During Boris Yeltsin’s impossibly busy first trip to the United States in September 1989, he visited nine cities and covered three thousand miles in eight days, delivering at least three speeches a day plus innumerable press conferences and interviews, most in places he either had never heard of, or had only a vague idea about, or cared little for. There were, however, two sites Yeltsin insisted on visiting. One was the White House, where President Bush, afraid of annoying Gorbachev, would not see him in the Oval Office; where, after much deliberation and consultation at the highest level, Yeltsin was delivered through the side entrance by the President’s advisor on Soviet affairs, Condoleezza Rice, to the office of the National Security Advisor, General Brent Scowcroft; whereupon General Scowcroft fell asleep—or pretended to—while Yeltsin was talking to him. The other call of Yeltsin’s choosing was a visit to St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, where Ronald Reagan was recuperating from surgery to drain fluid from his brain.

Of dozens of scenes that I reconstructed in my book—some of them I thought quite dramatic and moving—there were few that I wanted to witness as intensely as that Rochester meeting. The temptation to bend the record to the narrative and reconstruct it as a first-hand account, to which Reagan’s foremost biographer succumbed several years later, was strong but vague and fleeting. In my case, the product of such a creative source-making would not have had to be Yeltsin’s "handler" or Reagan’s press secretary. I would have settled for a nurse; even an orderly would have done.

Left to God-given sources, however, I tried to get anything that was available. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune carried a short article and a photograph, and there was another photo in Washington Times alongside the mention of the meeting by Marty Sieff (who was the only American reporter to travel with Yeltsin, and who later kindly gave me everything he published on the trip). Still more was to be gleaned from the videotape—miraculously preserved in Ekaterinburg, and just as miraculously made available to me—of Yeltsin’s meeting with democratic intelligentsia in that hotbed of glasnost, the Moscow House of Cinema, shortly after his return. There were also a few lines in the memoirs of Yeltsin’s faithful aide Lev Sukhanov, who accompanied the boss to America.

A basket of roses in hands, Yeltsin entered Reagan’s room, and the two proceeded to have a most enjoyable conversation. Reagan, in short sleeves and a baseball cap to cover the scar, looked tired and somewhat haggard, but straight and graceful as always, with a customary twinkle in his eyes. Yeltsin, in the same photograph, looked stiff, self-conscious, even a bit nervous in the presence of the man who had been a legend and a hero for millions of Soviet citizens who secretly rejoiced and found hope for deliverance in his "evil empire" speech. (In the fall of 1989, according to the polls, only Margaret Thatcher was as popular in the Soviet Union, due to her massacring three Soviet propagandists live on Soviet television in 1987.)

Reagan and Yeltsin talked about "life" in the Soviet Union and in the United States, the American revolution and the Soviet revolution. According to Reagan’s spokesman, Yeltsin told the former President that the latter had "given the start to a very perceptible warming of relations" between the Soviet Union and the United States, had contributed "enormously" to this process, and had gone "about it [in a] wise, courageous, and tactful way," for which Yeltsin was "very grateful." Reagan seemed to have been touched by the gesture. True to form, in a letter that Yeltsin received upon his return to Moscow, the former President "cordially" thanked Yeltsin for "the beautiful flowers," which "lit up the room." Reagan was "especially appreciative" of Yeltsin’s having found time to visit [him] in Rochester despite "a very busy" program. "I enjoyed our conversation," Reagan continued, "and I am pleased that we could meet, if only for a short time. Thank you, once again, for your attention."

There was an intriguing lead in these bare bones. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune man wrote that the conversation "went well beyond the bounds of formality." More fascinating still, both Sukhanov in his memoirs and Yeltsin in the House of Cinema recalled that Yeltsin and Reagan had agreed that Americans and Russians have a similar sense of humor, except that, as Reagan pointed out, Russians laughed at themselves while American laughed at others.

