things were looking very much the same. The bureaucratic elite that ran the Soviet Union had gotten over its shock and had begun to re-establish new ties to Mr. Yeltsin and the government. With that, the intellectuals became alienated.

Ordinary Russians chafed under the steep price increases he ordered in the initial phase of his bold economic gamble, and many questioned the competence of the people he chose to carry out his reforms.

In December 1991, Mr. Yeltsin backed a young economist, Yegor T. Gaidar, and eliminated price controls in early January 1992. This was shock therapy, Mr. Yeltsin acknowledged in his autobiography. “They expected paradise on earth,” he wrote, “but instead they got inflation, unemployment, economic shock and political crisis.”

To say nothing of crime and corruption. But shock therapy was applied for only a few months. When Mr. Yeltsin decided that Russia could take no more strain, and in the face of severe criticism from the holdover Parliament, he replaced Mr. Gaidar as prime minister in December 1992 with Mr. Chernomyrdin, a more reassuring industrialist who ran the natural-gas monopoly.

Nevertheless, the fight with Parliament continued, with the opposition soon led by the man Mr. Yeltsin himself had chosen as vice president, Aleksandr V. Rutskoi. Mr. Yeltsin again put himself and his policies before the people, in a referendum in April 1993, and again he won a big vote of confidence. But by the autumn, he was forced to defend himself and his reforms in a bloody confrontation with more conservative nationalist legislators.

The struggle became a serious fight for power and ended with the indelible image of tanks firing at the Parliament building itself.

A Bloody Standoff in Moscow

In September 1993, Mr. Yeltsin dissolved the Russian legislature, declaring that the “irreconcilable opposition” of its large number of Communist holdovers had paralyzed his reforms. He acted after a member of the opposition, in a gesture Russians understood, indicated with a flick of the index finger that Mr. Yeltsin was drunk. But there was also strong evidence that the Parliament’s leaders intended to remove him under the old Soviet constitution and empower Mr. Rutskoi, whom Mr. Yeltsin had summarily dismissed.

Mr. Yeltsin announced elections to a new Parliament. The Supreme Soviet, the Parliament’s day-to-day policy-making arm, responded by voting overwhelmingly to depose him. Mr. Yeltsin then ordered the police to surround the Parliament and cut off the electricity, setting the stage for the violent confrontation.

It came two weeks later, in October, after parliamentary supporters, urged on by Mr. Rutskoi, broke through police lines and rampaged through Moscow. With Mr. Yeltsin at his dacha and the government inattentive, the demonstrators could probably have taken the Kremlin if they had tried.

Mr. Yeltsin was in a panic. He called in elite troops. In a 10-hour barrage by tanks and armored personnel carriers, Mr. Yeltsin routed his rebellious opposition, leaving dozens dead and the vast White House a burning, windowless shell. It was the worst civil strife in Moscow since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

This time a different Yeltsin emerged. He imposed an overnight curfew and banned extremist opposition parties. He briefly closed down Pravda and other newspapers that had supported the rebels. Mr. Rutskoi and other leaders were jailed, only to be soon pardoned by the new Parliament. The Yeltsin optimism was gone.
“Do not say that someone has won and someone has lost,” the shaken leader warned his people. “These are inappropriate, blasphemous words. We have all been scorched by the deadly breath of fratricide.”

By 1996, the threat of a Communist resurgence behind his chief rival for the presidency, Gennadi A. Zyuganov, energized Mr. Yeltsin. He threw himself into the campaign, flying all over the country, shaking thousands of hands and performing everything from peasant dances to a much-televised version of the twist.

To ensure his victory, Mr. Yeltsin sealed a dramatic election pact with Aleksandr I. Lebed, a gruff former general he had fired. Mr. Yeltsin identified Mr. Lebed as a likely successor and made him chairman of the powerful National Security Council. But to ensure that Mr. Lebed would not become a rival, he then saddled him with trying to find an honorable end to the Chechnya fiasco.

Just before the final round of voting, Mr. Yeltsin had what his doctors later acknowledged to be a heart attack, and he nearly disappeared from sight. It seemed the end of the Yeltsin era. But the latest setback to his health was hidden from voters by compliant Russian news media.

Mr. Yeltsin later admitted that he had reached the point where he was prepared to scuttle democracy completely and outlaw the Communist Party. In his “Midnight Diaries,” published in 2000, the year after he stepped down from the presidency, Mr. Yeltsin wrote that he had gone so far as to have the decrees prepared. But a daughter, Tatiana Dyachenko, and the former Prime Minister Anatoly B. Chubais convinced him that a power grab would backfire.

Though frail, he beat back the Communist challenge of Mr. Zyuganov and won the election by a substantial majority. Afterward, an aide described him as “colossally weary.”

