Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin. These are three names to conjure with in Russia's recent history. Boris Yeltsin, who died yesterday at the age of 76, supplanted Gorbachev in 1991 and appointed Putin as prime minister in 1999, paving the way for him to become president the following year. Impulsive, shrewd and courageous, Yeltsin was a populist leader who delivered body-blows against the communist system from within and then presided over its brutal, painful but peaceful transition to an authoritarian capitalist democracy of sorts.
During Yeltsin's two presidential terms he presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of the Russian Federation - without an intervening civil war. He introduced formal democratic freedoms such as multiparty elections, media pluralism and open borders. His radical transformation of the Soviet economy through shock therapy reforms privatised state property and enriched a new class of billionaire oligarchs. These changes also undermined social protection, devalued pensions and boosted inflation. As a result, the Russian economy lost some 45 per cent of its output in 1989-98, millions of people experienced a collapse of living standards, public goods such as law and order, education and health care and life expectancy fell well below Soviet standards, and criminality, corruption and death rates soared. The disastrous Chechen war of 1994-96 humiliated the armed forces.
These raw facts of historical change make it difficult to evaluate Boris Yeltsin's record dispassionately. Alongside his daring commitment to political change from 1985 to 1993 there is the serial incompetence in office, peppered by bizarre episodes, prolonged absences and rampant cronyism. Russia's international standing suffered severely, despite it having adopted western economic and political norms. Its national pride was deeply affected as a result. It took the severe currency crisis of 1998 and then the strengthening international price of oil and gas products to restore that pride under Vladimir Putin, along with many authoritarian trappings of the Soviet era. But Mr Putin nevertheless shows continuity with Yeltsin's fundamental political and economic changes, rather than breaking with them. Mr Putin's popularity owes a lot to that.
Yeltsin's political flair did not desert him at crucial moments when that continuity was put in serious doubt. In 1996 he pulled himself together to win a second presidential term with a brilliant opportunist campaign that outwitted a resurgent communist opposition. Three years later his shrewd selection of Putin, the former KGB officer, as prime minister and his dramatic New Year resignation in 2000 opened the way for Putin to succeed him as president. Yeltsin was a flawed democratic pioneer who changed his country profoundly. On balance, he has left it a better place.