Boris the Good

...But Yeltsin’s approval ratings continued to drop, particularly after he launched a highly unpopular war in Chechnya...

...Rather than seeking consensus, he issued an endless stream of decrees, thus keeping alive the tradition of arbitrary executive power...

...Yeltsin then pushed through a referendum on a new constitution that awarded him sweeping presidential powers...

...When opposition legislators refused to heed his edict to disband parliament in 1993, he ordered his troops and tanks to shell and storm the same building where he had defi ed the coup plotters two years earlier...

...Bush in Houston the next day, just as he was preparing to board a presidential plane that would take him and Bill Clinton to Yeltsin’s funeral...

...He has produced a wellresearched book with many interesting details drawn from his interviews with Yeltsin, his family, and a variety of other key players, but one that feels oddly incomplete...

...He then orchestrated the dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving him in charge of the new Russia and his archrival Gorbachev out of a job...

...This latest biography of the father of the new Russia feels like a product of earlier times, when the Yeltsin glow was still there and Putin’s shadow was barely visible...

...It’s true that the Russian media were still freer than they ever had been (or would be afterwards) and that people began to take new freedoms for granted, such as the right to travel...

...Yeltsin does deserve full credit for his role as, in Colton’s words, “the dragon slayer who sallied forth from the belly of the beast...

...In fact, Walesa preferred to lose to the ex-Communists rather than destroy Poland’s fragile new democratic institutions...

...But unlike Walesa and Havel, Yeltsin didn’t build democratic institutions that he would respect, even when they didn’t work in his favor...

...The rest, of course, is some wellknown recent history...

...Colton is too much of an admirer of his subject and of his early, admittedly impressive, career to fi ll that void...

...And increasingly, Yeltsin rewarded the oligarchs—to wit, the “loans-for-shares” scheme that helped bail him out at the cost of further plundering of the state’s assets, only to trigger more public fury...

...Colton blithely dismisses charges that Yeltsin cut a deal with Putin to protect his family and entourage from corruption charges...

...Arguing his case for a constitution that gave him sweeping presidential powers, he warned that anything less could lead to chaos, and then “people would demand a dictator...

...And it’s worth noting that the Yeltsin era was marked by a steep decline in oil prices, the exact opposite of today’s situation that has allowed the Putin regime to trumpet its economic successes...

...In today’s Russia the 1990s are dismissed as the wild years, which set the stage for Vladimir Putin’s reversion to strong-arm rule that has eliminated almost all checks and balances, steadily strangled political freedoms, and allowed an oil-rich, cash-fl ush elite to throw its weight around again at home and abroad...

...His predecessors had blamed the Germans, but in 1992, Yeltsin dispatched an envoy to Warsaw with the original Kremlin order for those executions...

...The irony is that the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, whom he plucked from relative obscurity, has played that role quite well...

...And he doesn’t even mention the suspicious activities of the FSB (as the KGB is now called) that have prompted a few vocal critics to charge that a series of apartment bombings that took 300 lives in 1999, which Putin blamed on Chechen terrorists, may have been a provocation...

...Corruption, mob hits, and general lawlessness prevailed...

...After all, he demonstrated tremendous political acumen and courage...

...There’s no doubt that Boris Yeltsin is a far more sympathetic character than Vladimir Putin, and that Putin is to blame for Russia’s path in recent years...

...What’s sorely lacking, however, is the bigger picture that has been emerging with a bit of historical distance, and the kind of critical thinking about an innately attractive leader with a surfeit of glaringly visible failings...

...A loyal Communist party apparatchik for most of his career, he was perceptive enough to recognize that Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika couldn’t save the Soviet system, and then to launch his bold initiatives that would hasten its demise...

...The offi cial death toll was 187, and the building was left a burnt-out shell...

...As a result, democracy was strengthened even when its architects lost at the polls...

...While most Russians suffered, a new class of oligarchs divided up—and often fought over—the spoils of the Communist system...

...The guarantee that Yeltsin wouldn’t abuse his new powers was supposed to be his own commitment to democracy, and Colton is willing to give him the benefi t of the doubt in most cases...

