Goodbye, Yeltsin

...Yeltsin’s courage was partly born of calculation. He was, after all, an apparatchik, versed in the tortuous politics of the Soviet system. He had already staked out his position as the spokesman of radical reform in the politburo and then as the first democratically elected president of Russia. By 1991 he had to oppose the coup. But these were also the correct choices: he was on the right side of history. He recognised that the Soviet Union had become an empty shell and had the effrontery to break it...

...he made three huge mistakes: the war on Chechnya, which brought the security services into the heart of government; the “loans for shares” programme of 1995, which transferred a vast part of the natural wealth of Russia into a tiny number of private hands; and the selection of Mr Putin as his successor. These three errors, together, led to a reversal of the move towards a more democratic, liberal and open Russia... [The] mistakes were not Yeltsin’s alone. The west also made big errors...

-- from Martin Wolf's evaluation of Yeltsin