Boris Yeltsin, who played a key role in the Soviet Union's demise and became Russia's first president, has died aged 76, the Kremlin says.
Mr Yeltsin - who had a history of heart trouble - died of heart failure in hospital at 1545 (1145 GMT).
He came to power after being promoted by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a man he then outmanoeuvred.
He won international acclaim as a defender of democracy when in August 1991 he mounted a tank in Moscow.
In what became one of the defining moments of his career, Mr Yeltsin rallied the people against an attempt to overthrow Mr Gorbachev's era of glasnost and perestroika.
In another episode of high drama, two years later he ordered Russian tanks to fire on their own parliament in October 1993, when the building was occupied by hardline political opponents.
But Mr Yeltsin, who became Russia's first democratically-elected leader after Mr Gorbachev resigned in December 1991, saw his final years in office overshadowed by increasingly erratic behaviour and plummeting popularity as the economy suffered.
Bouts of ill-health were accompanied by rumours of a drinking problem, exhibited most famously when Mr Yeltsin grabbed a conductor's baton in Berlin and, apparently inebriated, tried to sing along with the orchestra.
The BBC's diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall says despite his unpredictability, Boris Yeltsin remained a reliable Western ally, even when relations grew icy over Nato's military action against Yugoslavia in 1999.
He announced his retirement in the final hours of 1999, handing over to secret service chief Vladimir Putin.
Mr Yeltsin may have disappointed Russians by bringing them neither peace nor prosperity, our correspondent says.
But, she adds, he did help end 70 years of Soviet Communism, and that, in the long run, is what he will probably be remembered for.
Mr Gorbachev paid a mixed tribute to his successor, saying Mr Yeltsin was responsible for "many great deeds for the good of the country and serious mistakes", Russia's Interfax news agency reported.
Mr Putin has telephoned Mr Yeltsin's widow, Naina, to express his condolences.
The US White House praised Mr Yeltsin as an "historic figure during a time of great change and challenge for Russia".
A funeral for the former Russian president will take place at Moscow's Novodevichy cemetery on Wednesday 25 April.
President Putin has also declared that a day of national mourning.
"We will do everything we can to ensure that the memory of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, his noble thoughts and his words ''take care of Russia' serve as a moral and political benchmark for us," he said in a televised address.
Chechen debacle
Mr Yeltsin's eight years in power brought immense changes to Russia.
He banned the Communist Party, introduced a new constitution which concentrated all real power in the hands of the president, and presided over Russia's troubled mass privatisation in the early 1990s.
The BBC's Russian affairs analyst, Steven Eke, says under the Yeltsin leadership, Russians were given greater political and civic freedoms than they had ever enjoyed.
The media, especially television, were able to criticise the authorities, even the president, in a way they would no longer consider possible, he says.
But history may judge Mr Yeltsin's actions towards the rebellious region of Chechnya much more harshly, he adds.
In 1994, Mr Yeltsin launched a disastrous large-scale military intervention in the breakaway republic, pledging to crush resistance in days.
Instead, a bloody war of attrition ensued, which left tens of thousands of people dead, and the north Caucasus permanently destabilised
Speaking in an interview with Russian television in 2000, Mr Yeltsin said that he saw the lives lost in Chechnya as the biggest responsibility he had to bear.
But he added that there had been no alternative and that Russia had to act against Chechen separatists.
"I cannot shift the blame for Chechnya, for the sorrow of numerous mothers and fathers," he said. "I made the decision, therefore I am responsible."
Link:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6584481.stm
Yeah I don't have to tell you how the Chechens felt when they found out he died, but I heard that there are rumors going around that Putin had him poisoned but nobody knows how true that is yet.
Yeah I don't have to tell you how the Chechens felt when they found out he died, but I heard that there are rumors going around that Putin had him poisoned but nobody knows how true that is yet.
I doubt Putin would have him poisoned at this point, his health wasn't exactly stellar to begin with. Too much Vodka. Unfortunately, it looks his democratic reforms died before he did.
