From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6584481.stm
Russian ex-president Yeltsin dies
Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin has died, the Kremlin
says.
Mr Yeltsin was 76. The cause of death has not yet been announced.
He had a history of heart trouble.
In 1991 he famously outmanoeuvred former Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev and then triumphed against parliament hardliners in
1993.
Mr Yeltsin became Russia's first democratically elected head of
state after Mr Gorbachev resigned as Soviet leader in December
1991.
He won international acclaim as a defender of democracy when in
August 1991 he mounted a tank in Moscow, rallying the people
against an attempt to overthrow Mr Gorbachev's era of glasnost and
perestroika.
Mr Yeltsin had a quintuple heart bypass operation following his
re-election in 1996.
Chechnya conflict
Mr Yeltsin ordered Russian tanks to fire on their own parliament in
October 1993, when the building was occupied by hardline political
opponents. But the BBC Moscow correspondent says Mr Yeltsin will be
remembered as the man who brought democracy to Russia.
He presided over Russia's troubled mass privatisation in the early
1990s and also launched the large-scale military intervention in
Chechnya in 1994.
He announced his retirement on the last day of the 20th Century,
handing over to secret service chief Vladimir Putin.
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."
