Rising Star: The Man Who Rules Russia

By DAVID AIKMAN/WASHINGTON

The dramatic rhetoric, the bold, often impulsive political gestures, the sometimes imperious style: as Boris Yeltsin has grown larger upon the political stage, the world has grown more familiar with his outsize personality, including his glaring character flaws and his impressive personal and political strengths. Yet there are transforming moments in a leader's life when his actions change forever the way he views himself or the way the world views him. Last week Yeltsin stood on such a pinnacle. All the qualities that made him one of the most fascinating and problematic political figures in the age of Gorbachev were recast in the form of Russia's man of destiny. Yeltsin's view of himself may not have changed, but the world discovered a giant.

Yeltsin has at various times been dismissed, both in the Kremlin and in the West, as a buffoon, an opportunist, a would-be autocrat wrapped in a populist mantle. His judgment has often been questioned -- along with his sobriety. Cynical speculation has abounded about his conversion to democratic principles. His assertiveness and impulsiveness have always exasperated more conventional politicians like Gorbachev, who viewed Yeltsin for years with wariness and distrust.

Yet whatever his detractors and enemies said, Yeltsin's extraordinary political career time and again has demonstrated that he had one thing they lacked: an intimate relationship with the Russian masses. "Yeltsin rises on a turret and around him there are no ghosts of past Kremlin rulers, but real Russians, not yet vanished," observed the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Yeltsin, unlike his peers in the Kremlin, has experienced a mercurial rise based on shaking off the past and embracing the radical opportunities of the uncertain present.

Like all men and women who survive and flourish in public life, Yeltsin has evolved and matured, changing from an ambitious technocrat to an energetic, near bullying party boss to an impassioned if erratic reformer. Born in 1931 in Sverdlovsk province in the Ural Mountains, he grew up in a family so poor that all six members slept on the floor of a one-room apartment with a goat. His childhood was, he has written, "a fairly joyless time." He was always, he later recalled, "a little bit of a hooligan." When he was 11, he lost the thumb and forefinger of his left hand after he and a pair of chums stole two hand grenades from a warehouse; as they tinkered with the weapons, one exploded. He was expelled from grade school for denouncing a sadistic teacher. Yeltsin stubbornly pursued the battle, and the teacher was eventually fired.

Trained as an engineer, Yeltsin waited until he was 30 before joining the Communist Party. By 1985 he had carved out a regional reputation as the reform-minded first secretary of the Sverdlovsk district central committee; it was enough to bring him to the attention of another reformer from the hinterland, the newly installed Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev soon appointed Yeltsin first secretary of the Moscow city party committee. Thereupon the tall, bulky technocrat seemed to settle into a sort of permanent guerrilla war with his superiors in the Politburo and with his often corrupt underlings throughout the city's rambling bureaucracy.

In the Politburo he chafed openly at Gorbachev's go-along committee style, as the new leader maneuvered to consolidate power. He began to rock the boat loudly, with sulfurous speeches that argued for rooting out corruption and injustice. In Moscow he rode the subway and workers' grimy commuter buses, barged into stores to ask why there was no meat for sale, fired hundreds of incompetents from the city's payroll and arrested hundreds of others for corruption. Embarrassed by Yeltsin's increasingly critical tone, Gorbachev in late 1987 forced him out of the Politburo and humiliated him at a closed plenum of the Moscow party committee, after Yeltsin had made an impassioned plea for greater democracy. On Moscow streets the news of his downfall was greeted with something akin to mourning.

Lesser souls might have languished indefinitely in the deputy ministerial sinecure that Gorbachev tossed Yeltsin's way as a consolation prize. But Yeltsin nursed himself back to both political and physical health and bided his time. During the 15 months he spent in the wilderness, he built up a coterie of devoted friends and followers who have supported him in all his political ventures since then. His closest administrative and political assistant, Lev Sukhanov, who has been with him since those dark days, flew personally to the Crimea last week to accompany Gorbachev back to Moscow.

Partly because of his clashes with the party apparat, Yeltsin became known as a maverick while running the Moscow party committee: he was outspoken, impetuous and disdainful of authority. He took on the entire machine in 1989 to run as Moscow's delegate-at-large for the Congress of People's Deputies. The contest was the first nationwide multicandidate parliamentary election in the Soviet Union since 1918, and Yeltsin's combative campaign won him the support of 89% of Moscow's 6 million voters, an astonishing accolade from the usually cynical and apathetic populace.

He faced a more skeptical audience in the Congress of People's Deputies. It was not until late in 1989 that Moscow's reformers became convinced that Yeltsin had undergone a genuine conversion to democracy. What persuaded the small prodemocratic interregional group in the Congress of People's Deputies was Yeltsin's willingness to work with younger and far more radical deputies and learn from them about issues he had never been familiar with, like economic privatization and the Baltics' case for independence. "Despite his age, he is teachable," says Galina Starovoitova, a senior Soviet and Russian national legislator and a longtime ally of the late Andrei Sakharov. "He has a skill at listening to people."

But not everybody else was yet persuaded. During a quirky, rushed trip to the U.S. in September 1989, when he first met George Bush, Yeltsin had to recover from a botched public appearance at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He had been drinking during the night and surprised his hosts the next day with his spirited, prankish behavior. His early reputation in the circles of the U.S. foreign policy establishment as a lightweight stemmed from an encounter with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft on the same trip. Yeltsin seemed at first unaware of who Scowcroft was: he was determined to meet Bush, the Russian insisted. Not surprisingly, "senior Administration official" comments on Yeltsin thereafter were coldly dismissive.

That was followed last June, however, by Yeltsin's great triumph, his successful campaign for the Russian presidency. In the process he was transformed again into a publicly impassioned nationalist who called his country "sick," demanded a new union treaty and castigated Gorbachev for half measures on political and economic reform. Through it all, his judgments were not always sound. He dismayed many admirers last February, for example, by bluntly calling for Gorbachev's resignation on national television.

Unlike the high-profile Gorbachev and Raisa, Yeltsin leads a reclusive home life. His wife Anastasia rarely appears in public. The couple have two daughters, two granddaughters and one grandson, also named Boris. Yeltsin plays tennis at least once a week and is an avowed admirer of the works of the anticommunist Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as the traditional classics: Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev. Again unlike Gorbachev, he has no intellectual ambitions, nor is he self-consciously "cultured."

Yeltsin's taste for raw political combat has surely been whetted by his stunning success last week. It is an important and to some extent worrisome question whether he will be able to control his triumphalist instincts in the days and weeks ahead. Now more than ever, the contrast between his personality and Gorbachev's may be the issue. Where Gorbachev is sophisticated and quick on his feet, Yeltsin speaks bluntly and seems uncomfortable with cut-and- thrust discussions. Where Yeltsin likes face-to-face airing of differences, Gorbachev seems to detest confrontation. Most important, the two men differ profoundly on political philosophy: Gorbachev is the stubborn adherent to socialism, Yeltsin the burning convert to democracy.

"If Gorbachev didn't have a Yeltsin, he would have to invent him," Yeltsin wrote wryly in his 1990 autobiography, Against the Grain. The question now is, If Gorbachev is not there, against what opponent will Yeltsin seek to match himself? Against the Soviet bureaucracy? Against George Bush? Or, like a latter-day Peter the Great, against the recalcitrant, politically inexperienced Russian people?