"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is."
I doubt Putin would have him poisoned at this point, his health wasn't exactly stellar to begin with. Too much Vodka. Unfortunately, it looks his democratic reforms died before he did.
Yep it was to much vodka, the man did many things that makes him top in my bad-book
Our preperation continued, with our efforts and the efforts of our brothers, for years and years. Through out that time we gathered, observed and waited until the moment to move arrived.
I doubt Putin would have him poisoned at this point, his health wasn't exactly stellar to begin with. Too much Vodka. Unfortunately, it looks his democratic reforms died before he did.
Yeah true vodka was a serious problem for him but I read that the doctor that was looking after him said his health had become better lately and that she would have never expected him to die like that. Also it's weird how all the people that helped Putin come to power are starting to die one by one for no apparent reason.
Yeah true vodka was a serious problem for him but I read that the doctor that was looking after him said his health had become better lately and that she would have never expected him to die like that. Also it's weird how all the people that helped Putin come to power are starting to die one by one for no apparent reason.
Yeah very intresting.....it wouldnt suprise me the Russians are bit of an expert when it comes to POISENING
Our preperation continued, with our efforts and the efforts of our brothers, for years and years. Through out that time we gathered, observed and waited until the moment to move arrived.
like wage war against the chechen people and have flats and houses in groznyy bombed for no reason! Killing thousands of Muslim chechens!!!!!!!
Our preperation continued, with our efforts and the efforts of our brothers, for years and years. Through out that time we gathered, observed and waited until the moment to move arrived.
Kavkazky Uzel, on April 24, published the comments of Chechens about Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, who died on April 23. Lechi, a 49-year-old Chechen who formerly belonged to the Vainakh Democratic Party, which in the early 1990s was headed by the late Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, told the website: "The Chechens in their time supported Boris Yeltsin in his fight against the GKChP [the state of emergency committee set up by the August 1991 hard-line coup plotters], but then came to bitterly regret doing so. Remember: even Shamil Basaev was on the barricades in Moscow [against the GKChP]!"
Lechi continued: "We really considered Yeltsin to be a democrat at the time, but he ended up being who he was - a person ready to do anything for the sake of power. I - probably like a majority of the inhabitants of our republic - only regret that he did not go on trial for having unleashed two bloody wars here and for shooting up his own parliament in 1993. I hope that the Most High will give him his just desserts. The death of any person is heart breaking, above all for his family. But someone who has brought so much suffering to people cannot expect others to grieve for him."
Islam, a 23-year-old student at one of Grozny's colleges, said of the deceased Russian head of state: "Yeltsin brought us only disaster - only blood, death and devastation. No one in Chechnya regrets his death. Because of him, tens of thousands of people died here. And not only Chechens, but also Russian soldiers. It's a great pity that people like him, guilty of committing heinous crimes, get the chance to live out their days peacefully in retirement, and not die in prison - like, for example, Slobodan Milosevic."
Ruslan Aliev, a former Soviet Interior Ministry official, said: "I heard the comments of some politicians about Yeltsin. They said he was a larger-than-life personality, almost the savior of Russia and so on. It is absolute nonsense! It was precisely Yeltsin who was one of the main initiators of the breakup of the USSR. I would put him on trial for that alone, because all the rest - the war in Chechnya, the events in the Prigorodny district of North Ossetia in 1992, the wars in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Trans-Dniester - are only consequences of the collapse of a great power. Who brought Djokhar Dudaev to power here in 1991? Yeltsin and his entourage did that in order to depose the [Communist] Party leadership of the ChI ASSR [Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic]. And then, in order to win elections, they launched a war here that they thought would be ‘small and victorious.' We are still straightening out the mistakes made during the years of Yeltsin's rule."
