High hopes always ended in despair

Like Russia itself, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was complex and enigmatic -- an unpredictable riddle of a politician.
The country's first freely elected leader in 1,000 years overthrew Communism and supervised the destruction of the Soviet Union. He established peaceful relations with the West and transformed Russia by introducing private property, free-market economics and new political and social freedoms.
But the hulking bear of a man who won the adulation of Russians by attacking communist privilege also left a legacy of shattered hopes and half-fulfilled economic reforms that nearly bankrupted the country and subjected its once-egalitarian society to searing social, economic and ethnic divisions.
History will always remember Mr. Yeltsin for that day in August, 1991, when he clambered atop a tank in Moscow and stared down a hard-line Communist coup.
Two years later, the impulsive "hero of democracy" shelled a mutinous parliament into submission.
In 1994, he launched a war in Chechnya that still haunts Russia and has killed more Russians than at any time since Stalin's purges.
When he retired, six months early, on New Year's Eve, 1999, Mr. Yeltsin did not turn power over to a democrat dedicated to deepening and strengthening his reforms. He tapped a veteran of the old Soviet security apparatus who steadily reversed many of Russia's democratic gains and fostered a new authoritarianism.
Throughout his tumultuous career, Mr. Yeltsin often appeared to be a peasant who acted like a czar.
His drunkenness and ill health frequently left the nation leaderless at critical moments.
His erratic behaviour -- whether pinching a female secretary's bottom during a diplomatic reception or threatening the West with an unsteady hand on Russia's nuclear trigger -- seemed to mirror his country's suddenly diminished superpower status.
Throughout his career, Mr. Yeltsin shrugged off rumours of heavy drinking, though he frequently needed physical support when he appeared in public and often slurred his speeches.
On a visit to Italy to meet the Pope, he delivered a formal toast at a banquet in which he leeringly pledged his "boundless love for Italian women."
And after a well-lubricated tour of the United States, he was unable to leave his plane to receive an official welcome from the Irish prime minister during a stopover.
Mr. Yeltsin was perplexing and contradictory. He always held out the hope of change and he almost always disappointed.
A sworn enemy of old Soviet-era politicians, he gradually alienated other significant sectors of Russia's political spectrum.
The former provincial Communist leader had lost faith in socialism, but introduced reforms that raped the economy, triggering hyperinflation, soaring unemployment and a collapse of industrial output.
He generously lined the pockets of supporters and close aides and created a class of privileged oligarchs who plundered Russia's resources.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who first elevated Mr. Yeltsin to public prominence in 1985 by bringing him to Moscow to reform the party's hierarchy, said yesterday he felt Mr. Yeltsin "had a tragic destiny."
"He was responsible for great deeds to the benefit of the country -- and serious mistakes," he told the Interfax news agency.
An advocate of rapid reform whose populist touch outshone Mr. Gorbachev's own policies of perestroika and glasnost, Mr. Yeltsin frequently clashed with his boss and publicly criticized his policies.
When they finally fell out, Mr. Yeltsin was ousted from the party leadership in 1987 and expelled from the politburo in 1988.
He quit the Communist party in 1990, after being elected speaker of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian republic in the old Soviet Union.
Carefully cultivating his image as a reformer who could rally ordinary people, he became the first elected president of the Russian Federation on June 12, 1991.
Two months later, he found himself dealing with the coup attempt.
Afterward, he banned the Communist party, confiscated its property and turned his leadership of Russia's reform movement into a democratic revolution in which he joined the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus in creating the Commonwealth of Independent States.
In the chaotic transition that followed, his personal failings as a leader aggravated Russia's political and economic turmoil.
He sought to give the country a dose of "shock therapy" but too often he left the details to advisors.
As a result, Russia endured its worst economic crisis in decades. Tens of thousands of people saw their life savings disappear, dozens of the country's banks collapsed, corruption and crime ran rampant, and neo-fascist groups surged in popularity.
In the fall of 1998, the economic collapse was complete when Moscow defaulted on billions of dollars of debt.
By allowing his presidency to be hijacked by corrupt "Kremlin insiders," Mr. Yeltsin createdideal conditions for Vladimir Putin's new authoritarianism.
But whenhe unexpectedly resigned tobe granted an immediate amnesty by Mr. Putin from all possible prosecution, he knew he had failed.
In his final television address to the Russian people, he pleaded for understanding.
"I ask for forgiveness for not justifying some hopes of those people who believed that at one stroke, one spurt, we could leap from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past into the light, rich, civilized future," Mr. Yeltsin said. "I myself believed in this, that we could overcome everything in one spurt."