Portrait of A Populist

By DAVID AIKMAN

His physical presence never fails to impress. At 6 ft. 4 in., Boris Yeltsin looms over listeners and lecterns, taming audiences of 1 to 100,000. His ramrod-stiff stance, his thick silver hair, his deep, slow voice all suggest a coil of powerful but slow-burning energy. Yet when Yeltsin starts to speak, the effect is not intimidating but mesmerizing, even entertaining. He has the touch of a born orator, able to sense the mood and needs of a crowd and play it for all it's worth. "When I first came into the room," he told a dinner audience high in a Dallas skyscraper during his U.S. visit in 1989, "I thought I was attending the Miss America contest." Delighted giggles from the women; knowing chuckles from their escorts. The audience was captivated, and Yeltsin's great putty face began its expressive dance through another speech.

Yeltsin's rapport with audiences is as instinctive with socialites in Chicago as it is with construction workers in his native Sverdlovsk. That remarkable skill constitutes a breakthrough in an unwritten, decades-old rule of Soviet politics that inhibits leaders from relating emotionally with their audiences. If a speaker connects, after all, the implication is that the views of the audience count, that persuasion is involved, that the audience, heaven forbid, actually has something to communicate back to the stage. Yeltsin has tapped the desperate yearning of Russians to be taken seriously by their leaders, to be spoken to rather than lectured at. He is thus not simply the most popular contemporary Russian political figure by far, but also the first genuinely popular Russian political figure since the Bolshevik Revolution.

Though Yeltsin fits the label of populist, he possesses a depth of character and an integrity that make him much more than a Huey Long in a Siberian fur hat. Like many populists, Yeltsin has made his share of rash promises -- to provide all Muscovites with an apartment by the year 2000, say, or to achieve a measurable improvement in living standards in two years. But unlike most, Yeltsin has taken his political lumps and recovered from them. He has perceptibly matured from the brash, almost bullying Moscow party boss of 1987, who boasted that he fired 40% of the party hacks who ran the city. Says Mikhail Poltaranin, a Yeltsin adviser who edited the pro-Yeltsin Moskovskaya Pravda in 1987: "When he was being attacked, he had to defend himself, and it was very unnerving. He made mistakes. Nowadays he's more balanced, calmer, more sure of himself."

How serious is Yeltsin's conversion to liberal democracy? The hard-to-please Muscovite intelligentsia were deeply skeptical of Yeltsin at first. After all, as Moscow party boss he actually received a boisterous delegation from Pamyat, the openly anti-Semitic Russian ultranationalist organization. But suspicion turned to respect after Yeltsin won election to the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 by winning 5 million out of the 5.5 million votes cast in Moscow.

Yeltsin's popularity stems partly from the impression he conveys that he understands the daily frustrations of Russian life. Nothing has endeared him more to ordinary people than his denunciation of the privileges of the political elite. In his autobiography, Against the Grain, Yeltsin describes the opulence of the Politburo villa that he was offered (and turned down) in 1987, wickedly reminding readers along the way that the house had once been assigned to Mikhail Gorbachev. As party first secretary in Sverdlovsk during the 1970s, Yeltsin enjoyed the same perks that Gorbachev received in Stavropol province in the south. But while Gorbachev took to the privileges like an English earl to a grouse-shooting party, Yeltsin seemed to feel he had got them by sneaking over the earl's fence.

Yeltsin is impulsive and can be downright cavalier in personal relations. The carpet outside his presidential office in the Byely Dom (literally, White House), the Russian Supreme Soviet building on the Moscow River, must have been worn thin by the pacing of visitors who never got to see him at the appointed hour. Yet Yeltsin genuinely loves people and thrives on contact with them. Says he: "If I don't meet with people for a time, I start getting nervous."

What motivates Yeltsin above all else is his sense that he is a player in the drama of history. By calling for Gorbachev's resignation on television last month, Yeltsin believed he was summoning destiny to his side, helping allow Soviet citizens to make their own choices about their country's future. Gorbachev deserves the credit for setting the Soviet Union free from its repressive past, but Yeltsin may yet get the credit for breaking the Kremlin's present-day grip on the union itself.