Eminentoes: Appreciating Boris

...Yeltsin's most recent absence from public view was followed by the predictable sigh of collective international relief when he appeared upright and even smiling on Russian TV to greet his new health minister Tatyana Dimitrievna (looking like a sixth-grader meeting the principal for the first time) and rebuke his newly prominent national security chief Aleksandr Lebed...

...His weakness for the bottle let him down early on...

...We in the West may soon have reason to look back in kindness on Yeltsin's extraordinary achievement...

...Is he sick...

...After Gorbachev banished him from the Politburo in 1987 to the post of Deputy Minister of the Construction Industry, he flatly refused several Kremlin special food and retail services that came with the job...

...Campaigning toe-to-toe against the Party apparat in March 1989 elections to the Congress of People's Deputies, he won by a landslide...

...When the pendulum of political popularity swung abruptly against him the following April, he did not flinch from a test of wills provoked by the anti-Yeltsin Russian parliament of the day...

...That so much in Russia seems to hang on Yeltsin's ability to stay alive a few more months speaks volumes about Yeltsin's real contribution over the past seven years...

...When he stumbled into the White House a few hours later, just barely sober, and lectured clean-living national security adviser Brent Scowcroft on how the U.S...

...Both were definitely firsts for a former member of the Soviet Politburo...

...he asked rhetorically...

...He will almost certainly need either angioplasty or bypass surgery...

...He won more than 50 percent of the vote in defeating four prickly opponents in Russia's first-ever general election in June, and two months later defended his Russian "White House" against a Soviet military coup in a famous display of courage that led to the final dissolution of Soviet power once and for all...

...DAVID AIKMAN, a former Time correspon dent, reported frequently from the Soviet Union and Russia from 1986-1994...

...Congress...

...How long will he be gone this time...

...For three hours he spoke without a note before the cream of Soviet society: ballet stars, retired admirals, novelists, academics, scientists, answering question after question handed up to him in the form of little notes...

...E M I N E N T O E S by David Aikman Appreciating Boris I t has become an almost eye-rolling feature of European politics: Russian president Boris Yeltsin, fresh from some domestic or foreign policy triumph, slouches like a grumpy bear back into a cave of despondency and self-imposed isolation from the world...

...How much money do Politburo members earn...

...He had kept himself alive during the three month odyssey by unloading coal and preparing an army colonel for his college exams...

...But also a warm human being, a genuine convert from Communism to democracy, and a leader refreshingly devoid of messianic pretensions for Russia...

...Within three months of that near-catastrophe, he won wide approval for a constitution that has actually worked remarkably well...

...The Muscovites had understood there was something different about Yeltsin...

...Eight hun dred rubles a month," he revealed...

...Now he reaps the rewards of this work...

...There was nearly an accident in the motorcade as Russian security men panicked at the idea that nuclear codes and other state secrets were being transferred to an American worker...

...Four...

...He quickly identified the leading democratic reformers in that short-lived organ of quasi-legislature, mobilized them, and made them a force of consequence...

...crest Yed with his second visit in early 1992...

...ought to help Russia, the damage was done...

...He had been hugely popular in Moscow as the Party boss brought in by Gorbachev during 1986-1987 to clean up the morass of bureaucracy and cor 58 October 19 9 6 • The American Spectator ruption that engulfed the city...

...How many people [in the Politburo] voted for the war in Afghanistan...

...He cracked down on meat stores whose staff kept supplies back for favored cronies and he stood up to both the party hacks who ran the town and the food distribution mafia who worked closely with them...

...It is easy, after all, to find fault with him: his impulsiveness, moodiness, and alcoholism, his inability to think strategically, his attentiveness to the clamor of boorish...

...Often pompous and callous towards his subordinates...

...In Houston, after his first experience of the cornucopia of an American supermarket, he broke down in a NASA bus and wept...

...Undoubtedly...

...It was touching to see how genuinely curious and admiring Yeltsin was of American democracy and capitalism...

...In early 1992, he visited our White House and received a standing ovation before a joint session of the U.S...

...Nonetheless, that Russian democracy has survived so far is almost entirely due to the character of this bearish, often boorish man...

...The U.S...

...They rushed to retrieve the jacket, but for the remainder of the day, Yeltsin remained in his shirtsleeves, embarrassed that his garment exchange had not held up...

...He defied protocol by traveling on dreary commuter buses or the Moscow metro across the city before dawn to see what ordinary workers faced every day...

...Really...

