Boris Yeltsin, the father of Russia’s (now) besieged democracy, is dead!

Frankly, given the obvious influence of acute alcoholism that led to many embarrassing, if not compromising, situations during the last days of his presidency, I’m surprised former Russian President Boris Yeltsin did not die until yesterday. He was 76.

But it would be as presumptuous and gratuitous for me to write an obituary about this larger-than-life figure as it would have been for me to have written one about former U.S. President Ronald Reagan after he died. Nevertheless, because of Yeltsin’s pivotal place in the history of the 20th Century (as the first democratically-elected president of Russia), I feel obliged to honor his passing – even if only modestly.

As it happened, it was the force of Yeltsin’s personality as much as the appeal of his democratic reforms that ushered in the end of communist rule in Russia. Although, based on the affable camaraderie he enjoyed with western leaders, it was self-evident that Yeltsin had the soul of an American-style democrat. And, to get a sense of how true this was, all you need to know is that Yeltsin was as determined to bury communism as he was to finally bury its Russian father, Vladimir Lenin.

(Alas, more than 80-plus years after he died, Lenin remains on display in a Mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square – as a far bigger tourist attraction than the planned shrine to Anna Nicole in The Bahamas will ever become. And we thought the nearly-80 days it took to bury James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, was wacky and unseemly….)

At any rate, I hope this pictorial tribute suffices to convey my admiration and respect for Yeltsin – despite his tragic flaws and monumental mistakes: not least of which, of course, was plucking Vladimir Putin from relative obscurity and effectively appointing him his successor as president of Russia, only to see Putin steadfastly undermine his democratic legacy.