Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s First Elected President, Dies at 76

The body of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin is to lie in state in Moscow ahead of a funeral on Wednesday. Yelstin died Monday of heart failure at the age of 76. Boris Yelstin came to power in 1991 as Russia’s first post-Soviet head of state replacing Mikhail Gorbachev. He led the country’s chaotic transition from communism to a capitalist democracy before resigning in 1999. Tributes to Yeltsin poured in from Western leaders upon news of his death. In Washington, President Bush said he “helped lay the foundations of freedom in Russia.’ British Prime Minister Tony Blair called the former president was a ‘remarkable’ man who had fearlessly championed democracy and economic reform.

But critics blame Yeltsin for plunging his country into years of economic and political turmoil after he dissolved the Soviet Union. He also presided over the disastrous military campaign to crush Chechnya’s drive for independence. The Washington Post puts it like this: “Yeltsin was no towering democrat. In launching a war against the breakaway southern region of Chechnya in 1994, he was responsible for the violent deaths of more Russian citizens than any Kremlin leader since Joseph Stalin. As president, he tolerated -- even authorized -- the excesses of a system in some ways as corrupt and morally adrift as the one it replaced.”

Yeltsin will be buried in Moscow Wednesday which has been declared a national day of mourning.

* Katrina vanden Heuvel. Editor and publisher of the The Nation magazine and an expert of U.S.-Russia relations.

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