Do svidanja, Boris Yeltsin

He destroyed the Soviet framework that kept the satellite states of Eastern Europe under eroding, but determined, Kremlin control, effectively dismantling the geopolitical structure that had fueled the Cold War for four decades. It was perhaps the most significant political change in modern history.

But he also sent tanks into the Russian streets to ensure his own power when it was threatened by old-line Communists in 1993. He unleashed a futile, brutal and, many would argue, immoral war against separatists in Chechnya in 1994 that leveled towns and villages and killed noncombatants in the thousands.

As a popular Russian joke in the late '90s had it, “Mikhail Gorbachev took us to the edge of the abyss, and Yeltsin took us one step further.”