Mr. Yeltsin’s poor health rendered him unable to start off his second term with the energetic recommitment to reform sought by Russia’s Western supporters, especially President Clinton. Mr. Yeltsin then underwent quintuple bypass surgery. As his health worsened, politicians maneuvered to succeed him.

He responded with his own maneuvers, appointing and firing four prime ministers in two years as he sought to deal with severe financial crisis. It was not until 1997 that Mr. Yeltsin got rid of the shadowy figure of Mr. Korzhakov. In August 1998, the ruble collapsed taking the Russian stock market with it. The government announced a moratorium on the repayment of some foreign debt and a restructuring of ruble-denominated debt.

Meanwhile the crisis worsened as the government started printing money, contributing further to inflation.
A brutal campaign was resumed in Chechnya after Chechen bandits invaded the province of Dagestan in 1999, followed by a series of bombings of Moscow apartment houses that were attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Chechen terrorists. Although the war in the Caucasus was unpopular in 1994, it was now seen as an issue of Russian territorial integrity and self-defense.

When Mr. Clinton criticized Russia’s bombardment of civilian areas in Chechnya, Mr. Yeltsin, in his last month in office, intemperately brandished his nuclear arsenal. It seemed, he said, that Mr. Clinton “had for a minute forgotten that Russia has a full arsenal of nuclear weapons.”

Mr. Yeltsin’s health continued to decline. On a visit to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in Central Asia, he appeared to nearly fall over as he listened to a band. At a dinner, he gave a confused version of a speech, reading from the beginning, then the end; apparently realizing he had finished too quickly, he finally reverted to the middle section.

In 1999, the Communists in Russia’s Parliament led a drive to impeach Mr. Yeltsin. In addition to waging what was called an illegal war in Chechnya, the charges against him included illegally dismantling the Soviet Union in 1991, staging the violent coup against rebellious Communists in Parliament in 1993, destroying the Russian military and committing genocide by allowing living standards to plummet, leading millions of Russians to an early death. The impeachment effort failed when 100 members of the legislature boycotted the vote.

During his last month in office, Mr. Yeltsin, with the help of the popularity of his chosen successor, Mr. Putin, was able to win enough votes in the Parliament to pursue economic reform and break the Communist hold on legislation. But Mr. Putin was soon making alliances with the same Communists who had gone down to defeat.

Mr. Yeltsin was a moody man subject to pessimism and lassitude. In his autobiography, he wrote of the burdens he carried: “The debilitating bouts of depression, the grave second thoughts, the insomnia and headaches in the middle of the night, the tears and despair, the sadness at the appearance of Moscow and other Russian cities, the flood of criticism from the newspapers and television every day, the harassment campaign at the Congress sessions.”

Raised in a Peasant Hut

If Mr. Yeltsin was unable to fulfill his vast promise, it was due more to the immensity of the task than to any lack of desire for change, for he knew first-hand the misery of the Russian people under Communism.
Boris Yeltsin was born on Feb. 1, 1931, to a peasant family in Butko, a village in the Sverdlovsk district of the Urals, the oldest of six children. When his father moved to the town of Berezniki as a laborer, during what Mr. Yeltsin called “Stalin’s so-called period of industrialization,” the family was allocated a single room in a communal hut. He recalled in 1990 in the first volume of his autobiography, “Against the Grain,” that they lived in that hut for 10 years.

“Winter was worst of all,” he wrote. “There was nowhere to hide from the cold. Since we had no warm clothes, we would huddle up to the nanny goat to keep warm. We children survived on her milk.”

He was still a boy during World War II when he lost the thumb and forefinger of his left hand; he and some friends had stolen a grenade and were trying to take it apart to see what was inside when it exploded.

At the Urals Polytechnic Institute he studied civil engineering and played volleyball. On graduation, he returned to Sverdlovsk, where he was offered the job of foreman at an industrial building site. He refused, insisting that he work in each trade so that when he was in a position to give orders, he would know what he was talking about.

He did not join the Communist Party until 1961, when he was 30, an age at which Mr. Gorbachev was already well on his way up in the party hierarchy. For Mr. Yeltsin, membership was a move to further his career in the Sverdlovsk construction agency, not an expression of belief in Communism.

Fifteen years later, after serving as a secretary of the Sverdlovsk provincial committee, Mr. Yeltsin became party chief for the region and stood out in the stagnation of the Brezhnev era as an activist less interested in the perquisites of office than in rooting out bureaucratic corruption.

When Mr. Gorbachev became general secretary of the party in 1985, he sought out regional leaders, among them Mr. Yeltsin. But he may have gotten more than he bargained for. Seeking a Mr. Clean image, Mr. Yeltsin turned down an offer of a government dacha. “We were shattered by the senselessness of it all,” he wrote, after he and his family were taken to see a “cottage” of enormous fireplaces, marble paneling, chandeliers and grand furniture.