...When Lech Walesa was faced with a resurgent party of ex-Communists, he sometimes envied Yeltsin’s methods...

...But it was Yeltsin’s political tactics, as much as his economic decisions, which were responsible for the fact that Russia has deviated so dramatically from the democratic course that countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic have followed...

...At home, Yeltsin also encouraged efforts to break with the country’s history of lies, and he appeared genuinely shocked by successive new revelations, such as Lenin’s orders to execute 25,000 Russian Orthodox priests during the civil war...

...But soon Yeltsin’s domestic constituents were far more preoccupied with the impact of his economic program, which at fi rst offered far more shock than therapy...

...To ensure its passage, some of the extreme Communist and nationalist publications were closed down, while the mainstream media found themselves increasingly manipulated or controlled by the new oligarchs...

...The backlash to those bombings propelled Putin to an easy victory in the presidential contest of 2000...

...But he never imitated them...

...The other irony is that, to justify his relentless power grab, Putin convinced most Russians that the 1990s under Yeltsin had been a period of unremitting anarchy and injustice...

...That’s certainly a tenable argument...

...There was one thing Clinton and I agreed on: We both liked Yeltsin,” he said...

...Colton acknowledges all those negative trends, but never examines the impact on the lives of ordinary Russians in more than an abstract way...

...Contrast that record with Yeltsin’s...

...But his enabler can’t be left off the hook, either...

...His abrupt price liberalization led to astronomical infl ation (2,520 percent in 1992), the loss of the life savings of millions, and a steady decline in national output...

...Dmitry Medvedev in March, and none of the substance...

...I happened to be visiting President George H.W...

...He implicitly suggests that no transition from the Soviet to a market economy could have avoided widespread pain and abuses...

...He ostentatiously quit the Communist party before the Soviet system collapsed, and he stood up to the hardliners who tried to topple Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, jumping on a tank to talk the army into turning against the wouldbe putschists...

...His most stunning gesture: admitting historical truths—most notably, Soviet responsibility for the murder of thousands of Polish army offi cers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in 1940...

...But when it comes to the most revealing comparisons, with Walesa and Havel, the results clearly contradict Colton: Poland and the Czech Republic have emerged as stable democracies...

...But it’s no accident that the Yeltsin era—and particularly, the initial optimism of that period—feels like ancient history now...

...In Yeltsin: A Life, Harvard professor Timothy J. Colton chronicles, often in painstaking detail, his political twists and turns, the multiple health crises that accompanied his latter years in power, and his endless hiring and fi ring of key people as he tried to keep one step ahead of the shifting alliances around him...

...When Yeltsin died on April 23, 2007, Western leaders looked back nostalgically at his era and his efforts to end Cold War tensions...

...As much as he wanted to consider himself a democrat, Yeltsin had little patience for outright defi ance...

...Aside from developing a new relationship with Washington, Yeltsin won the sympathy of some of Russia’s neighbors, who were still smarting from Soviet subjugation...

...Russia is once again pursuing its own path, where all that is left of democratic practices are the formal trappings, like the sham election of Andrew Nagorski is a Newsweek International senior editor and the author, most recently, of The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II...

...As downturns go, Russia’s in the 1990s ranks with the Great Depression of 1929-33 in the United States,” Colton points out...

...A new Yeltsin biography should make it easier to understand why the opposite could and did happen, but Colton generally prefers to downplay that part of the story...

...Colton concedes that Yeltsin was “enigmatic and fl awed,” but insists he was a hero nonetheless...

...As a democratizer, he is in the company of Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Vaclav Havel,” he writes...

...In fact, there was far more hope in those years that Russia would somehow fi nd its way to a more open system than there is now...

...Little wonder that Yeltsin became the focus of widespread disillusionment and anger...

...The Gorbachev-Yeltsin comparisons and contrasts are a subject unto themselves, and South Africa presents a very different model...

...He also vowed to turn Russia into a democratic state, with a free market economy and a newly empowered citizenry...

...His frequent disappearances, prompted by his heart problems and drinking binges, only contributed further to this downward trend...