Boris Yeltsin's heart, which gave out yesterday at age 76, was in the right place at critical moments in Russian history. But his weaknesses, not least for drink and bad company, in the end failed him as well as his country. He will be remembered for bringing down the Soviet Union and giving Russians a taste of freedom. But he also made possible Vladimir Putin's destruction of Russia's fledgling democracy.

Such contradictions were a reflection of his background. No dissident intellectual in the Vaclav Havel mold, Mr. Yeltsin was a rough-hewn construction engineer and Communist Party hack from Sverdlovsk, along the Urals. Mikhail Gorbachev's experiments with political opening in the 1980s enabled his rise. Even in those days, Mr. Yeltsin mixed courage with foolhardiness, naked ambition with a genuine popular touch.

History won't soon forget Mr. Yeltsin's finest hour, standing atop a tank to defy a coup launched by party hardliners in August 1991. His instincts told him that the people wanted the Soviet Union buried -- something that Mr. Gorbachev, who believed Lenin's construct was salvageable, never understood. In a system as tightly wound as the U.S.S.R., only a charismatic and brave insider like Mr. Yeltsin could have brought about its demise.

But the destructive skills necessary to do so proved inadequate to the job of building a state. The new Russia was led by the old guard in new clothes, with Mr. Yeltsin at the top. To his great credit, he embraced multi-party democracy and put up with scathing dissent.

But Mr. Yeltsin was his own worst enemy. Drunken escapades, aside from ruining his health, were symptomatic of poor leadership at the Kremlin. He briefly embraced limited market reforms in 1992, giving capitalism a bad name in Russia. He created the "oligarchs" through a "loans for shares" scheme -- in effect, selling off choice assets to insiders for a song -- and a badly run privatization plan urged on him by advisers who gained most from it. He failed to strengthen political institutions and the rule of law. The Chechen war that was begun in 1994 turned out to be a military and political debacle.

Mr. Yeltsin's tragedy was to stay too long, urged on by his family, advisers and foreigners who thought he was the only man standing in the way of a chimeric Communist threat. "I want this guy to win so bad it hurts," Bill Clinton said about the 1996 elections, when Mr. Yeltsin lay in a hospital after suffering a heart attack that was kept secret. He did win, but that year was the turning point for Russian democracy. By 1999, the Yeltsin family was no longer willing to trust voters to select a replacement and found the obscure KGB Colonel Putin. The businessman Boris Berezovsky, a Yeltsin confidant, engineered the takeover to the younger man, whose energy struck such a contrast with the incumbent.

The rest is Russia's recent history. President Putin has muzzled the press and free speech, destroyed opposition parties and centralized economic and political power inside the Kremlin. In retirement, Mr. Yeltsin kept quiet as his good legacy was dismantled -- leaving mostly the bad. Russia was never as free as in the Yeltsin 1990s, before or since.

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