Boris Yeltsin’s death last month affected me in a way that was surely unique. You see, he was my high-school crush.

Yes, I am serious. If you opened my locker at Dominican Academy in New York City, you would have found a picture of Yeltsin torn from Time magazine, as if it were Tiger Beat (move over, Kirk Cameron). One night in my freshman year, the phone rang at about 9:45 on a Friday night; it was a classmate’s father . . . calling for me. My father, who answered the phone, was concerned: Why was “Amy’s dad” calling — and so late on a Friday? Well, because Amy’s dad had heard about the girl with the crush on Boris Yeltsin and wanted to make sure Kathryn knew that Barbara Walters had an interview with Yeltsin airing on 20/20 at 10. Amy was too weirded about by the whole thing to call herself. You couldn’t blame her.

I watched the interview with fascination and admiration.

So what was it about Yeltsin? The talk of excessive vodka drinking? His manly-Soviet-strongman Communist past?

Uh, no.

For a teenager with a thirst for knowledge, Boris Yeltsin was a living, breathing civics lesson: One flawed man can make a difference.

Yeltsin’s rise was a tumultuous and fascinating time in history. I was old enough to remember being a kid hearing Ronald Reagan talk about the Evil Empire. That empire was falling — a wall had come down, a Kremlin as we knew it being dismantled. Boris Yeltsin didn’t do that, but he saw an opening and he went for it, first as a pain in Mikhail Gorbachev’s side, then as the first president of the new Russia.

As a young devourer of books, especially history books, a reader of Solzhenitsyn, I had a sense of what evil man can do and how the prospect of some kind of democracy and freedom can make a life-or-death difference to a people. On behalf of the Russian people, I thanked God for Yeltsin and prayed for his success.

As Yeltsin biographer Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute puts it in his new book, Russia’s Revolution, “Like Lincoln or de Gaulle, Yeltsin took over a great nation at the time of a mortal crisis and held it together. In Yeltsin’s case, there were three crises at once — political, economic, and imperial. Not only did the country’s political and economic systems lie in ruins, the country itself had to be reinvented. Against impossible odds, he succeeded, forging, for the first time in a thousand years, a sustainable Russian state that was neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship.”

National Review Online’s David Pryce-Jones, journalist and historian, wrote upon Yeltsin’s death: “Elected president of Russia, he played the nationalist card, and it proved stronger than Communism. Civil war might well have erupted between die-hard defenders of Communism and Russian nationalists. Standing on a tank in August 1991, Yeltsin successfully appealed to nationalism. It was a brave moment, and will always mark his place in history.”

Yeltsin, who led Russia for eight years, was far from perfect, and his obituaries and the current state of Russia — President Vladimir Putin seemingly more an autocrat than not — clearly reflect that. But he was a brave, impressive man all the same; one crucial to history, as mere men can be. As Aron puts it, “In the end, it was one man’s ability to make a choice and to take the responsibility that tipped the scale. The market economy happened in Russia because Yeltsin wished it to happen.”

And if you’re that high-school boy with a picture of Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the filmmaker and writer who speaks truth to radical Islam (and whose life is in constant danger for it) — I’m sorry we’re off a few decades to go to the prom. You’re laying the foundation for a long life of well-informed participation in American democracy: That you get the importance of politics — and of personalities in politics — is cool. High school’s not a time too well-known for thinking outside oneself. You may be the odd man out, but your weirdness can have positive consequences in our cynical young country.

© 2007, Newspaper Enterprise Assn.