News of Yeltsin's Death Stirs Mixed Feelings in Russia

"President Yeltsin was an historic figure who served his country during a time of momentous change," President Bush said in a statement that offered condolences to the Yeltsin family. "He played a key role as the Soviet Union dissolved, helped lay the foundations of freedom in Russia, and became the first democratically elected leader in that country's history. I appreciate the efforts that President Yeltsin made to build a strong relationship between Russia and the United States."

Yeltsin defined himself for the ages when he climbed onto a tank in August 1991 and beat back an attempted coup by hard-liners against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was loosening the Communist Party's grip on power. By the end of that momentous year, the Soviet Union was no more, Gorbachev was sidelined, and Yeltsin, the first elected president of Russia, seemed to hold history in his fist.

The leaders of some of the former Soviet republics, now independent countries, were among the most effusive in their praise of him Monday. "I remember with gratitude Yeltsin's role in the peaceful reconstruction of Estonian independence in 1991, and his contribution to the removal of Russian troops from Estonia in 1994," Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said in a letter to Russia's leaders.

But the marginalized Gorbachev resented Yeltsin deeply, a fact that again seeped out Monday. "I express my deepest condolences to the family of the deceased, on whose shoulders lie many achievements in the service of the country, and serious mistakes," Gorbachev said in a statement.

When Yeltsin resigned on New Year's Eve 1999, turning over the presidency to his prime minister, the then little-known Putin, he acknowledged the shortcomings of his years in office.

"I want to ask your forgiveness for not fulfilling some hopes of those who believed that . . . in one go . . . we would be able to jump from a gray, stagnating totalitarian past into a bright, rich, civilized future," said Yeltsin, who by then was a weary, puffy-faced shadow of the firebrand of 1991. "I believed in this myself. It didn't happen in one jump."

His declining health and alcohol-fueled gaffes, particularly abroad, were a source of acute embarrassment for many Russians, who saw in them a mirror of the country's weakness. In particular, Yeltsin's apparent acquiescence to the NATO alliance's expansion eastward and his inability to do anything about NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999 poisoned attitudes toward the West.

Russia's new assertiveness, seen recently in Putin's lambasting of the U.S. global role at a conference in Germany, is a stark and welcome change for many Russians.

Yeltsin disappeared from public life after leaving office and was largely silent on Putin's record. The two occasionally met, and last year Putin hosted a 75th birthday party for Yeltsin at the Kremlin.

Over the past six years, the Kremlin's centralization of power, its re-nationalization of strategic industries, particularly the country's natural resources, and its squeezing of political freedom have been justified here as necessary antidotes to the chaos of the Yeltsin years.

Buoyed by soaring prices for oil and natural gas, Russia under Putin has enjoyed the kind of economic boom and fiscal stability that Yeltsin could never have imagined. The president's approval ratings stand at 80 percent, while Yeltsin's rating, when people are asked to recall him, is in the low single digits.

The collapse of Soviet industry meant abject poverty for tens of millions of people, while a connected few exploited the privatization of state assets to become widely resented billionaires known as oligarchs. Many of those tycoons, notably Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky, are now in prison or in exile.

"I have lost my mentor, and Russia has lost the greatest reformer in all its history," Berezovsky said Monday.

Much of the wealth that the country's vast natural resources generate now flows to state accounts. The poverty level has been halved, and a sense of rising prosperity has softened resentment over the persistence of the oligarchs. Today's tycoons are politically silent except to pledge fealty to Putin's vision of a strong state.

Putin has also apparently tamed Chechnya, which Yeltsin disastrously invaded in 1994. A second war began in 1999.

Yeltsin's "greatest mistake was the first Chechen war," said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights organization. "He was able to realize his mistake, but at the price of tens of thousands of lives. But he did admit the mistake and stopped the war. He was very humane. When he was leaving, he said to people, 'I'm sorry.' Not many leaders can do that."