MOSCOW - Former President Boris Yeltsin, who engineered the final collapse of the Soviet Union and pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy, died Monday. He was 76. Kremlin spokesman Alexander Smirnov confirmed Yeltsin's death, and Russian news agencies cited Sergei Mironov, head of the presidential administration's medical center, as saying the former president died Monday of heart failure at the Central Clinical Hospital.


Although Yeltsin pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy, many of its citizens will remember him mostly for presiding over the country's steep decline.



Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, summed up the complexity of Yeltsin's legacy in a condolence statement minutes after the death was announced. He referred to Yeltsin as one "on whose shoulders are both great deeds for the country and serious errors," according to the news agency Interfax.

Yeltsin was a contradictory figure, rocketing to popularity in the Communist era on pledges to fight corruption — but proving unable, or unwilling, to prevent the looting of state industry as it moved into private hands during his nine years as Russia's first freely elected president.

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A strange person.
A curious president who will not have marked his time.

IT WAS KNOWN FOR ITS LOVE FOR THE VODCA

I think he will be missed, He certainly wasn't a Stalin and is a name and face we all recognised...

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This article certainly provides an interesting perspective:
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