Boris Yeltsin helped end the Cold War and begin a new era of freedom and democracy for his Russian people. But when he died Monday of heart failure at age 76, the Russian Federation's first president was remembered mostly for his failures, not his triumphs.
Westerners recall Yeltsin as the defiant reformer with the thick thatch of white hair and the growl for a voice who stood atop a tank in 1991 to help bring down the Soviet Union. Russians, however, remember the flaccid face of Yeltsin's second presidential term, the slurred speech, the extended absences and a tenure stained by bloodshed, corruption and widespread economic hardship.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who eventually would rue the day he brought Yeltsin from the provinces to Moscow, said Monday that Yeltsin was a man "on whose shoulders are both great deeds for the country and serious errors."
Others were more generous, focusing on the early Yeltsin years.
"He brought an unfree country to freedom," said Anatoly Chubais, a longtime Yeltsin adviser and one of the architects of Russia's reviled privatization process. "[Yeltsin brought Russia] from a country in which lies were simply routine to a country that is trying to live by the truth."