Mr. Yeltsin had found a subject he could ride and he later used it, often, as a blunt club, at one point tartly enumerating all of Mr. Gorbachev’s houses and dachas as he decried “the leadership’s privileges.”

“I believe the fault lies in his basic cast of character,” he said of Mr. Gorbachev. “He likes to live well, in comfort and luxury. In this he is helped by his wife.”

To this he contrasted the simple tastes of his own wife and his daughters, Yelena Okulova and Tatiana Dyachenko, who, along with three grandchildren, survive him. But as Russia’s new rich started dotting the countryside, Mr. Yeltsin, too, was soon enveloping himself in comfort and relative luxury, enjoying life at a state dacha, playing tennis, wearing trendy Western fashion, using more limousines than Mr. Gorbachev ever had, and allowing those officials around him to live equally well, if not better.

At a time when state employees, army officials and pensioners went unpaid, a reported $823 million was spent to restore palaces, churches, offices and Mr. Yeltsin’s Kremlin residence to czarist splendor. By 1999, Mr. Yeltsin and his family were being accused of accepting kickbacks.

Living as a ‘Great, Bright Flame’

It was Mr. Yeltsin’s personal excesses that made him particularly vulnerable. In his 1989 visit to the United States, he acted like an American politician in the middle of a campaign. But reporters also noted his thirst for bourbon. In his autobiography, Mr. Yeltsin attributed his slurred speech during that visit to the effects of a sleeping pill and exhaustion from jet lag.

In a still-puzzling incident before he became president, he turned up soaking wet at a police station near Moscow. According to one version, a jealous husband pushed him off a bridge. Mr. Yeltsin intimated that the K.G.B. was trying to kill him.

Mr. Yeltsin denied reports that he drank too much, although he acknowledged that he turned to alcohol to relieve stress. “I am not an ascetic,” he told Barbara Walters in a televised interview in 1992.

“Athletic activity and alcohol are two things that are incompatible with each other,” he continued, speaking through an interpreter. “I’m very actively engaged in sports, an hour and a half every Tuesday and Saturday, athletic exercise morning and night, a cold shower, and very intensive work for 19 to 20 hours a day.”

Some attributed his aberrant antics and his puffy face to the pain medication he took for a severe back problem stemming from a 1990 airplane accident, and the way such medication might mix with alcohol.
There was no such explanation for his erratic behavior some years later when an embarrassed Chancellor Helmut Kohl had to help him down the steps after he played the buffoon, boisterously picking up a baton to conduct the Berlin police orchestra.

Mr. Yeltsin was stung by criticism of his drinking and tried to clean up his image for awhile. But he was soon stumbling and slurring his words again and repeatedly disappearing again for long holidays.

There were also signs of worsening heart disease, including a hospitalization in July 1995. For the first time, the Kremlin admitted there was a diagnosis, myocardial ischemia, which is a shortage of oxygen to the heart muscle because of narrowed arteries. He was out of the Kremlin for four weeks and then took a monthlong vacation.

He had another attack of ischemia in October 1995, after a visit to France and the United States, and was hospitalized again. “A man must live like a great, bright flame and burn as brightly as he can,” Mr. Yeltsin said in March 1990. “In the end he burns out. But this is better than a mean little flame.”

After anointing Mr. Putin as his successor and being granted immunity from prosecution, Mr. Yeltsin largely withdrew from public life, devoting himself to his favorite pastime: tennis.

He did occasionally weigh in. In 2004, he rebuked Mr. Putin’s plans to eliminate direct elections for regional governors and individual members of Parliament in the wake of the terrorist attack on the school in Beslan, in southern Russia, where more than 300 hostages died.

More often, he praised Mr. Putin’s stewardship and kept his concerns, if any, to himself. “I am glad that I was not mistaken in choosing Vladimir Putin,” he said in a magazine interview in 2006. “I understand that a rapidly developing Russia needed a young president. I tried to find someone for whom the ideals of liberty and the free market, and an understanding of the need to move forward together with the civilized nations, would be the most important values.”

No one recognized more than he how far short he fell of his goal. In his resignation speech, he told the Russian people: “I ask forgiveness for not justifying some hopes of those people who believed that at one stroke, in one spurt, we could leap from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past into the light, rich, civilized future.”

At the end, he was a man worn down. “I feel like a runner who has just completed a supermarathon of 40,000 kilometers,” he wrote in his memoir. “I gave it my all. I put my whole heart and soul into running my presidential marathon. I honestly went the distance. If I have to justify anything, here is what I will say: If you think you can do it better, just try. Run those 40,000 kilometers. Try to do it faster, better, more elegantly, or more easily. Because I did it.”

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Moscow.