On the morning of Dec. 31, 1999, Yeltsin appeared on Russian television to address the nation. "I am leaving," he said, his voice close to breaking. "Why hold onto power for another six months when the country has a strong person, fit to be president, with whom practically all Russians link their hopes for the future today?" He wiped away a tear. "Why should I stand in his way?"

Indeed, Yeltsin had no compelling reason to stay on, and every reason to quit when he did. He was, after all, a power-driven former Communist Party boss. Though he was called a democrat by the Western leaders he embraced, Yeltsin unabashedly embodied many of the traits of the typical Russian autocrat. His authoritarian demeanor and adroitness at defeating his rivals won him, at least in the beginning, as much popularity among average Russians as enmity among his opponents. Power and survival mattered to Yeltsin. Granting people the freedoms for which they hungered assured him in the early 1990s of a populist appeal no other leader could match.

But by the end of last year, things had changed. His impulsive behavior, tolerance of corruption and inability to stop the fall in living standards had destroyed his popularity. Presidential elections were originally scheduled for June 2000. Had an anti-Yeltsin candidate won, as was likely given Yeltsin's single-digit approval ratings, Yeltsin and those associated with him might have faced prosecution for everything from genocide to theft of state assets to abuse of power and the destruction of the Soviet Union. The time to resign was New Year's, when the popularity of Yeltsin's chosen successor, Vladimir Putin, was high enough to ensure the latter's victory in early presidential elections.

Yeltsin's decision to resign surprised everyone, including me, but it should not have. Over the past three years, Yeltsin had appointed and fired four prime ministers, apparently in a search for one who would grant him immunity from prosecution when his second term ended. Last summer he appointed the fifth, Putin, an obscure former KGB agent and the head of the FSB (the successor agency to the KGB). Soon after, Chechen rebels invaded Daghestan, a republic in the south of Russia, and apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk began blowing up.

The war in the Caucasus and the so-called threat of domestic terrorism gave Putin his chance to establish himself politically; in fact, it is conceivable that toward that end, he and his KGB associates engineered both the war and the explosions. In any case, Russian forces drove the rebels out and pursued them into Chechnya, with much support from the Russian public, who saw in the war a chance to revive their country after years of drift, humiliation and decay.

When, at the end of 1999, Putin's war-based popularity hit 75 percent, Yeltsin resigned, knowing that the constitution would mandate elections in three months -- too little time for Putin's popularity to wane significantly. It made no difference to him that Putin had never held a political office before. Putin was a trusted member of his entourage. Yeltsin's trust was well placed: Putin's first decree as acting president granted Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. The transfer of power differed only in procedure from the abdication of a sovereign in favor of his loyal crown prince.

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The West has misunderstood Russia. This is not surprising, for Russia is remote from the West, and in more than just geographical terms. After the demise of the socialist system and the police state, Russia still has not westernized in the way much of Eastern Europe has.

Centuries of illiteracy, autocracy and isolation made Russia different from the West long before the Revolution of 1917. The single most decisive event in Russian history took place in the 10th century, when Kievan Rus (the ancestral Russian state) accepted Christianity from the Byzantine Greeks, from Constantinople and not from Rome.

A century later the Christian Church split in two, with Rome and Constantinople excommunicating each other, and a state of hostility was born between Russia and Europe. Four centuries later, Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks, and Russia was left the sole standard-bearer of the True Faith, the last remaining defender of Orthodox Christianity as the Greeks had bequeathed it to them. Russia thus became the bearer of a unique civilization.

If Russia had remained a middle-sized medieval state, this split might not have mattered much to the world. But Russia expanded in every direction to cover one-seventh of the Earth's surface by Soviet times, which meant more than 8.5 million square miles. (By comparison, the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, covers about 3.5 million square miles.) Along with its size, Russia's vision of itself as the possessor of the True Faith would give it a sense of messianic mission that throughout history would grant it a national identity that only the United States could match.

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