Here, then, was my opening if I chose to widen it. I was almost certain that Reagan told the Soviet jokes which he loved so much. Which ones did Reagan recall on that occasion? Was it the one many heard him repeat many times: about a Soviet who, having been told that a refrigerator repair man would come to his apartment in ten years, sheepishly inquires whether that would be in the morning or the afternoon, because, you see, he had a plumber scheduled for the same day? Or the one featuring a commemorative Brezhnev stamp which did not stick because people spat on the wrong side? Could it have been the one about the professional propagandist who, asked about the difference between capitalism and socialism, answered smugly: "Capitalism, comrades, is exploitation of man by man. Under socialism, it is the other way around." Or was it, from Reagan’s favorite émigré comedian Yakov Smirnoff, the Soviet Express credit card motto: "Don’t leave home!" And how about the one on the difference between the Soviet and American constitution—both guaranteeing freedom of speech but the American one providing for freedom after speech as well? And I could almost hear Reagan asking: "Have your heard the one about the Sahara desert under socialism? First the sand is rationed—and then it disappears completely."

I have always been puzzled—and moved—by Reagan’s appreciation of this very idiosyncratic and utterly un-American genre of folklore: an underground political joke—now, of course, a rhetorical relic of a communist civilization forever gone (and its only feature that is likely to be missed). A Midwesterner and then a Californian, Reagan could not have been further temperamentally and culturally from these verbal daggers dripping with sarcasm. But then this was a man who in his valedictory speech at the Republican Convention in New Orleans in 1988, used the word "freedom" eight times (America, Reagan said, was "a brilliant light beam of freedom in the world," and he called on his party to "defend freedom over and over again" and "to preserve it so it can unfold across the world for yearning millions"). Could not such a man have seen these jokes for what they really were: an act of resistance to tyranny, to unfreedom? Might not his enjoyment of them have also been an act of solidarity with those who were telling the rulers they did not choose, "You own our politics and culture; you own our jobs and our homes, you own our sons through the hated military draft—but you don’t own our minds because we laugh at you"?

Was it also possible, then, that such a man, with his unerring instinct for the few things that truly mattered in politics, sensed about his Russian visitor what five million Muscovites had fervently wished for when they had voted for Yeltsin six months before: a seeker after freedom and, two years hence, the leader of this century’s greatest anti-communist revolution?

We shall never know, of course. By the time the research on the chapter about Yeltsin’s trip got underway, Reagan was already out of anyone’s reach. But I wanted to believe that he did see something of the kind in his Russian visitor. I wanted to believe that, because I was looking for a validation—no matter how distant and spontaneous—of what I increasingly felt was the foundation of Yeltsin’s claim to history and the place at which a search for a historic Yeltsin ought to begin: the furtherance of liberty.

This choice requires an explanation. Yeltsin, after all, is a man who has done enough to make half-a-dozen lives memorable. In the fall of 1991, at the head of Russia (then part of a collapsing Soviet Union), he—like Lincoln or de Gaulle—took over a great nation at the time of a mortal crisis and held it together. In Yeltsin’s case there were three crises at once—political, economic, and imperial. Not only the country’s political and economic systems lay in ruins—the country itself had to be reinvented. Against impossible odds, he succeeded, forging, for the first time in 1,000 years, a sustainable Russian state that was neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship.

Until Yeltsin, Russian state-building—from Ivan the Terrible and Peter, through Catherine the Great, Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev—had invariably included militarism and imperial expansion as its key components. He shed the empire and decimated the militarized state by slashing the defense budget from at least 50 percent of the GDP to 2.5 percent and the number of men under arms from four million to one million. He starved the enormous military-industrial complex inherited from the Soviet Union and reduced Russia’s nuclear arsenal from 10, 000 warheads to 3,500. The departure of the last Russian soldier from the former Soviet radar base in Skrunda (western Latvia) this past October completed Russia’s return to its seventeenth-century borders.

Yeltsin has challenged another sacrosanct national tradition by revising the very criteria by which the Russian state is judged. It was said of Peter that he had ruined the country and created a great power. "The first duty of the sovereign is to preserve the internal and external unity of the state," the great Russian historian Nikolay Karamzin wrote Tsar Alexander I in a 1818 memorandum. "Solicitude for the welfare of social classes and individuals must come second." The Russian patrimonial état was its own raison.

