Monday, April 23, 2007

Boris Yeltsin, 76

Yeltsin died Monday at 76, a Kremlin official announced. The Interfax news agency quoted an unidentified medical source as saying that he died of heart failure.

Like Peter the Great, the 18th-century czar he once mentioned as his model, Yeltsin was no towering democrat. In launching a war against the breakaway southern region of Chechnya in 1994, he was responsible for the violent deaths of more Russian citizens than any Kremlin leader since Joseph Stalin. As president, he tolerated -- even authorized -- the excesses of a system in some ways as corrupt and morally adrift as the one it replaced.

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