An elderly inhabitant of Chechnya, Markha Saidova, told Kavkazky Uzel correspondent Sultan Abubakarov: "I lost three of my sons in the last two wars. In the first war, [my] eldest and middle sons were killed, and in this one, the youngest. Until I die, I will not tire of cursing those who unleashed war here. One of them is Yeltsin. He brought a great deal of evil not only to us Chechens, but also to Russians. How many Russian mothers, just like me, mourn the loss of their sons killed here? What were they fighting for, what did they die for? Let Allah punish Yeltsin and all the others guilty of the deaths of our children."
The Chechen separatist websites, not surprisingly, posted items about Yeltsin that were even harsher. In a comment posted on the Chechenpress website on April 25, Akhmed Karachoevsky wrote that Stalin's deportation of the Chechens in 1944 looked like "an easy excursion to the virgin lands of Kazakhstan" compared to "the crimes of Yeltsin's gang" in Chechnya. "More than one hundred thousand killed, thousands and thousands tortured in concentration camps [or] disappeared without a trace into the boundless expanses of the empire; more than fifty thousand children who became cripples under Russian bombs; tens of thousands of orphans robbed of one or both of their parents - this is by no means a complete list of the ‘services' of this ‘democrat' in the first ‘Chechen' campaign, for whom the caretakers of Russian and Western ‘democracy'...are today shamelessly shedding tears."
Karachoevsky concluded: "Another murderer has died without receiving just punishment. But ahead is Judgment Day, when everything will have to be answered for - both worldly, righteous deeds and ‘feats of arms,' in the course of which crimes before the Most High - violating the basic commandments of Christianity set forth in the Bible: ‘Thou shall not kill,' ‘Love your neighbor,' and so on - were committed. Will he rest in peace?"
Perhaps the harshest comments came in an item posted on the separatist Daymohk website on April 24. In it, Data Tutashikha, wrote of the late Russian head of state: "His place is not simply on the garbage heap of history, but in the rubbish dump, or on the streets of Djokhar [Grozny], where [the bodies of] Russian soldiers that he threw into war were eaten by wild dogs and cats. I wonder: in his final moment, did the butcher remember the Chechens he killed or [remember] his own...18-year-old soldiers who, [according to] his best defense minister of all times and peoples Paskha-Mercedes [Yeltsin's first defense minister Pavel Grachev], died with smiles on their faces? Judging by the fact that he [Yeltsin] didn't repent of his sins, he didn't remember them."
Tutashikha continued: "Many today are paying their respects...Chechens are also mourning the deceased, but only because they didn't have time to stick a knife in his throat. Many Chechens were waiting for an opportune situation to do that. But time intervened, and the enemy passed away without vengeance being exacted. There is no doubt that God's judgment will be frightful." She ended her commentary by saying: "Burn, pig, in the blue flames of hell!"
Kavkazky Uzel on April 25 quoted a source in the apparatus of the Chechen president and government as saying that Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov had sent a telegram with condolences to Naina Yeltsina, widow of the deceased Russian president. According to the source, Kadyrov also paid his respects to Yeltsin in a letter to President Vladimir Putin.
According to Kavkazky Uzel, Kadyrov's telegram to Naina Yeltsina read: "It was with profound sorrow that the Chechen people took the news of the passing of your husband, the first president of the Russian Federation, Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin. His name is closely associated with the history of the New Russia, and particularly with the country's transition to democracy. With dignity, he went through one of the most difficult periods in the formation of our state, taking upon himself historical responsibility for the people who believed in him and supported him. You, together with him, had to endure the heavy weight of responsibility for the country. You were his tower of strength. This loss cannot be made up for, but words of gratitude will be the best remembrance of this great person."
According to Kavkazky Uzel, Kadyrov said in his letter to Putin that "Boris Yeltsin was a great person" and "a courageous fighter for democracy and freedom," and called Yeltsin a democrat and larger-than-life politician whose name "is connected to an entire epoch in world history."
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Our preperation continued, with our efforts and the efforts of our brothers, for years and years. Through out that time we gathered, observed and waited until the moment to move arrived.
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