On June 12, 1997, in the address to the nation on the seventh anniversary of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Russia, Yeltsin said: "A great power is not mountains of weapons and subjects with no rights. A great power is a self-reliant and talented people with initiative…. In the foundation of our approach to the building of the Russian state … is the understanding that the country begins with each of us. And the sole measure of the greatness of our Motherland is the extent to which each citizen of Russia is free, healthy, educated, and happy…."

Until Yeltsin, the unity of Russia had been achieved by rigid and ruthless control by Moscow. Whenever the control loosened, the country swiftly felt apart, descending into fratricide and anarchy, and then was reconstituted again by a new tyrant. Today, again for the first time in its history, Russia is both radically decentralized and whole.

Yeltsin has presided over the birth of a new Russian politics. He institutionalized all the vital liberties that Gorbachev granted, making them the society’s right rather than state’s concession: glasnost became freedom of speech and of the press, and "political pluralism" evolved into freedom of political organization for the regime’s implacable opponents; free, multicandidate elections; and a parliament dominated by radical opposition.

Rid of its traditional cruelty and revenge, the Russian political system now grants losers not only their physical but political lives as well. Not a hair fell off the heads of the leaders of the August putsch, who were never even brought to trial. In February 1994 Yeltsin signed into law the amnesty voted by the Duma for them and the leaders of the October 3 armed rebellion in Moscow. Remarkable as it would have been in any revolution, in the bloodstained history of Russia this act was nothing short of astounding: the victorious head of state released unmolested his violent and unrepentant foes, who would almost certainly have killed him had they prevailed. (Yeltsin also transferred the jurisdiction over prisons from police to the Justice Ministry and effectively abolished capital punishment by commuting virtually every death sentence—in a country that, along with China, the United States, and South Africa, led the world in executions only a few years ago.)

Still, if from this plethora of epochal leaps notoriously parsimonious History were to single out one theme, the leitmotif, what Yeats called the "great melody" (and which Conor Cruise O’Brien put in the title of his first-rate "thematic biography" of Burke), that great melody of Yeltsin’s life would likely be the extension of liberty.

No matter what happens in the short run, ultimately History appears to recognize only choice, not luck or accident. The great French socialist and prime minister Leon Blum noted that "life does not lend itself to the simultaneous retention of all possible benefits, and I have often thought that morality consists uniquely perhaps in having the courage to choose." This might be one of those rare cases where, pace Machiavelli, private morality and statesmanship intersect. Making critical choices may not be a sufficient condition for greatness, but it is most certainly a necessary one.

Sooner or later, therefore, a search for a historic Yeltsin must confront the matter of choice. Did Yeltsin, not to put too fine a point on it, know what he was doing? Or did he, as the currently fashionable lore in Russia and Washington directs us to believe, wake with a hangover after nonstop drinking in Belavezhskaya Pushcha eight years ago this December and decide to dissolve the Soviet Union? And did he introduce capitalism by freeing the prices on January 2, 1992, in much the same manner: impulsively, even capriciously, concerned only with petty political gain and unaware of the gravity of the consequences? I believe the preponderance of evidence will establish consistent and considered choices for liberty in Yeltsin’s three crucial decisions: on the Russian domestic empire; democracy; and the market economy.

Of these three choices that laid the foundation for the world’s youngest great power, post-communist Russia, that of economic freedom is generally treated as something almost accidental. Yet it was precisely here that personal choice was both absolutely central—and hardest to make. The dissolution of the empire and democratization had been set in train by Gorbachev (the former inadvertently, the latter more or less consciously). Not so in the economy: by the end of 1991, after four years of tinkering, the market and private property were still a taboo, dealt with by articles in the Criminal Code.

The choice of economic liberty was unique also because Yeltsin had to abandon the strategy that had served him so well before. Until then, he had sensed the direction of Russian public opinion and followed—as well as guided and molded—it. He was the sail, the people’s support the wind; together they began to turn Russia around. Yet if democracy was clearly in tune with the sense of the majority, and if the abandonment of the Soviet Union, at least for the moment, seemed a fair price to pay for Russian liberty and prosperity, neither the freeing of prices nor the privatization of the economy were being clamored for by tens of millions. With the market revolution, Yeltsin was, so to speak, on his own.

