In this context, Yeltsin's rambling memoir is inherently interesting for what it tells us about his character and maneuverings. Its author-statesman casts the ongoing Russian drama in terms of Kremlin intrigues, ceremonial functions, gossip, meetings and talks with foreign potentates, and perpetual personnel changes. All along it is Yeltsin who holds every string in his hands and who, like a puppetmaster, keeps moving the cardboard characters he has created, apparently for that very purpose. The sagging economy, rampant corruption, rising crime, growing social inequities and one of the greatest lootings of assets ever recorded in history seem to be matters of minor concern. "How can you force a bureaucrat not to take bribes to feed his family, when he earns only 5000-6000 rubles per month but is involved in monitoring multi-million-ruble transactions?" Yeltsin writes. "Naturally, the only way is to raise his salary."

The picture that emerges is one of a petulant, self-centered, cunning man whose lust for power and fragile ego were the dominant forces of his presidency. Even though he was the picture of a model Bolshevik throughout much of his life, even though he had toadied up to Brezhnev, Chernenko and other political leaders to crawl up the party ranks, Yeltsin had always been a man waiting for the main chance. He turned against his colleagues when they blocked his path to the top in 1987. He fought hard. He finally seized his chance. The image of the man atop a tank was the apex of his career, the grand gesture for which he will be remembered in history.

Paradoxically, despite his anti-Communist diatribes, Yeltsin remained a Bolshevik at heart insofar as he believed that strong-willed and determined individuals could change the world by forcibly engineering social and economic changes. He saw himself as just such a man. He sought to obliterate the past, revise his own history and cultivate his own myth. I recall a St. Petersburg historian contemptuously quoting from an early New Year's Eve address to the nation in which Yeltsin referred to Communists as "they"--"They have imposed Communism on us for seventy years." And who was talking, the historian asked rhetorically? A former Politburo member and Communist boss of Sverdlovsk.

What is there of substance, if anything, in this man who strove mightily for grand gestures and theatrical effects? Midnight Diaries provides no answers, so there remains the question of whether Yeltsin ever seriously considered championing a democratic revolution.

What happened in 1991 is that the students and workers who made the revolution and toppled the old regime did not know how to make a new government. Those who did know how were the ones from the old regime. Yeltsin brought those same people back to power and subsequently worked mightily against the very democratic forces that had been the mainstay of his support when he was a populist politician.

Yeltsin's memoir offers no evidence to suggest that he was ever interested in the systematic mobilization of Russia's democratic forces. He had no vision of the nation's identity and future; his concerns were far more personal. His obsession with the grand gesture--something that required an element of surprise--made him fret constantly about leaks. Not only did he crave the limelight, he always tried to stun the world by unexpected actions: "If the news were to leak, the whole effect would be lost," he writes about his decision to resign. "Any leak, any advance talk, any forecasts or proposals would put the impact of the decision in jeopardy." In June 1999, at the end of the war with Yugoslavia, he ordered the Russian brigade serving on peacekeeping duty in Bosnia to steal a march on NATO and occupy the Pristina airport in Kosovo even though he knew it was an empty maneuver. "I decided that Russia must make a crowning gesture, even if it had no military significance," he writes. This was, he adds, "a sign of our moral victory."

Ironically, the first wave of opposition to Yeltsin's policies came from the very people who brought him to power. They argued that his economic reforms had little to do with a genuine free market but amounted to a Bolshevik-style, top-down expropriation and redistribution of assets in disguise. In The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy, Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski note that by late 1993, most democrats--"an entire generation of talented and idealistic would-be leaders of Russia's body politic and civil society"--were "pushed off the political stage along with the democratic movement as a whole."

Reddaway, a professor at George Washington University and former director of the Washington-based Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, and Dmitri Glinski, a senior research associate at the Moscow-based Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and International Relations, teamed up to produce a critical analysis of the Yeltsin years in power. It is a finely argued and frequently provocative account that deserves a respectful hearing.

Reddaway and Glinski believe Yeltsin had "little commitment to democracy, the national interest, or the economic development of his nation." His rule was an age of blight. The destruction of Russia's intellectual assets was particularly severe. The number of scientists has shrunk from 3.4 million to 1.3 million. Russia's net financial loss from the decline in its science is estimated at between $500 billion and $600 billion annually.

The overall damage inflicted on the economy, they write, exceeds that of the comparable American experience during the Great Depression or, again, the industrial loss inflicted on Russia in World War II. High-tech industries suffered the worst. Production in electronics fell by 78 percent between 1991 and 1995. In 1997 imports made up half the Russian consumer market.

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