Yeltsin’s antics used to make it easy for Westerners to laugh him off. The people of the Soviet Union couldn’t possibly take him seriously enough to threaten the popularity of the great reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev–could they? They could and did. “People saw in him the values of a man who was honest, who was courageous, who said what he thought,” says Alexander Rahr, who recently spent several weeks with Yeltsin’s staff researching a book on the Russian democratic movement. For Russians, Yeltsin’s breaches of etiquette were simply part of his no-nonsense charm. His rise to world attention began in 1985, when Gorbachev, new on the job himself, brought him to Moscow to be the party’s national construction secretary. Yeltsin’s energy and enthusiasm soon earned him additional influence as Moscow’s local party leader and a candidate member of the Politburo. The public reveled in such trademark stunts as Yeltsin’s making the rounds of Moscow butcher shops and personally castigating the managers for selling such inedible meat. But his increasingly elbows-out demands for faster reforms became a public embarrassment to Gorbachev, who threw him out of office in 1987.

The ouster only helped cement Yeltsin’s reputation for integrity, Unlike virtually any other Soviet politician, Gorbachev included, Yeltsin had demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice his career for his beliefs. The phenomenon baffled the party’s leaders: every time they tried to squelch him, his popularity would soar. Two years after his firing, Yeltsin ran for a seat in the new Congress of People’s Deputies against a candidate supported by Gorbachev and won in a landslide. “His election to the Soviet Parliament was a protest vote in the truest sense of the word,” says Princeton University Sovietologist Stephen Cohen. “Everybody who had a resentment against anyone or anything voted for Yeltsin.” Yeltsin finally quit the Communist Party entirely last year, and this June he became the first freely elected president in Russia’s thousand-year history, winning an overwhelming 60 percent of the of six candidates.

A flair for making the right enemies isn’t the only thing Yeltsin has going for him. He also displays an uncanny talent for cultivating and keeping the right friends. Early this year he riled the Soviet armed forces by advocating the creation of an independent Russian army. According to Robert Nurick, an analyst at the Rand Corp., Yeltsin wasted no time in mending fences with the Soviet brass. First he named Col. Gen. Konstantin Kobets, a former deputy chief of the general staff, as his de facto defense minister. Then he began making the rounds of local Soviet military installations such as Tula, home of the crack 106th Guards Airborne Division. Military analysts believe Yeltsin’s courtship of the Army helped thwart KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov’s attempt last week to commandeer Army helicopters for an assault on the Russian Federation’s headquarters.

Critics have often accused Yeltsin of demagoguery. His supporters don’t deny the charge, but they prefer to call it “populism.” Galina Starovoitova, Yeltsin’s adviser on ethnic affairs, is the highest-ranking woman in his cabinet. “His manner is a little populist, like many new Russian politicians, including me,” she concedes. “But our people have just awakened to a political life after 70 years of a totalitarian regime. Populism is meant to awaken them. " He has met on occasion with representatives of the extremist and anti-Semitic Russian nationalist group Pamyat, but only to satisfy his curiosity about the group’s intentions, his supporters insist.

Although Yeltsin’s sheer unabashedness occasionally shocks non-Russians, it still may turn out to be his most indispensable asset. Andrew Nurnberg, Yeltsin’s literary agent in Britain, accompanied him to a meeting last year with Britain’s prime minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher. “Yeltsin asked Mrs. Thatcher if she’d consider a commercial treaty with the Russian Republic as opposed to the U.S.S.R.,” Nurnberg recalls. The proposal was an enormous display of nerve on Yeltsin, s part, given Thatcher’s close relationship with Gorbachev, but she responded as tactfully as possible, avoiding a direct refusal. “As we came out, Boris gave me a nudge in the ribs,” says Nurnberg. “He said, ‘You see? She didn’t say no!”’ Such unquenchable optimism may yet be the salvation of the Soviet Union. Sometimes it helps not to know what’s impossible.