In the end—after years of debates, recommendations, commissions, and resolutions—it was one man’s ability to make a choice and to take the responsibility that tipped the scale. The move to a market economy happened in Russia because Yeltsin wished it to happen (as it did not happen in the neighboring Ukraine because its president, Leonid Kravchuk, decided to have a peaceful and uncomplicated presidency.)

The freeing of prices, which would overnight turn millions of Russians into paupers (no matter how impoverished they had already been made by shortages and inflation that consumed most of their savings) was, as the engineer of the first reforms Yegor Gaidar told me years later, something that Yeltsin knew Russia "needed" but, he was equally certain, "could not support"—at least not by the majorities he was accustomed to. For the first time, as an astute Russian journalist noted at the time, Yeltsin the populist and Yeltsin the reformer became adversaries.

This was, literally, Yeltsin’s first "unpopular" decision. (He would confess later that for "two whole months" he and his advisors had searched for "more acceptable," "less onerous" ways to begin the reforms without freeing the prices—but could not find any.) No politician makes such choices lightly—least of all someone who until then had been a national hero, basking in the adoration of millions.

On October 28, 1991, Yeltsin went to the Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia to seek a mandate for the price liberalization and privatization plan (the mandate, which, many in Russia and in the West would soon so conveniently forget, was granted him by an 876-16 vote). In one of the best speeches he ever made, Yeltsin declared that the time of "small steps" was past. We must in deeds, not words, begin extricating ourselves from "the swamp that pulls us deeper and deeper." Only a "large scale reformist breakthrough" could save Russia’s economy from disintegration, her people from poverty, and her state from collapse.

He called the "unfreezing" of prices the "hardest" measure, but the entire experience of "world civilization," Yeltsin said, had proved that fair prices could not be set by the bureaucrat—only by the market. He counted on the "support and understanding" of the people of Russia, support that they had so generously given him in the past. Together the previous August they defended "political freedom"; now it was time for economic freedom, freedom for enterprises and entrepreneurs, for people to work as much as they wanted and to get as much for their labor as they earned.

"Today, we must make a decisive choice," Yeltsin concluded. "To do so requires the will and wisdom of the people, the courage of political leaders, the knowledge of experts. Your President has made this choice. This is the most important decision of my life. I have never looked for easy roads in life, but I understand very clearly that the next months will be the most difficult. If I have your support and your trust, I am ready to travel this road with you to the end. The time has come for practical actions in the name and for the benefit of every Russian family, in the name and for the benefit of the Russian state."

On December 29, four days before price controls were to be lifted, Yeltsin addressed the nation in a televised speech. The economic revolution was part of what he called "de-communization" of Russia. Along with prices set by the state, "we are abandoning mirages and illusions," Yeltsin said. It was clear that the communist utopia "could not be built." It was not Russia that had been defeated; it was communism. Together with state-owned economy, Russia was "ridding" itself of "the militarization of our life," of the "anti-human economy" almost entirely devoted to military production. She had stopped "constant preparation" for war "with the whole world." The "iron curtain" that had been there "between us and almost the whole world" was no more.

On the pediment of the portico of the Paris Panthéon, where, among others, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Zola are buried, there is a bas-relief of France, between Liberty and History, bestowing laurels on famous men. If the two—Liberty and History—agree, then good and well. But do they, invariably?

