Yeltsin leaves mixed legacy

Russia's first democratically elected leader also was quick to use force.
MOSCOW (AP) -- Boris Yeltsin was a courageous fighter, an instinctive democrat who helped dismantle the vast totalitarian apparatus of the Soviet state and its monolithic Communist Party, freeing millions in Asia and Europe.
Yet when he died Monday, at age 76, many Russians regarded their nation's first freely elected president as a failure, or worse.
Yeltsin "was a revolutionary leader at a revolutionary moment," said Andrew Kuchins, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. But that moment, it seems, has long passed.
Yeltsin's successor, President Vladimir Putin, has muzzled the media, restricted the independence of parliament and governors, effectively crippled opposition political parties and filled many high state offices with veterans of the Soviet and Russian secret services. A respected pollster recently measured his approval rating here at over 80 percent.
Larger than life during his tenure, Yeltsin shrank from public view after his retirement on New Year's Eve 1999, and in recent years had rarely given interviews. Only after his death was the big, bumptious politician with the soft pink features and wave of white hair seen again in file footage on Russian television.
Putin's remarks
Putin spoke to the nation four hours after the announcement of Yeltsin's death to praise his predecessor -- and one-time patron -- as a man "thanks to whom a whole new epoch has started."
"New democratic Russia was born, a free state open to the world; a state in which power truly belongs to the people," Putin said.
Yeltsin will be buried Wednesday in Moscow's historic Novodevichy cemetery, the resting place of such diverse figures as writer Anton Chekhov and former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Putin postponed his annual state of the state address from Wednesday to Thursday in deference.
Kuchin said Yeltsin was a reformer who battled the Communist Party from the inside, an exultant wrecker of the U.S.S.R.'s totalitarian regime.
But as president of Russia, he seemed too willing to use force, too tolerant of corruption, too eager to trust his gut -- even when it led to disaster.
He stood on top of a tank during the 1991 coup attempt by Communist hard-liners like a big-game hunter celebrating his kill, but two years later, he ordered tanks to shell upstart members of parliament. He broke up the old Soviet Union, but then invaded Chechnya when the region joined the rush for independence.
He abolished the old KGB, but then named a KGB veteran -- Putin -- as his heir apparent.
But what angered many Russians was how Yeltsin the crusader against Soviet corruption presided over a fire sale of state-owned industries to Kremlin insiders, a move that created a small cadre of Russian billionaires overnight.
Meanwhile, during his tenure, many ordinary Russian citizens saw their savings wiped out, their jobs evaporate, the society their parents and grandparents had created disintegrate.
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