Thank you, Mr President

Thank you, Mr President

Yeltsin writes a happy end to the Russian century
Ideology would not have let a Russian leader retire. Biology has done it for Boris Yeltsin. His new year gift to Russia, a declaration of departure from the Kremlin, marks the less than grand finale of a turbulent chapter in Russian history. The one who is taking leave is not an ordinary Russian.

He is the first popularly elected ruler of Russia. And he is taking leave as an imperfect democrat, as a paranoid redeemer, as a man who has finally come to terms with the desperation of power. His evolutionary tale is resonant with the agony and aspirations of post-Soviet Russia. The beginning was glorious. Yeltsin the mass leader, the street fighter of democracy, the leader born out of the tragedy of the demolition man of communism, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Had there been no Gorbachev, there would have been no President Yeltsin, only Yeltsin the resident of the Gulag. He, once the typical member of the perestroika gang, symbolised the triumph ofGorbachevism. And his greatest homage to his mentor, the man who pitted his mind against the disembodied evil that was the eight decades of Soviet insanity, is captured in that defining image of August 1991: Yeltsin atop a Soviet tank, singularly taking on the second coming of Stalin. That day Yeltsin was true to what he had written in his memoirs Against the Grain: ``My own problems worried me least of all, what horrified me was that the country was falling apart.''

Power neutralised the street fighter. President Yeltsin became a neo-tsarist steeped in paranoia, protected by the undemocratic powers of presidency, a ruler of decrees. The tragedy of Gorbachev was that while changing the system he himself refused to change. Yeltsin too followed the script. The man who once denounced communism as fantasy and described himself as a social democrat willingly failed to use his democratic mandate to build the structures of civil society. In the absence of institutionalised democracy, freedom courted the remainsof the past. Gennady Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinowsky, the reborn communist and the farcical nationalist, are the products of the imperfect Boris revolution. Yeltsin, like Lech Walesa before him, borrowed from the same totalitarian methods he once raged against.

``Where is this Yeltsin taking us?'' he asked in the second volume of his memoirs, The View From the Kremlin. His answer: ``The chief goal of this restless President is Russia's tranquillity.'' It seemed the world at large, especially Clinton's America, almost agreed with him. Perhaps, despite his imperfections, Yeltsin was more acceptable than his alternatives. Then Yeltsin himself was not willing to play Gorbachev to potential Yeltsins.

Even when the body resisted the mind, he refused to be democratically magnanimous. Still, this belated decision to step down doesn't mark another beginning. The historical importance of Boris Yeltsin is that he has already scripted the beginning. The Russian century could not have hoped for a better finale.