I think, rather no, than yes. Of all heroes, liberators fare worst. Among the components of progress, liberty, like greatness, is perhaps the most suspect to social scientists (at least those of my generation), who were taught in graduate school that that which cannot be quantified is not worth dealing with. The elusiveness and misperception of the criteria by which liberators are judged bear much of the blame as well. In keeping with his central conviction of the multiplicity and occasional incompatibility of even the most noble of human wishes and values, Sir Isaiah Berlin greatly clarified the matter when he said: "Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience." (As quoted by Michael Ignatieff in "On Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997)," The New York Review of Books, December 18, 1997.) To which, in the Russian case, one can easily add scrupulous and competent bureaucracy, universal sobriety, enlightened, honest and generous captains of industry, pensioners paid on time, peace in Chechnya, a five-percent annual growth of GDP, foreign investments, improvement in corporate governance, and decreasing male mortality. Yet, as far as I can gather, Berlin’s injunction remains largely unheeded.

Sublime though it is, liberty, of course, can also be terrifying and often cruel. Economic freedom, for one, is the foe of equality, especially equality in poverty. "In much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow," says Ecclesiastes. There is much vexation in much freedom as well, and those who increase it, the liberators, increase sorrow for millions—at least in the short run.

But the short run is all that matters in democratic politics. Helmut Kohl, who brought democracy and capitalism to 17 million East Germans and then spent 900 billion dollars to ease the transition to capitalism, was thrown out of office, his party trounced in every one of the formerly East German states. In a recent poll, only 38 percent of former East Germans said they liked living in a democracy; one in seven would prefer to rebuild the Wall.

The darling of the Western intelligentsia, the Czech President Vaclav Havel, sits abandoned and often depressed in the Prague Castle—irrelevant, even a bit of a joke for his people, who are angry at the cronyism and corruption they blame on the new economic order. "All the Communists who stole were allowed to keep their wealth, and today they are captains of industry," a Prague worker complained to an American reporter recently. Havel "should have left at the height of his career," the worker added. "He gave people hope but did not fulfill it."

Russian liberators have been dealt with particular severity. Alexander II, who freed the serfs, was killed by militant socialists. Khrushchev, who emptied the gulag, was ousted and then kept under virtual house arrest until his death. The greatest liberator of them all (and perhaps ever), Mikhail Gorbachev, received one percent of the vote in the 1996 presidential elections.

A great deal in Yeltsin’s sorry public image today is traceable to these genetic handicaps of liberators. Yet he is to blame for much of it himself: the economic crisis, which has brought immense hardships to tens of millions, whose money was made worthless by inflation, whose jobs disappeared, and whose salaries and pensions were delayed for months; the armed rebellion Moscow on October 3 and October 4, 1993, precipitated by Yeltsin’s decision to resolve a constitutional crisis by dissolving the Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia and scheduling early election, and quelled with tanks; the indiscriminate brutality of the Chechen wars; the embarrassingly crude and inept manipulation of Russian politics to enhance his slipping grasp on power in the last two years. The fact that the economic crisis had begun and deepened long before Yeltsin came to power; that the Soviet regime had always been corrupt; and that, as tens of millions suffered, millions of others gained enormously from economic freedom—all this does not to absolve Yeltsin of responsibility for blunders in the strategy of economic reforms, and for abetting (if not indeed being complicit in) corruption and a brief but pernicious reign of the so-called "oligarchs," the Russian robber-barons, whose presence became synonymous with crooked deals, rigged markets, fraudulent "auctions," and the incestuous relationship between political power and private economy.

No man, as we all know, is a hero to his valet. Because of daily probing by the Russian media in general and attacks in the opposition press in particular; and because of the endless stream of memoirs from some of his closest associates, we are very much in the position of Yeltsin’s valet. Yeltsin is by far the most transparent of all past Russian leaders—the only one, so far, of whom we are likely to know more while he is in office than after his death or ouster. Most of what we have learned is far from flattering. He drinks hard, he could be boorish and rude toward subordinates. He is a haughty, petulant and often severely depressed man. He runs the Kremlin’s Presidential administration like a Byzantine court (or a regional party committee, an obkom, where he spent 17 years): with favorites, intrigues, and sudden promotions, demotions, and firings. He is deeply unpopular, isolated and almost friendless, passionately hated by enemies and resented or despised by most of his former allies.

