IN AN election campaign trip to Siberia earlier this month, Boris Yeltsin gave a history lesson to a class of schoolchildren. His subject was the reformers of Russia, such as Tsar Peter the Great, and how they had been unable to complete their reforms.
The Russian President hoped the children's parents would vote for him so he could finish the reforming work he had started.
Mr Yeltsin did not actually say it, but clearly he saw himself as a latter day Peter the Great, the Tsar who left his backward country in 1697 to study in England and Holland before returning to build the city of St Petersburg.
But, according to a little pamphlet called historical parallels, which is selling like hotcakes on Moscow's new street bookstalls, Boris Yeltsin is more like his namesake from the end of the 16th century, Boris Godunov. The story of his tragic reign was told by the composer Modest Mussorgsky in his famous opera of 1874, Boris Godunov.
Boris came to the throne after the death of Ivan the Terrible, who had held Russia in an iron grip from 1533 to 1584. Ivan achieved much, beating back the Tartar Khans who had raided medieval Russia and bringing the country together in a strong centralised state. But the people paid a heavy price as Ivan, paranoid like Stalin, terrorised his own subjects as well as fighting external enemies.
Ivan's death can be compared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The hated dictatorship was over but the people, suddenly released, were confused by the new chaos.
Boris Godunov, a boyar or noble, was adviser to the feeble minded Tsar Fyodor who succeeded Ivan. There was also another son of Ivan, called Dmitry, who, with his unfortunate mother, Maria Nagaya (Maria the Naked), was shut up in a monastery at a place called Uglich.
In 1591, he fell from a window onto a spike and died. He was an epileptic but many felt that he had not fallen but had been pushed by Boris Godunov. Thus when Fyodor died in 1598 there was nobody standing between Boris and the throne. The patriarch gave his blessing for the coronation.
BUT everything Boris touched turned to disaster. Russia was in for the so called "time of troubles".
An earthquake hit Moscow, usually safe from the tremors, which can affect southern Russia. A plague of locusts devastated the crops, bringing on a famine. And the pretender, claiming to be Dmitry and saying he had survived at Uglich, invaded with an army from Poland.
After the death of Boris in 1605, the false Dmitry briefly, tried to impose Roman Catholicism on the Orthodox Russians before they killed him, burnt his body and shot his ashes from a canon in the direction of the west whence he had come.
Superstitious Russians said all their misfortunes were because Boris Godunov, who had had the chance to change Russia after Ivan the Terrible, had the blood of the innocent Dmitry on his hands.
Likewise, Russians today see Boris Yeltsin, struggling with the legacy of Soviet totalitarianism, as a seriously flawed hero. In his case, it is the bloodshed and destruction in Chechnya, a tragedy of his own making, which has tarnished his image and diverted his energy from his reforming tasks.
However, it seems that Mr Yeltsin himself is determined to go down in history as a successful reformer. His low popularity ratings of earlier this year have spurred him into an election campaign far more imaginative than that of his communist rival Gennady Zyuganov.
Mr Yeltsin is trying to woo the market reformer, Gregori Yavlinsky, into an alliance with him. He has promised to end conscription. And he is hoping to correct his self acknowledged mistake over Chechnya at peace talks with Chechen leaders. "Give me a second chance", Mr Yeltsin seems to be saying. "I will indeed complete my historic reforms."