Russia's press bade a farewell to first post-Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin, praising the freedoms he introduced over his many faults.
MOSCOW: Russia's press bade a respectful farewell to first post-Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin on Tuesday, praising the freedoms he introduced over his many faults.
The mass circulation pro-government daily Izvestia returned to Yeltsin's inauguration in 1991, picturing him as he first entered the Kremlin gates to assume power and praising him for not clinging on beyond a second term.
"In power many people cursed him, but in leaving the Kremlin he showed his critics and his supporters that there is something more important than hunger for power," Izvestia said, referring to his sudden 1999 resignation.
"There is such a thing as law and democracy and it was under Yeltsin that this began to be understood. In the end it was for him about self-respect and reputation and now he has left us in the same way," Izvestia said.
The paper also noted Yeltsin's appeal for forgiveness for his faults, unprecedented for a Russian leader, in his resignation speech on December 31, 1999.
The independent Vremya Novostei daily pictured a more reflective Yeltsin in his later years and gushingly paid tribute to a man who for all his faults, the paper said, had been a hero.
"Yeltsin was the last hero. Now we just have people," said Vremya Novostei.
"The main quality of a hero is not his historical good or bad points or the number of his mistakes, his victories or defeats. What is important for a hero is greatness, even if it is frightening," the paper said.
Meanwhile a commentator in the English-language Moscow Times also returned to Yeltsin's establishment of democracy in Russia and warned that his crowning achievement was in danger of being undone under President Vladimir Putin.
"His tenure was characterized by a constant search for political coalitions but his main drive was always forward, away from the history of a Communist dictatorship and toward the future of a normal country that could truly consider itself European," Konstantin Sonin wrote in The Moscow Times.
"If Russia does indeed slip into dictatorship then it is only right that its first president died before he had to watch his country pass the point of no return," the paper said.
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