Yet in addition to the "built-in" features of a historic Yeltsin, as always in the social sciences, observers’ biases are at work as well. As he readied his old-fashioned camera to photograph the remnants of the Casa Bertini (Shelley’s house in the wooded hills near Lucca), Richard Holmes, who is likely the best literary biographer in the English language today, set his field of focus and aperture to "ten feet to infinity." He wrote later that this was precisely a range for a conscientious historian: "ten feet to infinity". In the case of Yeltsin, the depth of vision is a few inches at best.

Much of what passes for reporting on Yeltsin today falls within the genre of political entomology, in which politicians, like insects, are watched through a magnifying glass within the tiny confines of their personal foibles, petty passions, and daily stupidities, in almost total isolation from what is happening in the country at large. On any day, one will easily find in Washington at least a half-dozen experts who would describe, in minute detail and with visible relish, what and how much Yeltsin drank lately; whether he spoke kindly to the tycoon Boris Berezovsky or threw him out of the office; how much his daughter Tatiana has on her credit card in Switzerland; who in the Kremlin is behind this or that exposé in this or that newspaper or television program.

This is history as practiced by those whom Berlin called "the glass and plastic" historians who "regard all facts as equally interesting." In a brilliant essay on Chaim Weizmann, Sir Isaiah supplied an antidote: "Greatness is not a specifically moral attribute. It is not one of the private virtues.… A great man need not be morally good, or upright, or kind, or sensitive, or delightful, or possess artistic or scientific talent. To call someone a great man is to claim that he has intentionally taken ... a large step, one far beyond the normal capacities of men, in satisfying, or materially affecting, central human interests." As in the case of liberty, this warning, too, remains ignored—in Yeltsin’s case and that of almost everyone else.

Of course, the shortness of perspective is not confined to Yeltsin alone. Post-communist Russia’s entire magisterial experiment with self-rule, political liberties, and the free market is not unlike the movement of a long and disorderly caravan on a vast, muddy plain: stopping, zigzagging, occasionally almost drowning in muck, and yet stubbornly plowing forward. Following closely behind, but never quite catching up with the caravan, is a ragtag crowd of journalists and experts. They are intense. Their brows are furrowed. They look neither forward, to where the road might lead; nor back to measure the astonishing distance already covered; nor yet to the sides to compare the caravan’s progress with that of Russia’s neighbors. Their gazes are forever downcast, fixed on the dirt on the wheels, the ruts in the road, and the ugly creatures awakened by the caravan’s movement and feasting on the piles of refuse in the wagons’ wake.

Liberty, of course, is not democracy (although it is a necessary condition for democracy), and a liberator is not a democrat. What label, what short-hand will History settle on in Yeltsin’s case?

Here is the man who ordered troops into Chechnya in December 1994 and for a year-and-a-half prosecuted a war there—incompetently, cruelly, and in complete disregard for the country’s public opinion. (He may be repeating the same blunder again.) Yeltsin weakened the nascent constitutional order and cheapened free political discourse by his cynical palace games. He is responsible for a great deal of the alienation of the people from power in the new Russia.

He is also someone who allowed complete freedom of speech and political organization for his most outrageous and crudest critics; who never permanently closed down a single opposition newspaper; who has sought popular mandates for his policies and his office in a referendum and free elections open to those same critics. In the 1996 presidential race, he, quite literally, risked his life for the victory: ignoring the doctors’ warnings, suffering a heart attack a few days before the final vote, and undergoing a quintuple bypass heart surgery four months later.

He is rife with authoritarian habits and urges—and bound by self-imposed and self-enforced constraints. He thirsts for power and is zealous to acquire and hold it. Yet both the mode of acquisition of that power (by two free elections) and the uses to which he had put it—greatly weakening the state’s stranglehold over society and the economy, and Moscow’s over Russia—are utterly novel for that country.

Rendering a coherent and definitive verdict on Yeltsin is not unlike the predicament in which Samuel Johnson found himself as he tried to pass judgment on the subject of the first of his lives of the English poets: that of his mysterious friend and one-time mentor, the poet Richard Savage.

Savage was a raffish, deceitful, manipulative, violent, and, on one occasion, murderous man. Boswell testified that Savage’s "character was marked by profligacy, insolence and ingratitude." Johnson himself acknowledges that the man’s weaknesses were "indeed very numerous" and described them in great detail.

