By Valeria Korchagina

        On the last leg of an exhausting 72-hour trip across the Sakha republic, Anatoly Chubais took time out to reflect on Boris Yeltsin's place in history and the changes in Russia since the failed coup in August 1991.

Chubais said Russia has not seen anything comparable to Yeltsin in 300 years.

Chubais, who now heads Unified Energy Systems, was one of the reform-minded economists brought in by Yeltsin in the early 1990s and he is known, for better or worse, as the architect of the privatization program. In 1996, he came to Yeltsin's rescue and led the campaign that managed to get the unpopular president re-elected. Afterward, Yeltsin appointed him his chief of staff.

On June 16, his 46th birthday, Chubais spoke with Valeria Korchagina on the flight back to Moscow from Yakutsk on a UES Aviaenergo Tu-154 jet. He was relaxed and friendly, though tired from three days of nonstop traveling by plane, helicopter and truck to inspect power stations around the enormous east Siberian republic.

Sitting close so the tape recorder would pick up his voice over the engine noise, Chubais spoke to the reporter for about an hour on a wide range of topics. Here is just one small section of that interview, published as the country looks back on those fateful days 10 years ago.

Q:Who is Yeltsin?
A:The most amazing thing about Yeltsin is the sheer magnitude of the man. He possessed such depth, such reserves of talent that he was able to reach every layer of society. This is a man who climbed all the rungs on the party ladder, from regional party organization to the Politburo, and yet no one ever accused Yeltsin of timeserving. He rose above that within himself; he cast off that shell. Not because he wanted a career, a particular post or because he was power-hungry. This is a widely held belief, but it's not true.

He did what he did simply because he understood that everything had gone wrong.

On many occasions our democratic intelligentsia proved narrower in scope than Yeltsin. On the surface their ideas appeared sound and progressive. But at the end of the day Yeltsin enjoyed a far broader appeal. Yeltsin's relations with the democratic intelligentsia in 1990 and 1991 were quite mixed.

I believe to this day that in reality it was Russia's fantastic, supernatural good fortune that a figure of such scope and such qualities came along. I can't think of anyone else among the top 400 or 500 members of the political elite who could have come even close to tackling a task of this scale.

What is Yeltsin's accomplishment? Yeltsin changed history.

What is Putin doing now? He is working on issues of enormous complexity: land reform, tax reform, reform of the military and the natural monopolies. This is all extremely difficult, and I tip my hat.

But Yeltsin accomplished a different feat altogether, a feat of historic proportions. We were headed in one direction. He turned us around, and we are now headed in the opposite direction.

And he did all this without bloodshed — not counting the events of October 1993, and discounting the events in the Caucasus, where the amount of bloodshed could have been many times greater.

Yeltsin did all this by the sheer force of his personality, which brought together the most disparate elements of society. You have to remember that apart from the democrats like Yegor Gaidar and myself on one side, and reds like [former KGB chief Vladimir] Kryuchkov on the other, there was a vast middle ground inhabited by normal, run-of-the-mill members of the old Soviet elite. They were neither democrats nor utter scoundrels, and they accounted for probably 95 percent of the total.

Yeltsin's inestimable feat was that he drew this huge mass to himself, and this mass determined the country's capacity to cross from one historical epoch into the next.

To integrate such mutually exclusive forces and hold them together required more than just the force of Yeltsin's personality. Simply put, it required all of his life experience, his entire biography. Russian history hasn't seen anything comparable to Yeltsin not just in the last 10 years, but in the last 300.

If not for Yeltsin, everything would have been different. We would have endured bloodshed of another order entirely.

Compare Russia to the other former Soviet states. We all began in the same conditions, but the complexity of Russia's transformation was much greater than in the other former republics. Despite that fact, Russia has made far greater progress than the others have. People are migrating to Russia.

These are irrefutable arguments based on economic reality. They prove that Russia is a long way ahead of its neighbors. I'm not speaking of the particulars of our Tax Code or the right to buy and sell land. I'm simply speaking of those economic factors that reflect what is happening to our standard of living.

It's clear that we are far ahead of the rest, though our road was far more difficult. That in itself is proof positive.

Q:What do you consider the country's and your main accomplishments in the past 10 years?
A:For Russia the greatest accomplishment of the past 10 years was the peaceful start of a new era. What happened in this country was truly extraordinary.

At a press conference recently a reporter asked me: "What do your rightists [in the Union of Right Forces] stand for? Private property, sure, and democracy. But everybody already knows all that. What's left to prove?" Private property and democracy are old hat. And I was supposed to come up with something new.

This is amazing! Simply amazing! In my estimation the rightist movement in Russia has achieved two victories of historical significance.

The first was when [Communist Party leader Gennady] Zyuganov stopped talking about nationalization. Until 1996 he had talked of nothing else. After [he lost the presidential election in] 1996 he dropped the subject altogether, as though his tongue had been tied once and for all. The second became clear when that reporter said that private property and democracy were old hat.

It was fabulous! The clearest evidence of a complete turnaround in Russia.

As for my own accomplishments, I would mention one historical victory that the public didn't notice at the time, but which in a professional sense I am more proud of than anything else I've done. I'm talking about the 1995 budget that laid the foundation for economic stabilization in Russia.