Yeltsin

The hospitalization of Boris N. Yeltsin with "acute" heart troubles forces everyone to think about the day when he is no longer in power.As Russia's first post-Soviet president, Mr. Yeltsin has had an unenviably hard task. He has had both successes and failures. Many of his instincts have been good, even though his behavior has often been erratic.In his hard drinking and impulsiveness he is a true son of Russia, whose lifestyle recalls Alexei Tolstoy's adage: "When you love, love with passion; when you threaten, threaten with intention; when you insult, insult only in anger; when you strike, strike with all you've got; when you quarrel, quarrel with courage; when you punish, punish with a reason; when you forgive, forgive with all your heart, when you party, party through the night."

Obituaries play a vital role in the lives of newspaper readers and are consistently among the best-read articles in The Sun. These chronicles of the lives of the famous and infamous, the extraordinary and ordinary, the well-known and little-known tell readers things about people they would otherwise never have known. Whether the obituaries appear on the front page, the Maryland section front or in the obituary pages themselves, The Sun always treats them as news articles. During a week in late April, obituaries of four remarkably different individuals were played on The Sun's front page: Boris N. Yeltsin, David Halberstam, Mary Carter Smith and Mstislav Rostropovich.

"Midnight Diaries," by Boris Yeltsin. Public Affairs. 398 pages. $26. When Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned on the last day of 1999 after more than eight years as Russia's first elected president, few people at home or abroad much regretted his passing from power. Doddering, widely despised, he had squandered the huge political capital he brought to office in 1991. If then he was seen as the courageous, truth-telling democrat who climbed aboard a tank to defy the Soviet hard-liners' coup, by the time of his resignation he was thought of as dangerously unpredictable, comically capricious and addled by illness and alcohol.

An article in yesterday's editions of The Sun about Queen Elizabeth II's visit should have described Jamestown, founded in1607, as the first permanent English colony in America. The "Lost Colony" of Roanoke was founded two decades earlier but did not last. The April 24 obituary of Boris Yeltsin carried a Moscow dateline and identified the writer as a Sun foreign reporter. The writer, Will Englund, was a Sun Moscow correspondent who reported on Yeltsin, and who is now on the newspaper's editorial board.

MOSCOW -- First Boris N. Yeltsin took the job, then he took the limousine and now he has taken Mikhail S. Gorbachev's new office complex.Last night, Itar-Tass reported that Mr. Yeltsin had evicted Mr. Gorbachev from the buildings where he runs a social and political research foundation.Mr. Yeltsin signed a decree yesterday transferring the buildings to the Russian government's Financial Academy, which will train new bankers. But the decree instructs the academy to lease one building to Mr. Gorbachev.

MOSCOW -- Two days after President Boris N. Yeltsin issued a decree to suspend Vice President Aleksandr V. Rutskoi from office, the Russian Parliament voted yesterday to suspend the president's decree and threw the issue of Mr. Rutskoi's status to the Constitutional Court.The standoff over Mr. Rutskoi's suspension is another example of the political paralysis gripping Moscow as Mr. Yeltsin and his antagonists in the Supreme Soviet, or legislature, prepare for a showdown this fall over the president's call for early parliamentary elections.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin may not yet be the eighth member of the Group of Seven, but he figures to upstage his hosts at this week's economic summit in Munich. On the eve of the meeting of leaders from the world's richest democracies, he pressured the International Monetary Fund to open the door to a $24 billion economic support package. Then, with that in hand, he arranged to arrive in Munich early enough to wangle an invitation to dinner tonight ahead of his scheduled post-summit lunch tomorrow.

President Clinton did the right thing in not hesitating to back Boris N. Yeltsin in his power struggle with the hardliners of Russia's parliament. Recent experience had painfully demonstrated that unless the paralysis of power could be broken, holdover legislators from the communist past would continue to try to undo President Yeltsin's reforms.Although he resorted to extraconstitutional means in dissolving the Soviet-era legislature, Mr. Yeltsin had little choice. The Russian president said he had to "break this ruinous, vicious circle" of old-guard legislators sabotaging government initiatives.

Washington. -- President Clinton is being urged to press Bori Yeltsin's gun to his own temple and play an American version of Russian roulette by risking everything on Mr. Yeltsin's regaining dominance. Mr. Clinton would be a fool to do it.It is said that the U.S. has no one it can back but Mr. Yeltsin, and that if he falls so will the hope of democracy in Russia. Worse still, it is said, the ouster of Mr. Yeltsin would mean a return to power by the Communist Party and a resumption of the Cold War. The fact is that Mr. Yeltsin is by no means the only powerful politician in Russia who believes in democratic politics and economic reforms.

As George Bush and Boris N. Yeltsin begin their Washington summit today, it should be apparent that the former is expendable and the latter is not. Mr. Bush presides over a nation and a government defined by more than two centuries of history and quite capable of absorbing a change in leadership under normal or abnormal circumstances. Not so for the post-imperial Russia under Mr. Yeltsin's command. His country finds itself behind shrunken borders, its identity and destiny in doubt.Given this situation, Mr. Yeltsin's hold on his presidency is at once more tenuous and more important than Mr. Bush's.

