Farewell Yeltsin

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Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin died 23 April at the age of 76 of heart failure. It was Yeltsin who scuttled Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet Union, and although 76 per cent of Soviets supported maintaining the union in a referendum in 1991, Yeltsin exhorted them to "declare war on the government". After the army putsch in August that year, he was in the driver's seat, and made a pact with Belorussian and Ukrainian leaders to dismantle the union.

As Russian president from 1991-1999, he presided over a severe economic decline, a sharp increase in the death rate, the destruction of parliament in 1993, a disastrous war against Chechen rebels, and an entrenchment of corruption and cronyism that surpassed the worst of the Soviet era.

He virtually disappeared from public life after his retirement and was increasingly reviled as a drunkard who turned a mighty empire into a checkerboard of mostly failed states. The only major public figures attending his funeral in Novodevichy Cemetery are ex-US presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton. He is survived by his wife Naina, two daughters and grandchildren.