The good Czar: the strange nobility of Boris Yeltsin.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Columns - In memoriam - Column

"YELTSIN DIED OF grief" declared the headline of an obituary on the liberal Russian website EJ.ru. The former president of Russia, wrote columnist Andrei Ryklin, simply could not bear to watch the destruction of the freedom he had worked so hard to bring to his country.

That's reaching a bit. If anything hastened Boris Yeltsin's death at 76 (a fairly ripe old age, especially for Russian men), it's far more likely to have been years of heavy drinking. Nonetheless, there is a certain grim symbolism to the fact that his final days were marked by some devastating blows to what remains of Russian liberty.

Earlier in April, anti-government demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg were dispersed by security forces with a brutality unseen since the waning days of the Soviet empire; dozens of demonstrators were beaten badly enough to seek hospital treatment, and many were arrested. The day before Yeltsin's death, a front-page story in The New York Times reported new moves to curb free speech on Russia's still relatively independent radio stations, with owners instructing their staffs to focus on the positive in domestic news coverage and ignore opposition leaders.

Every day in President Vladimir Putin's Russia is a reminder that the window of freedom the country enjoyed in the Yeltsin era (and even, in some respects, in the tail end of the Gorbachev years) is closing. Enjoyed is a relative term, since it was also a period of chaos, poverty, and corruption.

But as the Russian journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza noted in another EJ.ru obituary, Yeltsin's Russia was "a country which had independent television and no political prisoners," a country where opposition parties flourished and where the president could embarrass himself with drunken antics but did not muzzle critics or send goons to crush peaceful protests and take over TV stations. (It should be noted that Yeltsin did shut down some far-left and far-right parties and papers, including Pravda, during his 1993 standoff with pro-Communist hard-liners in Parliament, though this ban proved a temporary measure.)

Yeltsin's flaws were not limited to drunken antics. He went to war in Chechnya--twice. He also initiated the consolidation of presidential power that allowed Putin, his handpicked successor, to emerge as an authoritarian strongman. While he came to admire American capitalism, he had little if any understanding of how markets work. He was far from a free market radical, and his economic...