I learned one evening in 1988 that Boris Yeltsin was making his first public appearance since being fired as Moscow party chief. I raced the two miles across Moscow by car but found the meeting had already begun, in a hall in Gertsen Street.
I fought my way in and heard his stentorian tones as he castigated Communist Party conservatives, but it was impossible to write down the words in the unbearable crush of bodies. At the time, Mr Yeltsin was officially a non-person, but on that evening there was no mistaking that something momentous was happening. Too powerful and popular to be arrested, he had embarked on a collision course with the party leadership as a powerful symbol of change.
The burly construction engineer from the Urals, with his little pig-like eyes and overbearing manner, was an unlikely democratic hero. As party secretary of Sverdlovsk, now Ekaterinburg, he had been a typical apparatchik. Far from being a reformer, he had sent in bulldozers to flatten the house where the Tsar's family was murdered so as to deter anti-Communist pilgrims.
When he came to Moscow in 1985, Mr Yeltsin (then 54) took Mr Mikhail Gorbachev's talk of reform literally and bullheadedly. He allowed non-party groups to meet in college classrooms and discuss mundane, but previously forbidden, subjects like market reform. This was at a time when Mr Gorbachev was publicly promoting perestroika (rebuilding) and glasnost (openness), but when demonstrations and free speech were still forbidden.
At a politburo meeting in October 1987, Mr Yeltsin lost his temper with a party hard-liner, Mr Yegor Ligachev, accusing him of smothering reform, and was promptly sacked by Mr Gorbachev, who personally couldn't stand the hard-drinking Siberian (nor could Mrs Raisa Gorbachev).
Among reform-minded members of the intelligentsia, Mr Yeltsin became a cause celebre behind whom they could rally - he was still on the central committee - without being labelled dissidents. At the same time, he was idolised by the masses for populist acts like riding the metro, and taking on the bureaucrats responsible for shortages and an unpopular anti-vodka campaign. The media ignored him, but copies of his politburo attack on Mr Ligachev were circulated widely.
The sacking of Mr Yeltsin ignited a slow-burning fuse. In the months following in 1988, the streets of Moscow became a series of debating chambers. Crowds which gathered daily in the Old Arbat to discuss Mr Yeltsin extended their complaints to shortages, Stalin, injustices and life's hardships.
When, in the autumn of 1988, Mr Gorbachev announced his first major reform, the establishment of a Congress of People's Deputies of 2,250 members, 1,500 of whom would be directly elected, Mr Yeltsin stood for the Greater Moscow constituency. His appearance in the Gertsen Street hall was in fact his first election rally. Party bureaucrats tried to block him at every step.
They tried dirty tricks, circulating a a video of Mr Yeltsin drunk on a visit to the US and a story about how he fell into a river as he tried to take flowers to an unnamed woman. It did not deter those campaigning for his political rehabilitation.
In the election in March 1989, Mr Yeltsin won the biggest single mandate of any elected deputy. The congress had a conservative majority, but it unleashed a torrent of free speech. Deputies dared openly to criticise Mr Gorbachev, the Communist Party and the KGB.
Mr Yeltsin dominated the congress, despite Mr Gorbachev's efforts to shut him out. When he was excluded from the Supreme Soviet, thousands took to the streets and he was quickly reinstated.
From then on, Mr Yeltsin was unstoppable. Though he rarely appeared at giant pro-reform rallies staged on Manege Square, tens of thousands there would take up a thunderous chant of "Yel-tsin, Yel-tsin!". He allowed himself to be named leader of the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies which incorporated revered figures like the human rights champion, Mr Andrei Sakharov, whose moral authority he assumed for himself.
Mr Yeltsin would often disappear for long periods, partly for tactical reasons, sometimes because he was drinking, but he never failed to maintain the political momentum when opportunities arose. After new republic elections, another Gorbachev reform which played into his hands, he was voted president of the Russian parliament in May 1990 and led a wave of resignations from the Communist Party, accelerating the break-up of the Soviet Union.
One of Mr Yeltsin's achievements at this time was to prevent civil war breaking out in the Baltics when he made a dramatic dash to Tallinn, capital of Estonia, to defuse a conflict between the Red Army and the forces of the emerging state.
By the time of the attempted coup in 1991, he had the stature to climb on top of a tank and in effect declare the end of the Soviet Union. For many Russians, that was his finest moment, for which they will always remember him.