Upon graduation, Mr. Yeltsin returned to Sverdlovsk, where he was offered the job of foreman at an industrial building site. He refused, insisting instead that he work in each trade first, so that when he was in a position to give orders, he would know what he was talking about.

He did not join the Communist Party until 1961, when he was 30 years old, an age at which Mr. Gorbachev was already well on his way up the party hierarchy. For Mr. Yeltsin, membership was a move to further his career in the Sverdlovsk construction agency, not an expression of his fervent belief in Communism.

He vented his disdain for the party in his autobiography when he described the oral examination he had to pass for membership. A member of the local committee, he wrote, “asked me on what page of which volume of ‘Das Kapital’ Marx refers to commodity-money relationships. Assuming that he had never read Marx closely and had, of course, no idea of either the volume or page number in question, and that he didn’t even know what commodity-money relationships were, I immediately answered, half jokingly, ‘Volume Two, page 387.’ What’s more, I said it quickly, without pausing for thought. To which he replied, with a sage expression, ‘Well done, you know your Marx well.’ After it all, I was accepted as a Party member.”

Fifteen years later, after serving as a secretary of the Sverdlovsk provincial committee, Mr. Yeltsin became party chief for the region, and stood out in the stagnation of the Brezhnev era as an activist, less interested in the perquisites of office than in rooting out bureaucratic corruption and improving the lot of the people.

When Mr. Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, he sought out regional leaders like Mr. Yeltsin who were not mired in Moscow’s ways. But he may have gotten more than he bargained for in Mr. Yeltsin, who wrote in his autobiography that he turned down the offer of a government dacha that Mr. Gorbachev had formerly used.

“We were shattered by the senselessness of it all,” he wrote of the enormous fireplaces, marble paneling, parquet floors, sumptuous carpets, chandeliers, crystal and luxurious furniture in the house. “I lost count of the number of bathrooms and lavatories.”

He asked: “What was the point of the whole thing? No one, not even the most outstanding public figures of the contemporary world, could possibly find a use for so many rooms, lavatories and television sets all at the same time.”