Today on Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow is a burial ceremony of the first President of Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin.
Attempts to associate the certain time with prominent figures of recently deceased is a common approach in journalism. In case of Boris Yeltsin it is not an overstatement to say that he has to a large extent defined Russia during the volatile 90’s. Yeltsin will go down into the history books as Russia’s ultimate liberal ruler and a westernizer.

Boris Yeltsin
When aksed in 1993 which deed is he most proud of in his entire life, he said it was quitting the Communist Party, where he has successfully started his political career. Yeltsin wanted to be the opposite of what the communists were - he has performed a number of difficult reforms; particularly difficult and painful was the rapid transition from planned to market economy. He has liberated the press and was very tolerant to criticism from the outside. He has diminished the role of the KGB in public life and worked towards the creation civil society, manifesting itself through public participation in political processes that went on in the country.

Lots of reforms went wrong, the failed privatisation, as a result of which few became rich practically overnight, whereas the rest of the people felt they were cheated. The Chechen wars dragged on as a senseless bloodbath and a neverending partisan war, accompanied by terrorist acts on Russian territory. Due to these and other problems, Yeltsin was never particularly loved by the majority of Russia’s population. His alcoholism and countless anecdotes of his drinking-related failures on the international scene also did not add to his popularity.

As Gwynne Dyer stated:

I have seen President Boris Yeltsin drunk and I’m pretty sure I have seen him sober, but unless he does something obvious like singing or falling over, it takes a while to decide: both his body language and his speech patterns tend to blur the issue.

Perhaps, the main mistake that he has made in his life was annointing Putin as his direct successor. In retrospective, that was the one single deed that has overturned most of Yeltsin’s unquestionable political achievements.

Putin’s policies have largely destroyed what was left of Yeltsin’s political achievement. While Yeltsin was an innovator seeking to create and nurture a free Russia with public participation and a limited role for the state, Putin scrapped the fledgling institutions and political freedoms and pushed Russia back toward its traditional track: loyal bureaucrats instead of statesmen; and an omnipotent and forbidding state and an impotent society, deeply alienated from each other.

Masha Lipman in Washington Post, on Yeltsin’s legacy

In his last speech, Yeltsin said: “I want to say that I am sorry. I am sorry for the dreams that did not materialize.” The dreams of the young Russian democracy were his dreams too. He was a truly Dostoyevsky’s character, torn apart by various conflicting forces, feeling guilty for his inability to make system improvements. Both his strengths and weaknesses seemed blown out of proportion.

When prominent politicians die many say that they have marked a certain era. In this case I could not agree more.