Yeltsin Remembered: Russia's First Freely Elected Leader, but With a Mixed Recor

Boris Yeltsin rose within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But in nineteen eighty-seven he rebelled against the Soviet system. He called for more reform. Within a month, he was dismissed as party chief in Moscow.

He became a leader of Russia's political opposition. In nineteen eighty-nine, he was elected to the Soviet parliament. Two years later he was elected president of the Russian republic -- at that time, the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic. Mikhail Gorbachev was president of the Soviet Union.

To take his place, he chose his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB spy. Mister Putin was then elected president in two thousand and re-elected four years later. This week he remembered Mister Yeltsin as a man thanks to whom "a new democratic Russia was born."

Boris Yeltsin had a history of heart problems and heavy drinking. He suffered a heart attack between the first and second rounds of balloting in the nineteen ninety-six presidential election. His condition, though, was kept hidden. In nineteen ninety-nine, six months before the end of his second term, Mister Yeltsin resigned.

Political scientists say history will remember Boris Yeltsin as a leader who was democratic in some ways but not in others. They say Russia under Mister Yeltsin was a far more open place than it was during Soviet times -- and more open than it is now.