...Despite Communist and ultra-nationalist control of the Russian Duma, Yeltsin has managed to keep his country's foreign policy on an even keel...

...Just days before the crucial election to the Congress of People's Deputies in March 1989 , I squeezed through a mob into the main auditorium in the House of Actors in Moscow to see Yeltsin on stage...

...Yeltsin pooh-poohed rumors about his heart condition, but there is hard evidence that he is indeed in need of major heart surgery...

...In October 1993, this time on the outside of the Russian White House looking in, he crushed a parliamentary revolt that might have led to a fascist takeover...

...In his modest fourthfloor Moscow office, he was uncharacteristically candid about his youth in the Urals...

...On his second night, he'd hogged a bottle of Jack Daniel's in Baltimore and showed up transparently drunk for a breakfast organized by the Johns Hopkins University...

...eltsin's popularity in the U.S...

...In 1991, he achieved two stunning successes...

...As he opened and read the notes, his face was a slow ballet of arched eyebrows, melodramatic frowns, and spreading grins...

...could have declared a miniMarshall plan for Russia, rallying its allies to aid specific infrastructure projects that had high visibility for ordinary Russians, instead of letting the impersonal and sometimes cold-seeming IMF handle everything...

...All of this is Yeltsin's doing...

...Unable to plan strategically for the domestic development of his country...

...nationalists, and, most obviously, his brutality against Chechnya...

...Six months later, I traveled with him on his first trip to the U.S...

...He had traveled illegally around the Soviet Union one summer on railroad car roofs, sleeping at night in sheds with the poor and homeless...

...Three weeks later, he won an astounding 89 percent of 6 million Muscovite votes against determined campaigning by Gorbachev allies...

...He agreed to a four-part referendum on his personal rule, and despite dire predictions by pollsters and Russia-watchers, won affirmative responses to all four questions...

...Certainly...

...Apparently...

...Is he crawling out from under yet another bout with the bottle...

...He practiced what he preached, too...

...And I want to fight for this...

...It may seem trivial to you," he said, "but I really want us to have a state that is socially just...

...We should have an open discussion of it," Yeltsin replied...

...But Yeltsin was genuinely moved by the warmth of his reception on Capitol Hill...

...Yeltsin was relaxed, and as ever, impulsively warm...

...When a labor union official presented him with a union windbreaker at a meat-packing plant, Yeltsin spontaneously took off his large, pale gray lightweight suit jacket and handed it to the man...

...From my very first interview of the man in February 1989, I knew he was a wholly new phenomenon on the Soviet political scene: a genuine populist, with an entirely un-Soviet sensitivity to the gripes of ordinary people...

...However fragile, Russian democracy has provided enough incentives to the citizenry for a majority to want it to continue...

...He wanted to ride on the New York subway, so along I went amid the noise and graffiti on his visit to the New York Stock Exchange...

...Has he had another heart attack...

...Unpredictable...

...These are just some of the reasons why, for all of his faults, we continue to worry about Boris Yeltsin's health...

...An official Kremlin medical advisory obtained by Time magazine indicated that his cardia ischemia (constriction of the heart through a blockage of the heart arteries) worsened seriously during the June election campaign...

...he answered daringly, revealing what had until then been a closely guarded secret...

...On top of that, he could just as easily be done in by the ferocity of Kremlin infighting over how to end the war in Chechnya...

...I first became acquainted with Yeltsin during 1989-1993, a period that saw him roar out of the political obscurity to which Gorbachev had banished him after his expulsion from the Soviet Politburo in 1987...

...It taught me a lot," he said of the trip...

...What about multi-party democracy, someone else wanted to know, mentioning a hitherto Soviet taboo...

...See how well these homeowners look after their property," he commented in Minnesota out of a car window...

...It was a moment of American-Russian warmth that, had the Bush administration seized it properly, might well have helped defuse much of the growing anti-American bitterness in Moscow during the past year...

...His audience, totally unaccustomed to candor and political courage, could have listened to him till dawn...

...Despite his quite sober performance during the rest of his trip, the Bush administration spent the next two years dismissing him as a buffoon and insisting, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Gorbachev's view of the Soviet future was more realistic than Yeltsin's...

...59 The American Spectator • October 19 9 6...

...Senator Bob Dole also basked briefly in Yeltsin's reflected glory on a side-trip to Kansas just before Yeltsin's return to Russia...

...Yeltsin seemed to sense then that the political tide of Russia itself was flowing in his direction...