Yeltsin

Perhaps Boris N. Yeltsin's departure as president of Russia was more graceful. He resigned with great drama on New Year's Eve 1999, installed Vladimir V. Putin as his successor and swept away from public view. Georgia's President Eduard A. Shevardnadze left office in messier fashion. For days, protesters weary of corruption and poverty demanded that he go, chanting, "Enough." Saturday, his angry countrymen broke into parliament, and Shevardnadze fled out the back door, in great indignity, still insisting that he would not leave office.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- Truth appears in Washington with the frequency of Halley's comet, but when it does it shines like the tail of that infrequent celestial visitor. The truth about our "friend and ally" Saudi Arabia was told last month in a briefing delivered to a Pentagon advisory panel. A Rand Corporation international security analyst told the panel, "The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader.

Russia's Alexander I. Lebed always wore the politician's uniform somewhat uneasily, looking as if he was about to squirm under the shoulders of his suit. He was born to the soldier's life -- assuming authority, barking orders, protecting his men -- and moved comfortably in army green. When he died Sunday in a helicopter crash, he was 52 years old and the governor of Krasnoyarsk, a region about a fourth the size of the United States, in the heart of Siberia. His ambitions had no doubt contracted by that time, as had the hopes of his nation.

BSO music director Yuri Temirkanov has been asked to conduct a concert by Russian president Vladimir Putin for visiting French President Jacques Chirac next Thursday at the Noblemen's Assembly (the home of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic) in St. Petersburg. As Chief Conductor and Music Director state-supported and owned Philharmonic, Temirkanov had frequent dealings with the KGB, the Soviet secret police. Putin, from St. Petersburg, was one-time top KGB official and has known Temirkanov for years.

MOSCOW - The village of Gorky-9 isn't Chappaqua, N.Y., but in most other respects Boris N. Yeltsin should be finding life as an ex-president to be considerably easier than Bill Clinton is. For all the scorn that was heaped on both men while in office - and Yeltsin got more of it than Clinton did - the controversies surrounding Russia's first president swirled away as soon as he stepped down, on New Year's Eve a year ago. Clinton wanted office space in...

"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.

OBSERVING the recent events in Serbia reaffirms my conviction that Reinhard Bendix got it right so many years ago when he wrote: "In our time, not only democracies but also military regimes, dictatorships, and even constitutional monarchies are legitimized by claims of popular mandate. Indeed, other ways of justifying authority have become inconceivable. `' Modern democracies draw their authority not from kings or divine sanction but from the will of the people. This has become the case even more so after the fall of Communism -- one of the last ideologies, along with various theologies, that attempt to grant authority through a means other than the popular vote.

IN JUST seven months as Russia's president, Vladimir Putin has consolidated power in ways Boris N. Yeltsin never could. The once-rebellious parliament now kowtows to the former KGB officer. The latest example: It is curbing the regional governors' pre-eminence. In recent weeks, the Kremlin has strengthened its hand in other ways, too. Through tax audits and criminal investigations, it has moved systematically against the "oligarchs." Those shady money men became fabulously wealthy and politically influential when state properties were privatized.

MOSCOW -- Vladimir V. Putin won an outright victory today in Russia's presidential elections, avoiding a runoff even as his opponents charged widespread fraud after long delays in the vote count. At 10 a.m. today, with 94.08 percent of the vote counted, Putin had been credited with 52.57 percent, enough to claim election as Russia's second president. Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist leader, made a strong showing for second place, with 29.45 percent. The liberal Grigory Yavlinsky did much worse than he expected, at 5.85 percent.

A DOZEN candidates are running for president in Sunday's Russian elections.But only Acting President Vladimir Putin has a realistic chance of winning. Fallout from his expected victory has already begun. Many of the country's political formations believe that after the election the number of viable parties will be reduced to two or three. Mr. Putin, a 47-year-old former KGB officer, succeeded President Boris Yeltsin on New Year's eve. But in a scant three months, he has solidified his grip on power in ways that his predecessor was unable to do during a turbulent decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union.