On the other hand, Yeltsin wants us to believe that he had everything to do with his memoir, that he wrote it himself "in fragments over the years...late at night or early in the morning." It is widely known that it was ghostwritten by Valentin Yumashev, a former journalist and Yeltsin's longtime personal aide, with daughter Tatyana being the final censor. Only in passing--in Chapter 13--does Yeltsin mention that Yumashev worked with him on the manuscript. Other bits of contrived candor are sprinkled sparsely around with the apparent aim of defusing--with a sentence or two--some of his well-publicized shortcomings, even his drinking problem. Yeltsin says alcohol was his "only means [of getting] rid of stress"--until his 1995 heart attack. His consumption was afterward reduced to a single glass of wine per day.

Herculean efforts are made by the authors of this slapdash tome, which is filled with homilies about duty and patriotism, to suggest that Yeltsin possessed mysterious and therefore miraculously effective leadership skills. He liked the "simple, effective" style of leadership and made his decisions with "surgical precision." His stationery was embossed in gold with the presidential seal. His desk was cluttered with "coded telegrams" and "presidential mail." He used his "presidential pen" to sign decrees. By pushing buttons on a presidential "control panel" he could reach his far-flung minions. Metaphors reinforce the image of a supercool superexecutive who is always in control. Sometimes he is the sea captain, steering the Russian ship of state past dangerous reefs and shoals. On another occasion, before making a major announcement, he is like the space expert about to fire a rocket. ("Now it was too late for doubts. The countdown had begun. The bomb was ticking.")

The oddest thing about the details is that they offer the illusion of concreteness to obscure enormous ambiguities. We don't see Yeltsin making decisions on any substantive domestic issues. There is no evidence of his even being aware of the scope of devastation visited upon the people by his social policy. (Statistics give us an inkling: His government used only 9 percent of GNP on social services, compared with around 33 percent in the West.)

Yeltsin is certainly not stupid, but when you consider his remarkable energy in fighting for the presidency he seems unaccountably passive in other respects. We don't see him really concerned with the substance of his job. It is difficult to find an economic or social initiative Yeltsin conceived and brought to completion. ("There won't be any inflation," Yeltsin tells the press shortly before prices explode following the collapse of the ruble.) In fact, he reversed the democratization trend initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. Yeltsin resorted to force to overhaul the entire constitutional order and to create a presidency that suited his needs. According to his own account, his crowning political achievement was Vladimir Putin's election as Russia's president in March 2000 (much of the first and last portions of the book are devoted to this).

There was something Reaganesque about Yeltsin, for his leadership seemed to exist only in his public utterances. But Reagan looks like a giant by comparison, since he held on to a few simple but firm beliefs and surrounded himself with capable aides. Yeltsin seems to be missing a central core belief--"the vision thing." He believed, he said in his final speech (in which he asked forgiveness of the people), that he was moving the country from its totalitarian past "to a bright, prosperous, civilized future." But wasn't that exactly the belief he was supposed to cherish when he served as the Communist Party boss of Sverdlovsk?

There is nothing in this book that appears to qualify Yeltsin for the presidency, with the exception of his prodigious lust for power and a genius for behind-the-scenes, byzantine politics, in which various elites struggle over the reallocation of power and wealth. Yeltsin was not a marionette. Far from it--he made his way up the greasy pole of power and fought constantly to stay at the top. He may have been extraordinarily passive on economic and social matters, but he was a superb bureaucratic infighter--bold, decisive and ruthless. He had no qualms about sacrificing even his most loyal supporters. "It was too bad, really just too bad," he notes after dismissing one of his prime ministers. When he fired his longest-serving prime minister--"faithful, decent, honest, intelligent" Viktor Chernomyrdin--he did it without forewarning because decision-making requires a special approach. "A decision should not wait. With any leakage of information, the decision ceases to be a bold, unexpected move and turns into the opposite." But even though he says firing people caused him "the severest kind of stress," Yeltsin concedes that he "felt an unusual rise in spirits, an enormous wave of optimism." He insists that his perpetual personnel changes were part of a careful and deliberate search for a politician to replace him and continue "on the path of democracy."

On the basis of the evidence, in the light of his years as president, we see Yeltsin as confident, surefooted and deeply interested in only one issue: the preservation of his personal power. He is a genius at perpetual conniving. Unlike Reagan, Yeltsin feared competent officials with established reputations. He entrusted great power to younger, inexperienced people without a political base of their own, then dismissed them when things went wrong. The failures were attributed to his revolving-door prime ministers as though they bore exclusive responsibility.

But why put oneself at the mercy of incompetent advisers? Yeltsin reveals his priorities in explaining his reasons for appointing Sergei Kiriyenko, 35, an obscure and inexperienced official, as prime minister: "Everybody needed a new figure, not someone who would lobby for the interests of some against others, not someone from some sort of camp, not someone who had already appeared in Moscow's echelons of power." In short, someone without a history or a political base. During his most severe crisis, in 1998, Yeltsin turned to his foreign minister and perhaps the most experienced man in the government, Yevgeny Primakov. But when Primakov suddenly gained widespread popularity in early 1999, Yeltsin became alarmed. He realized, he writes, that Primakov "was becoming a serious political alternative to my course and my plan for the country's development." Ignoring Primakov's "honesty, decency, and loyalty," Yeltsin swiftly defused the threat by dismissing the prime minister for alleged pro-Communist sympathies. "Primakov had too much red in his political palette," Yeltsin writes.

His final choice was Vladimir Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel, who was named prime minister in the summer of 1999. Putin's first move on becoming acting president was to sign a decree protecting Yeltsin from future criminal prosecution.

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