When Boris Yeltsin awoke on the morning of August 19, 1991, he had no real power over the Soviet Communist Party or the armed forces with which it had terrorised half the world since 1945. By lunchtime he had seized de facto control over both. Scarcely a shot had been fired. Instead, from the top of a tank, he had denounced the hardliners seeking to topple Mikhail Gorbachev and won over the commanders sent to arrest him. One said: “I am not going to order my troops to shoot Boris Yeltsin.”

Seldom in history — and never in the TV age — has power swung so dramatically into the hands of a leader with genuine authority to use it. And use it Mr Yeltsin did. Over the next four months he dismantled a spectacular but ruinous experiment in totalitarianism and launched Russia on a new, albeit tortuous, path to pragmatism.

Mr Yeltsin’s immense political courage was too often eclipsed by his own human frailty. By the end of his eight years in power he was presiding over a mess. Ravaged by poor health, he was an embarassment to Russians, a liability abroad and of little help to a succession of bewildered prime ministers. But his great achievement, the burying of a 19th-century ideology that poisoned the 20th century and abhorred the individual, proved irreversible. Critics assessing his legacy after his death yesterday from heart failure may dwell on missed chances and false hopes. But in the war of ideas that continues to shape the contemporary world, Boris Yeltsin was a towering force for good.

Thrust into the cauldron of Moscow politics from his power base in the Urals, this hulking populist, a party member himself until 1990, faced down the Communist old guard not once, but four times. The first, during the August coup attempt of 1991, positioned him to take on Mr Gorbachev himself later that year. Two years later Mr Yeltsin defeated another Communist-led coup attempt by shelling its leaders in the Moscow White House. And in 1996, threatened by a reborn “democratic” Communist Party, Mr Yeltsin mortgaged the State’s choicest assets to fund a campaign that won him a second term — even if it also nearly killed him; the man dancing furiously in an iconic piece of campaign footage underwent quintuple heart bypass surgery soon after.

By the mid-1990s Mr Yeltsin had ceded control of the economy to a widely reviled clique of “oligarchs”. It is too seldom remembered that these men profited from crash privatisations urgently counselled by the Harvard economist and White House adviser Jeffrey Sachs (he of the Reith Lecture), when a more gradual transition from command to market systems would plainly have suited Russia better.

The now flailing President had also unleashed a disastrous war on Chechnya, again on blinkered, overoptimistic advice. Yet the negotiated settlement that ended the first Chechen war was consistent with Mr Yeltsin’s underlying preference for granting freedom, whether to the regions or the press, where his successor has obsessively reimposed central control.

Many Russians, both inside and outside the Kremlin, will note with wry disdain the West’s applause for Mr Yeltsin’s role in history. They recall more painfully the deaths of young recruits in Grozny and the mass destitution wrought by the financial crash of 1998. Yet only a slim minority of ageing diehards would choose now to go back to communism. Without Boris Yeltsin, there might have been no choice.