Yet Johnson also records that Savage "knew very well the necessity of goodness to the present and future happiness of mankind." He was a man "of whom ... it must be confessed that ... virtue ... could not find a warmer advocate." Johnson, moreover, was satisfied that his subject’s advocacy of "virtue" was not mere hypocrisy. His Savage was a man who knew what the right thing to do was and who did it occasionally and quite spectacularly—even as he failed to do it consistently (or, indeed, most of the time).

What to do? How to classify such a specimen? It is here that Dr. Johnson arrives at one of his most powerful and subtle judgments. He pronounces Savage "not a good man but a friend of goodness."

Was not Savage to virtue what Yeltsin was to democracy? Was not Yeltsin, although not a democrat, a "friend" of democracy—in the same way that the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson, who declared that all men had been created equal, was a "friend" of equality? (The paradox, needless to say, did not escape Dr. Johnson, who, in his essay on the tax revolt in the American colonies, asked "how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?")

As befits a "friend" of democracy, Yeltsin is leaving behind a hybrid: a polity still semi-authoritarian, corrupt, and mistrusted by the society, but also one which is governable, in which the elites’ competition for power is arbitrated by popular vote, and in which most of the tools of authoritarian mobilization and coercion appear to have been significantly dulled. Yeltsin’s legacy is a collection of necessary, although far from sufficient, conditions for a modern capitalist democracy: free elections; freedom of political opposition; de-militarization of state and society; de-centralization of the traditionally unitary state; a largely privatized economy; and a still small and weak but increasingly assertive civil society, sustained by civil liberties, freedom of the press, and an increasingly independent and assertive judiciary. The political organism that he forged is full of severe genetic defects—yet capable of development and of peacefully thwarting communist restoration without succumbing to authoritarianism.

Yeltsin has freed Russia from what the great English poet Robert Graves (in an entirely different context) called "the never changing circuit of its fate": the history which, after four centuries, appeared to have become destiny: imperialism, militarism, and rigid centralization interrupted by episodes of horrifyingly brutal anarchy. He gave Russia "peredyshka"—a time to catch its breath. The attributes of the traditional Russian state—authoritarianism, imperialism, militarism, xenophobia—are far from extinguished. Yet more and higher hedges have been erected against their recurrence under Yeltsin’s peredyshka than at any other time in Russian history.

Today Yeltsin is facing the last of his grand choices. It is an entirely novel dilemma. Before he could always persuade himself—and on a few occasions millions of others—that his power and the cause of liberty were synonymous. Now he must choose between liberty and his mastery of the Kremlin.

This is not to be an easy choice. Like a champion boxer, who cannot admit defeat and retirement, Yeltsin fights on, incapable of giving up: groggy after several knockdowns, his nose bloodied, his eyes barely seeing behind swollen eyelids, yet clinging to his opponent, rope-a-doping, and punching erratically.

Yet this last choice, so important for his place in History, is already largely irrelevant for Russian history. Because of the critical choices he has made in the past eight years, virtually no one in Moscow today would support an attempt to cancel or postpone the presidential election. And, unlike 1993, no soldier will shoot to ensure Yeltsin’s victory.

The creator of a new order is incapable of violating it. Yeltsin’s legacy—the freest regime in Russian history, a distorted but functioning market economy, and a flawed but real multi-party democracy—appears impervious to the desperate thrashing about in the Kremlin. The Yeltsin of liberty and history has defeated the Yeltsin of political entomology: petty, quick-tempered, domineering, obsessed with power, jealous of those who came to replace him, fearful for the security of his family, and very, very sick.

When he was brave, strong, confident, and handsome, when his ability to learn and to change seemed inexhaustible, Yeltsin would have understood the paradox, and, I think, would have considered such an outcome a victory.

Mr. Aron is a resident scholar at AEI. His biography, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, will be released in London on January 4, 2000, by HarperCollins Publishers and in New York on March 1, 2000, by St. Martin’s Press.