Yeltsin's legacy, a decade on

Ten years ago yesterday, Boris Yeltsin clambered atop Tank No. 110 of the Taman Division of the Red Army and raised his booming voice in a call to resist a military coup. The image of the defiant Yeltsin became a symbol of the dramatic collapse of the world's last major empire and its communist system.

Part of the legacy of that act was the disintegration of a communist state and the largely peaceful emergence of 15 independent countries. Yet, because he had personalized the struggle for freedom, Mr. Yeltsin also ushered in a complex, and often contradictory, process of political reforms rooted in executive power.

Unlike Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and Lech Walesa of Poland, who embodied change from the grass roots, Yeltsin led the opposition to the August coup attempt as president of a protostate and a former Communist steeped in traditions of command politics. He was not a civic opposition activist. But from Aug. 19 forward, the world preferred to see him as the personal guarantor of Russian reform - an "icon of resistance" with "the authority of the people behind him." Western policy focused on supporting his path.

In the years that followed, Yeltsin built up the constitutional powers of the presidency at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches. His efforts to clip the wings of retrograde and antireform branches of power seemed right and were cheered by the Clinton administration and European leaders. But Russia's reform path took a decidedly negative turn away from the one followed by other post-communist countries like Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

Today, the "democracy divide" between Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union threatens a new, post-cold war demarcation line between Europe and the rest of Eurasia.

Most of Russia's serious political defects and its recent drift toward authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin have their roots in Yeltsin's decision to concentrate power in the executive branch. Just as significant, Yeltsin's consolidation of executive power was copied throughout the former Soviet Union (the Baltic republics aside), and set the standard for the institutional development of new states. Today, of the 12 non-Baltic Soviet republics, only Moldova and Georgia give their parliaments a significant share of power. In all the others, excessive presidential power prevails, albeit to varying degrees.

Presidential power in most of the Central Asian states is absolute. In Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, where the executive branch is in ascendancy over the legislature and courts, the president represses all political opposition and severely restricts basic freedoms of religion, speech, press, and assembly.

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