Boris Yeltsin was Russia’s liberator, the man who brought to an end 70 years of Communist oppression. But he was also the man who almost destroyed Russia by letting liberty turn to licence, democracy to anarchy and the free market to rapacious exploitation.

His greatest moment was his heroic defiance of the old Soviet Union in the summer of 1991, when he clambered atop a tank and single handedly faced down the plotters who had staged a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev.

But like so many Russian leaders, triumph eventually turned to disaster. Weakened by ill-health and far too much vodka, he lost control of his country. His final years were marked by chaos, corruption and the almost total collapse of the rule of law. He left office a broken man, widely despised.

Today many Russians have forgotten what they owe to the burly peasant son from the Urals. Yeltsin swept into Moscow as a breath of fresh air — a vigorous, nononsense mayor who in the dying days of communism showed in practice how Gorbachev’s calls for glasnost and perestroika could be translated into better government. It did not last. He fell out spectacularly with Gorbachev and was sacked — a personal slight he never forgave.

But like Churchill, when the crisis came Yeltsin seized it with all the courage and theatricality of a born leader. He destroyed the coup plotters by shaming them and swept away their worn-out heritage by outlawing the Communist Party. Intoxicated with their new freedoms, Russians applauded widely. In 1991 Yeltsin won an overwhelming mandate for change in the first free elections of a leader in almost a century. Yeltsin was in a hurry. But like so many before him, he rushed ahead with visionary changes and decrees without understanding the forces he was to unleash or the fatal Russian tendency to veer from one extreme to another.

Egged on by Western applause, he appointed Yegor Gaidar, a young Western-orientated economist, to cure the sclerotic economy with shock therapy. It was to prove a disaster. Huge state industries — oil, gas, steel — were privatised by giving their employees shares in them. A handful of cunning entrepreneurs saw their chance and bought up the vouchers that the workers saw as worthless. By 1995 they had seized control of half of Russia’s wealth. Money turned to influence and influence to corruption, as these men exploited their monopolies and protected their privileges. And while impoverished pensioners peddled their last wares on the streets, a new hated class was born: the oligarchs and their hangers-on, the New Russians.

Meanwhile, on the streets, rivals battled it out in gun fights for control of the banks and businesses. The police were powerless and the law was meaningless. It was almost as though Yeltsin had deliberately inoculated the country against democracy, the market and the new friendship with the West.

Yeltsin could yet have saved the day had his health been better. He won overwhelming reelection in 1996 because people saw in him an honest man, a freedom fighter ready to return the country to its old values and traditions. Whatever the world thought of the brutal shelling he ordered of the Russian parliament in 1993 after its squabbling deputies defied the Constitution by refusing to accept its dissolution, most Russians applauded Yeltsin’s decisiveness. Partly, however, he won because the oligarchs saw their position threatened and staged a spectacular PR campaign to turn around his dismal ratings.

But at this moment of triumph Yeltsin suffered a massive heart attack and never regained full command. He delegated government to “advisers” who protected him while lining their pockets. He searched vainly for a loyal prime minister to show the smack of firm government — but by 1998 the underperforming economy could no longer be kept going, and the rouble crashed together with Yeltsin’s credibility. Millions of Russians lost their life savings. He should have resigned then but too many people had an interest in keeping him going.

As Yeltsin’s grip weakened, so the challenges grew: Chechnya, Russia’s tricky relations with its former empire, the breakdown of public health and education, and rampant inflation. Russians felt battered and bewildered and yearned for the old certainties and stability instead of this chaotic new freedom. The country that had applauded the Russian “bear” as a change from the dry, preachy Gorbachev now wanted a little more order from their leader as well. His public escapades became more and more embarrassing — his impromptu conducting of a German band, his “tiredness” that prevented him leaving the plane in Ireland, his almost monosyllabic press conferences and his “goosing” of a startled secretary. It was a cringing humiliation for most Russians.

But for all his weaknesses, Yeltsin was admired by many for his blunt, peasant-like understanding of what made Russia tick. He became, like his country, committed to Christianity. As a Communist Party leader in Ekaterinburg (then called Sverdlovsk) he had carried out the party’s orders to demolish the house in which the Tsar and his family had been murdered. He never forgave himself this sacrilege — and did everything to restore the Orthodox Church to its old influence and authority. As a symbol of national reconciliation, he presided over the poignant reburial of the bones of the murdered royal family in St Petersburg in 1998.

Yeltsin tore his country away from its crippling past and offered it the chance to become a respected moral member of the world community. Russians have still not found their place there. But without Yeltsin the search could not have begun.

Michael Binyon is a former Moscow correspondent for The Times

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