They dawdled back from the polling booths, pulling apart the free cinnamon buns that came with every vote. There was no rush on the summer day when Boris Yeltsin became Russia's first democratically elected president. Mind you, this was the scorching south of the country, where, when the sun burns, no-one hurries for anything.

"I voted for Yeltsin," I remember one old family friend telling me, a woman, then in her 50s, who would be far too embarrassed to admit it now. "I say we should go for Yeltsin and then wait and see."

She chewed the harder outer rings of her cinnamon swirl and gave the sweet, moist centre to her granddaughter.

This was the last summer of the Soviet Union and Russia, the biggest of its 15 republics, was celebrating its first flirtation with democracy. Yeltsin was elected on June 12, 1991. His opponents were wiped out. So, within six months, was the Soviet Union and the livelihoods of millions.

"Shock therapy", the papers called it. Yeltsin forced through one of the world's most aggressive programmes of economic reforms.

A year or so after Yeltsin was elected, still in southern Russia, I ran into a casual acquaintance on another roasting summer afternoon. The man, in his late 50s, had on a smart new shirt, patches of sweat filling his armpits. "My life savings," he said, pulling at the sleeve.

He had worked at a nickel mine more than 1000 miles north, leaving when he had saved enough to buy a retirement cottage in the south. He was in the middle of organising the purchase when "shock therapy" hit.

By the time he realised he should cut and run, pulling his cash from his "guaranteed" accounts in the state savings bank, it was too late. He went to the shops and spent the lot on a single shirt.

There was one man who hated Yeltsin even more: Alexander Rutskoi, the air force general who had been Yeltsin's running mate in 1990 and Russia's first vice president. In October 1993, Rutskoi, surrounded by a rag-tag army of everything from fanatic Stalinist grannies to young Afghanistan veterans, declared himself president in the grounds of the "White House", Russia's barricaded parliament.

Somehow, jostled by the crowd, I ended up next to him as he made the announcement, an unwilling cheerleader for a counter-revolution. Then Yeltsin shelled Rutskoi and his comrades out of the White House.

Rutskoi, no angel himself, thought Yeltsin was a crook. My old friend, now into her late 60s, was agreeing by the time Yeltsin, his one-time energy sapped away by heart disease and, his critics said, the drink, stood down in December 1999.

"He gave the country to bandits," she said, that vote on the long hot summer day of 1991 long forgotten.