Remember Boris Yeltsin, the bluff, burly democrat who stood on a tank, ready to slay the Soviet dragon, then roll up his sleeves and remake Russia?

That was 1991. Today, in the Russian president's newly published memoirs, we meet a more humble Boris Yeltsin."The Struggle for Russia" is a portrait of a dragon-slayer worn down by a long war of attrition, a lonely ruler plagued by doubts and remorse. His goal is more modest now: peace amid the ruins of an empire.

"I am not setting my sights on some shining peak that must be scaled. Nor am I trying to wipe out the entire path traversed until now," he writes. "No. The chief goal of this restless president is Russia's tranquility."

Others will have to remake Russia, Yeltsin says. The best he can do is make the process of change irreversible.

"A new generation will have to continue the work, to fulfill the reforms, to move Russia toward prosperity."

Yeltsin's deepest fear is civil war. The empire, he warns, will strike back.

"It has even more cataclysms in store for us. It will produce new fighters, fanatics and leaders, with or without epaulets. The empire is exacting its revenge for having been dissolved."

One shape that revenge might take - fascism - became clear in December with ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky's stunning showing in parliamentary elec-tions.

"Zhirinovsky revealed social, psychological and moral wounds in our society whose presence we had not suspected," Yeltsin says.

Yeltsin reveals wounds of his own in the book, writing about himself with startling candor for a country with a centuries-old history of remote, secretive rulers.

He writes of "debilitating bouts of depression, the grave second thoughts, the insomnia and headaches in the middle of the night, the tears and despair," as well as the "burden of the decisions made, the hurt from people close to me who did not support me."

"I have had to bear all of this," the 63-year-old Yeltsin says.

And alone.

People at the top don't have friends, he says. "You develop a kind of insularity."

The memoirs try to break through that insularity and close a widening gap between himself and the public. They are a bid for understanding, perhaps even forgiveness.

"People expected paradise on earth" after the Soviet collapse, he acknowledges. "Instead they got inflation, unemployment, economic shock and political crisis."

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The book appears when Yeltsin's popularity is at an all-time low; his health, sanity and drinking habits are openly questioned; and critics call him remote and vacillating.

Yeltsin claims to relish the criticism as a sign Russia is becoming a normal country.

"Fear is disappearing," he says. "And, oh, how they lambaste me!"

Yeltsin's new book picks up where his 1990 autobiography, "Against the Grain," left off: in the twilight of the Soviet Union.

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