Boris Yeltsin

A 29-YEAR-OLD student in Moscow gave this assessment of Boris Yeltsin, who died yesterday at age 76: "It's too early to judge properly now, but in 10 or 20 years we will be able to judge." However, from an outside perspective, here's a preliminary appraisal: Yeltsin will stand with Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great , Lenin, and Joseph Stalin as one of the pivotal leaders of Russia.

Ivan, the first to be crowned czar, curtailed the power of the aristocracy; Peter opened Russia to the West; Catherine expanded the realm to the Black Sea; Lenin forged a Communist successor to the czars' domain; Stalin defeated Hitler's Germany. All ruled through violence and fear.

"He [Yeltsin] made many mistakes," the student told Reuters. That's true. But in Yeltsin's glory days, he broke the grip of autocracy in Russia.

Yeltsin first came to prominence in 1985 as a protege of Communist Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, who sought to reform the Soviet Union. The Communist leadership ousted Yeltsin from national power in 1987 for contending that Gorbachev's reforms were not going far enough.

The Soviet constitution, however, established democratic institutions for each of the 15 republics that formed the union, and gave them the right to secede. Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to take seriously the constitutional mandate for free elections. Yeltsin saw an opening, got elected to parliament, and won the presidency of Russia, largest of the republics, in June 1991. He had found a chink in the structure of Soviet autocracy that he was able to exploit through democratic means, a method of governing alien to the great czars and their Communist successors.

The Baltic republics were demanding independence, which even Gorbachev thought went too far. Communist diehards staged a coup in August 1991. Yeltsin mounted a tank from a friendly garrison, rallied the Russian people against the plotters, and forced them to back down. Four months later, he led Russia and the other republics out of the Union. An empire forged by coercion had collapsed peacefully, thanks to Yeltsin's leadership.

Yeltsin's administration showed that democracy is far from perfect. He started a war to keep Chechnya part of the Russian federation, botched the privatization of the economy, and allowed corruption to become endemic. But he thwarted a Communist comeback in 1996, winning reelection in part by dancing a jig to prove his health. Unlike other great Russia rulers, he ceded power peacefully, in 1999, to Vladimir Putin.

Putin is reviving many of the practices of the czars and Communists, but he still has far to go before he becomes another Ivan the Terrible or Stalin. That democracy persists at all in Russia is a tribute to Yeltsin's stubbornness, daring, and showmanship.