Sometimes famous politicians just seem to have become a footnote in history and are completely forgotten, until they die. Today such a man died: Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin (76) was the first popularly elected president in Russian history, when he came to power in 1991. But after a series of economic and political crises in Russia in the 1990's his popularity soon went down. Yeltsin's conception of the presidency was highly autocratic and he either acted as his own prime minister (until June 1992) or appointed men of his choice, regardless of parliament. His confrontations with parliament climaxed in the October 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, when Yeltsin called up tanks to shell the Russian White House, blasting out his opponents in parliament. Later in 1993, Yeltsin imposed a new constitution with strong presidential powers, which was approved by referendum in December.
Following the 1998 Russian financial crisis, Yeltsin was at the end of his political career. Just hours before the first day of 2000, Yeltsin made a surprise announcement of his resignation, leaving the presidency in the hands of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin.
Internationally he will be most remembered because of his strange behaviour that usually was fuelled by vodka. At times he was a real clown instead of a president.
Gwynne Dyer, a London-based independent journalist, commented in the Moscow Times on April 13, 1999:
"I have seen President Boris Yeltsin drunk and I'm pretty sure I have seen him sober, but unless he does something obvious like singing or falling over, it takes a while to decide: both his body language and his speech patterns tend to blur the issue."
