Say what you want about Yeltsin – and you are probably right.

Who was Boris Yeltsin? Westerners see Yeltsin as the defiant reformer with the thick thatch of white hair and the growl for a voice who stood atop a tank in 1991 to help bring down the Soviet Union. Russians, however, remember the flaccid face of Yeltsin's second presidential term, the slurred speech, the extended absences and a tenure stained by bloodshed, corruption and widespread economic hardship.
Yeltsin was the first Russian politician whose legitimacy rested on the genuine popular support of the masses, and he brought public politics to a country where for centuries politics had been confined to the czars' court intrigues and Politburo fights behind the curtain. But many people feel that he oversaw the terrible economic crisis in Russia in the late 1990s and started a very unpopular war in Chechnya, a mistake that has been a failure for Putin.

Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, was correspondent in Moscow from 1986 to 1991 and remembers Yeltsin as a "talented politician" like Gorbachev. But Yeltsin understood that the party should be abandoned somehow, and Gorbi wanted to fix it. Hear the audio and the slideshow here.

He entered in the spotlight in 1991, when he climbed to the top a tank to rally Muscovites to put down a right-wing coup against Mr. Gorbachev, a heroic moment etched in the minds of the Russian people and television viewers around the world; it ended with his electrifying resignation speech on New Year’s Eve 1999.

His kedy-dates:

1. July 1990: Resigns from Communist Party
2. June 1991: Elected president of Russian republic (in USSR)
3. August 1991: Rallies citizens against anti-Gorbachev coup, bans Russian Communist party
4. December 1991: Takes over from Mikhail Gorbachev as head of state
5. 1992: Lifts price controls, launches privatisation
6. October 1993: Russia on brink of civil war, Yeltsin orders tanks to fire at parliament
7. December 1994: Sends tanks into Chechnya
8. June 1996: Re-elected as Russian president, suffers heart attack during campaign
9. 1998: Financial crisis, rouble loses 75% of its value
10. December 1999: Resigns, appoints Vladimir Putin successor

In office less than nine years, beginning with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and plagued by severe health problems and alcoholism, Yeltsin added a final chapter to his historical record when, in 1999, he stunned Russians and the world by announcing his resignation, becoming the first Russian leader to give up power on his own in accordance with constitutional processes.

For The New YorkTimes, his relationship with the United States was a complicated one. President Clinton seized on the fall of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to advance American interests, and he and Mr. Yeltsin maintained a strikingly good rapport. In his dealings with Mr. Yeltsin, Mr. Clinton was protective, careful not to tempt old-line Communists to try to turn the clock back to dictatorship. There was some success between the two countries on nuclear issues, the removal of Soviet troops from the Baltic states and Moscow’s cooperation with NATO as it expanded toward the borders of Russia itself.

Like Peter Rutland wrote in Transitions Online, say what you want about Yeltsin – and you’re probably right. The former president's legacy remains controversial in today's Russia.

A good source of documentation about his excinting existence is Midnight Diaries, by Boris Yeltsin. Public Affairs, 12 October 2000. 336 pages, in English. Translated from Russian. I bought it in St. Petersbourg in 2005, and even if it is too partial, stills useful to understand the character. For Elena Chinyaeva, he embodied Russia in its troubled years: large, imposing, unpredictable, thirsty for change, riddled with problems, highly temperamental, exhausted, and totally lacking of nicely measured, decent manners.

Boris Yeltsin is a man who once escaped his enemies within the Communist Party in a military airplane, hugging a cannon. He mounted a tank calling for the nation to embrace democracy. He fell off a bridge during a dubious night rendezvous. He slept at Shannon Airport, snoring, while the Irish prime minister stood by, waiting in vain. Drunk, and looking like a true Russian bear, he directed an orchestra in Berlin during a ceremony devoted to the Russian army leaving Germany. He started a bloody Chechen war. He danced, clumsily and enthusiastically, through his presidential campaign, despite two heart attacks.

Unlike his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor, Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin was able to overcome his Soviet background, writes Masha Lipman in The Washington Post.

After rising to a high-ranking position in the Communist Party, he reformed into a staunch anti-communist and associated himself with Russia's liberals and Westernizers, including prominent Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. Yeltsin was a statesman with a clear vision and a strong sense of purpose: he committed himself to ridding Russia of communism and attaining freedom for his country, whose people had always lived in fear of the state.

Yeltsin achieved both goals: He made his victory over communism irreversible, and he turned Russia into a free nation. The coup in 1991 was above all a revolution -- even if it proved short-lived -- of public attitudes. The Russian people overcame their fear, they came to believe in freedom and in themselves, and they united to change the country's direction.

Mistakes? Many. During the rule of his successor, the phrase "the chaos of the '90s" has been firmly tied to Yeltsin's tenure. But he was running against time: The and turmoil of the early post-communist years left the Russian people frustrated and disillusioned, and they came to hate him as fiercely as they had loved him only a few years earlier. His compatriots, having no experience with freedom, failed to use their newfound options to make their lives better; they expected him to be their benefactor, and when he failed to deliver they resented and condemned him.

He was a drunk, but after all a modernizer. Even in his death: Yeltsin's funeral was the first for a head of state sanctioned by the Church since Tsar Alexander III's in 1894, helping to restore the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the life of the country and its people. Al least that is what Church spokesman Metropolitan Kirill said. Read what russian newspapers said on his death in Sean's Russia Blog

Writing on RIA Novsoti, political commentator Vladimir Simonov claims that the Sinatra song My Way best described Yeltsin.

So, final courtain for him.