Politicians and paradox, it is true, often go hand in hand. Yet by any standards Boris Yeltsin's career has been paradoxical in the extreme. At times it has seemed as though there are two Yeltsins: one a feisty democrat and populist, the other tough, vindictive and authoritarian.
The contrast can be summed up by two Economist cover pages featuring Yeltsin. One bore the caption "The only man for Russia", while the other was titled "The wrong man for Russia". Both, it could well be argued, were true.
He was, on the one hand, the president responsible for bringing a market economy and a quasi-democratic political system to a country which had suffered oppression for centuries. On the other hand, no Kremlin leader since Stalin has been responsible for more bloodshed on Russian territory.
Born near Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in the Urals in 1931, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin qualified as a civil engineer and worked his way through the ranks of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to become the Sverdlovsk party boss in 1976. Called to the capital by the then Soviet president, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, he became Moscow city boss, chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Russia and, in 1991, president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and later that year of its successor, the Russian Federation. He was elected President of the Russian Federation in July 1996.
In Moscow he had fought a battle with his conservative party colleagues which led to his ousting from his position as city boss, his removal from the politburo and eventually his resignation from the Communist Party.
Mr Yeltsin had by 1991 become the focus of democratic discontent in Russia. He fought against the privileges of the party elite and was seen travelling on trolleybuses in Moscow, something previously unheard of for a Russian political leader. He had also developed an undying hatred of the Soviet president, Mr Gorbachev, a feeling returned, with interest, on Mr Gorbachev's part.
The animosity had its positive side. When Mr Gorbachev dithered on reforms, Mr Yeltsin was there to rally the people and push the Soviet president in a democratic direction; when security forces killed 14 demonstrators in Vilnius he was there to highlight a brutal event which in earlier times might have been hidden from the people. When he stood for the presidency of the RSFSR in 1991 there was little doubt that he would be victorious. But that presidency was subordinate to the Soviet presidency of Mr Gorbachev and a major power struggle ensued.
Then, totally unexpectedly, the hardliners in the Communist Party gave Mr Yeltsin his greatest opportunity. When the tanks rolled on to Moscow's streets on August 9th, 1991 - with Mr Gorbachev cut off in his Crimean holiday home - he was there to lead the opposition. The coup failed miserably. Mr Gorbachev returned to a city which had changed totally. Mr Yeltsin knew this; Mr Gorbachev did not. From that moment on, the fate of Mr Gorbachev was sealed and real power on a national scale was within Mr Yeltsin's grasp.
The banning of the Communist Party and the dissolution of the Soviet Union left Mr Gorbachev powerless and bereft of popular support. By January 1st, 1992, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was leader of an independent Russia. There were still battles to be fought. The Russian Congress of People's deputies, constitutionally, had enough power to limit Mr Yeltsin's decrees. A running battle between the presidency and the parliament culminated in October, 1993, in the shelling of parliament and a fierce gunfight at the Ostankino TV station in Moscow.
Mr Yeltsin had overthrown the constitution, and in December of that year a new basic law was passed, amid allegations of vote-rigging, in a referendum which made the new parliament subservient to a president who had more powers than any democratically elected western leader.
In power, Mr Yeltsin began to change. His behaviour became more erratic and he surrounded himself with some extremely unsavoury advisers. The Communist Party he had done so much to destroy had also played a decisive role in forming his character: opposition was to be crushed rather than tolerated.
The rumours of heavy drinking persisted. In his days in opposition these had been put down to KGB disinformation, but a series of missed meetings with foreign leaders both in Russia and abroad pointed to problems.
The Shannon incident, in which Mr Yeltsin failed to leave the aircraft to meet the then Taoiseach, Mr Albert Reynolds, had been preceded by a bizarre performance in Berlin in which, after staggering out of a state reception, he attempted to conduct a military band.
His weaknesses were exploited by his entourage, which included former KGB general Alexander Korzhakov and defence minister Gen Pavel Grachev among others.
Gen Korzhakov despised democracy, while Gen Grachev was accused of massive corruption. Some Russian newspapers even linked him to the murder of the journalist Dmitri Kholodov, who had been investigating corruption in the military.
The choice of people to surround him had always been one of Mr Yeltsin's weakest points. It was his dogged loyalty to Gen Grachev that led him to commit the biggest and bloodiest mistake of his career.
In Chechnya, a self-proclaimed regime under former Soviet Air Force Gen Dzhokhar Dudayev had been a thorn in Moscow's side for three years when Gen Grachev convinced Mr Yeltsin that a couple of parachute regiments would sort the Chechens out in a matter of hours.
Thus began 18 months of bloodshed, in which tens of thousands of people lost their lives. The deaths of the 14 people in Vilnius in 1991, at which Mr Yeltsin rightly railed, were soon put in the shade by events at Grozny. Estimates of the numbers who died run from 30,000 to 90,000, most of them unarmed civilians.
By the end of the war Mr Yeltsin counted among his most bitter enemies not only Gen Rutskoy, Mr Khasbulatov and the resurgent communists under Mr Gennady Zyuganov but the old dissidents led by Mr Andrei Sakharov's widow, Yelena Bonner, the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mr Sakharov's close collaborator, Mr Sergei Kovalyov, whom Mr Yeltsin sacked as Russia's commissioner for human rights. Of these, Mr Kovalyov was the most scathing.
In an open letter to Mr Yeltsin, Mr Kovalyov wrote that if Russia ever achieved democracy it would be "not because of you but in spite of you". By January, 1996, Mr Yeltsin's popularity rating had fallen to less than 10 per cent, with presidential elections looming in just six months.
His entourage, helped by some British and American technical advisers, got to work. The crushing of the democratic opposition and the creation of a two-horse race between him and the communists was the first task. It was achieved through control of the media and particularly of television by the new pro-Yeltsin oligarchy, a group which was later to call in its favours as state industry was privatised.
The initial threat, that the liberal economist Mr Grigory Yavlinsky might outpoll Mr Yeltsin, was countered simply by making Mr Yavlinsky disappear from the TV screens. A poorly conducted, almost arrogant campaign from Mr Yavlinsky played into Mr Yeltsin's hands.
Despite this, Mr Yeltsin managed to get only 35 per cent support in the first round of voting on June 16th.
Only then, with possible defeat staring him in the face, did he rid himself of his more sinister friends. He also brought Gen Alexander Lebed on board to boost his chances and then went missing just before the second round of voting.
We know now that Mr Yeltsin had suffered his third heart attack in a year. But the propaganda machine churned out stories of his signing decrees, of his having a cold, a bout of laryngitis, tiredness.
Although they knew Mr Yeltsin was seriously ill, the Russian media kept quiet. News of s the illness appeared only in the Western media, denounced from the Kremlin as mischief-makers and liars.
Shortly after Gen Lebed had solved the Chechen problem and ended the war, he too was sacked for "lack of team spirit". Now the latest of Mr Yeltsin's prime ministers, Mr Vladimir Putin, will run Russia until a new presidential election is held within three months. That, at least, is what the constitution says.
But in today's Russia, in which economic crisis threatens to destroy whatever measures of democracy have been achieved in the past seven years, the rules are not always observed.
