Séamus Martinremembers a capricious and contradictory man who was full of surprises.
"It was," as Dickens wrote, "the best of times, it was the worst of times." Boris Yeltsin's presidency was simultaneously brilliant and calamitous. He was, according to the Economist magazine "the only man for Russia" on one front page and the "worst man for Russia" on another.
Capricious, contradictory, anti-communist but with the mentality of a local party boss, Yeltsin succeeded in breaking up the old Soviet system but his attempts to build something in its place were simply disastrous.
In Moscow in the 1990s each foreign correspondent had a minder from the Soviet foreign ministry. My first minder was Shavkat Khamrakulov, now a senior Uzbek diplomat. At our first meeting he gave me some good advice. "You will find that this is a country full of surprises." Next morning there was no hot water in my apartment. The following day was marked by a four-hour power cut. A month later a visit to Dublin was cut short with the news that the tanks were on the streets of Moscow in a coup to oust President Gorbachev.
Gorbachev finally was ousted, not by the men who planned the coup d'état of August 1991, but by Boris Yeltsin who had rallied the opposition to the attempted putsch. It was then that the surprises really began.
In order to take power Yeltsin had first to get rid of Gorbachev. The method he chose was a dramatic one. Gorbachev was president of the Soviet Union, so if the Soviet Union was abolished he would not be president of anything. Yeltsin, the Ukrainian leader, Leonid Kravchuk, and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus met at a hunting lodge at Byeloveshcha Pushcha near the Polish border and announced that the USSR had ceased to exist.
But the red flag still flew over the Kremlin. With my colleague Peter Pringle of the London Independent who lived in the same ramshackle apartment block, I went to Red Square each night to check what flag was flying. It eventually came down and was replaced with the Russian tricolour at midnight on New Year's Eve.
What followed was far more dramatic. Yegor Gaidar, as Yeltsin's prime minister, abolished price controls in 1992 while there was still a supply- side monopoly. Inflation surged to 2,700 per cent. You checked your grocery prices in the morning, at lunchtime and in the evening. You changed just as many dollars into roubles as you needed for your purchase.
Once when my wife was buying a winter coat we arrived at the Vesna Store on the Novy Arbat with a parcel of 20 rouble notes that weighed 2½ kilos.
We were the lucky ones. The babushki, the grandmothers of Moscow and other cities, began to appear in the underground street crossings selling their belongings to make ends meet. I have a particularly haunting memory of an entire well-dressed family standing in the snow outside the Praga restaurant in downtown Moscow singing the beautiful religious chants of the Russian Orthodox Church, the father holding out his cap for alms.
Then came the vouchers. Each Russian citizen was given one as part of the privatisation process. Soon little groups, mainly of elderly people, were seen on the streets selling them. Those who bought them all up became very rich. They became the "oligarchs" who bit by bit got their hands on political as well as economic power.
They later met differing fates. Boris Berezovsky, a car dealer turned tycoon, now lives in a mansion in Surrey. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, communist turned capitalist, now dwells in the Matrosskaya Tishchina prison in Moscow.
Yeltsin surrounded himself with very unsavoury characters. Journalists investigating corruption began to get killed. In my own case I was roughed up by the police at the funeral of a young reporter called Dmitri Kholodov who had been blown to pieces by a briefcase bomb.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists' list of 12 of their number killed in the line of duty during Putin's term of office has drawn massive international criticism. The 31 journalists killed during Yeltsin's reign are rarely mentioned.
Among those who died was Rory Peck from Derry, shot by special forces at the TV station at Ostankino in October 1993. The shelling of a rebellious parliament followed and then Yeltsin took upon himself more powers than any president in the democratic world.
A year later Boris Yeltsin stood Albert Reynolds up at Shannon. I was in the breakaway region of Abkhazia the night before. Yeltsin appeared on TV before he set off from Seattle for Ireland. In an interview with Russian journalists he was obviously under the influence even before he got on the plane.
As he stood for re-election in 1996 I was told by a security expert there would be attempts to cancel the poll. "Watch for a bomb on the metro," I was told, "and later look out for Mr Yeltsin becoming seriously ill."
There was a bomb on the metro that night and Yeltsin had a major heart attack just before polling day. The heart attack was not reported locally and Boris Nikolayevich was re-elected.
The surprises became fewer and less frequent after that, but there was a massive one in August 1998 when the economy virtually collapsed. The effective devaluation of the rouble set the economy on the road to recovery, but banks went bankrupt. One of them held the modest Moscow account of The Irish Times.
Boris Yeltsin had one more surprise left for us. On New Year's Eve 1999 the phone rang as my wife and I, one of our daughters and some friends, prepared to see in the new millennium. It was an American colleague.
"Switch on the TV," she said, "Yeltsin has just resigned."
Séamus Martin is the former Moscow correspondent for The Irish Times.