Boris Yeltsin





is dead and buried; the tributes have been made, the pundits have opined, and the journos have moved on.

I was very sad to hear the news last week; not that I am a believer in coincidences, but I had been wondering what had become of him when the flash came through.

He was a man who fundamentally changed his (vast) country - not many can say that; and a person who emerged from his conventional communist political background to show enormoous personal courage, to climb on that tank, face down the still very dangerous forces of the past and avert an unimaginable civil war.
Of course he has his detractors, from the minnows who moaned that he drank too much, to the ordinary Russians for whom idealism mattered less than the disappearance of their life savings.

The truth is that, although he was quintessentially Russian, Russians distrusted him - as in the communist era and now, they preferred a resulote leader who told them what to do and kept Russia strong, than an experimenter with newfangled and disorganised theories of 'democracy'.

His name will be remembered for centuries to come; though I hope not as the figure in the narrow window of the sole democratic Presidency of Russia - a slim episode between the country's last communist leader and the first fascist one.