Moscow -- Last week, as Russians buried Boris N. Yeltsin, many were reminded of the dramatic passage when Yeltsin discarded the authoritarian Soviet state in favor of capitalism and democracy. It also reminded them of the years of chaos and confusion that followed. That troubled period led Russians to embrace as president Vladimir V. Putin, a former KGB chief with a stern hand. Now, some here fear that under Putin the revolution Yeltsin instigated is going full circle, bringing Russia back to a state where dissent is smothered and overwhelming power is wielded from the top. Nowhere else in the world does democracy look the way it did in Moscow earlier this month, when as many as 9,000 riot police and troops -- some in camouflage, with truncheons, helmets, shields and a clear go-ahead to crack down -- beat back a peaceful anti-government protest.

Just as Boris N. Yeltsin's career was taking off - his first career, that is, as a Communist Party functionary - he received an order from Moscow that would tie him, however indirectly, to the one great crime that overshadowed all of Soviet history. Czar Nicholas II and his family had been murdered by their Bolshevik captors in the Ural Mountain city of Yekaterinburg, back on the night of July 16, 1918, and 59 years later, Mr. Yeltsin was ordered to destroy the house where that had happened.

MOSCOW -- They came with flowers and photographs or with empty hands, in business suits and faded jeans, some from around the corner and some from other continents. There were students and pensioners, current and former presidents of Russia and other nations, children too young to know who Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin was and what he meant - for better and worse - to the nation. The towering, gold-domed Christ the Savior Cathedral on the banks of the Moscow River filled yesterday with thousands of mourners paying their final respects to Russia's first democratically elected president.

CLARIFICATION The April 24 obituary of Boris Yeltsin carried a Moscow dateline and identified the writer as a Sun foreign reporter. The writer, Will Englund, was a Sun Moscow correspondent who reported on Yeltsin, and who is now on the newspaper's editorial board. MOSCOW -- Boris N. Yeltsin, the Russian leader who broke the Soviet Union and the system it had created, died yesterday in Moscow of complications from chronic heart problems. He was 76. Mr.

Boris N. Yeltsin was a destroyer at a time when there was much that was in need of destruction - primarily the sclerotic and decrepit Soviet Union, where an entire tottering system was devoted to the ideology of nothing-makes-sense. He turned on his one-time comrades and, drawing upon deep and vocal public support, he stood up for Russia - and in doing so stood up as well for the other 14 Soviet republics - and thereby swept aside the U.S.S.R. His death yesterday at age 76, more than 15 years after the Soviet crackup, puts in relief one salient and dismal fact about Russia today: Mr. Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president in 1,000 years of Russian history, outlived the democracy he did more than anyone else to bring into being.

The speaker of the Russian State Duma, Boris Gryzlov, called former Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin a man "who did much to ensure the creation of our state" and "for the development of democracy in Russia." The head of the nation's energy monopoly, Anatoly Chubais, praised his role in taking the nation from "non-freedom to freedom." And the chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, called the nine years of Yeltsin's leadership "a breath of freedom for the country" and "his biggest achievement."

American attention is suddenly focused like a laser not on squabbles over the domestic economy, which in context seem almost parochial, but on a genuine constitutional crisis in Russia that threatens to increase world instability.President Boris N. Yeltsin's fight to retain power or, as he would put it, to preserve democracy is a struggle that far transcends the boundaries of his huge country. It is a political battle with global implications for nuclear arms control or proliferation, for free markets or command economies, for national cohesion or further unraveling into the ethnic-religious-ideological rivalries that have erupted with the end of the Cold War.In this struggle, U.S. self-interest clearly lies in measured support for Mr. Yeltsin.

First they tried it Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev's way: force. Two Russian assaults on the Chechen rebels holding 1,500 hostages in a hospital in Budyonnovsk in southern Russia led only to more than 100 hostage deaths.Then they tried it the way of President Boris Yeltsin's critics in the Duma and in the Group of Seven: politically. Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin took charge and, on the phone before millions of televiewers, conceded rebel commander Shamil Basayev's demands.With hostages freed, this crisis is over.

MOSCOW - Russians re-elected Vladimir V. Putin by a landslide margin yesterday, putting their faith firmly behind a president with a czar-like grip on power and an uncertain agenda for rescuing much of his country from the mire of poverty. Exit polls had Putin garnering more than 69 percent of the vote, a clear sign of the depth of the former KGB agent's popularity. His closest challenger, the Communist Party's Nikolai Kharitonov, had 14 percent of the vote. With another four-year term for Putin ensured before the polls opened, the only question heading into yesterday's contest was whether the minimum 50 percent voter turnout mark would be reached to make the election valid.

KRASNOYARSK, Russia - Russian President Vladimir V. Putin began yesterday revamping his government less than three weeks before his re-election bid, firing Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and his Cabinet and pledging to appoint a team that will carry out sweeping economic and social reforms that the Kremlin has promised but failed to deliver. Putin's prime minister for the past four years, Kasyanov has been criticized by Putin for not moving fast enough on Kremlin reforms. Kasyanov, considered a friend to business interests, also irked Putin by criticizing the jailing of billionaire oilman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos oil company.