There is the photo of him shaking hands with Gorbachev that same year; Yeltsin was approximately three feet taller than the man of Perestroyka. And there is the infamous image of the post-Soviet dance: in Yeltsin’s 1996 campaign for reelection, he danced on an open air stage with scantily-clad professional female dancers, looking like a gigantic dancing bear (a typical spectacle at some marketplaces in the Balkans) – and won, by a narrow margin. After all that had happened under his leadership, could this man have won again without the dance moves? The God of Russia only knows.

Yeltsin was appreciated as a man who led Russia bloodlessly from socialism to capitalism. He was also the hated politician who oversaw the final collapse of the superpower Soviet Union. It is hard to forget that he used military force against elected legislators barricaded inside the Russian White House after he had dissolved the parliament – an unusual solution in a democracy. He also started the awful ongoing war against the Chechen rebels.

When Yeltsin handed power to successor Vladimir Putin in 1999, he basically disappeared from public. However, we Hungarians and other citizens of the former Soviet bloc keep his memory well. He was the first politician in the Soviet-Russian hemisphere to apologize for the Soviet Army’s brutality in putting down the 1956 Revolution in Hungary. He was a first in many other historic ways, and our part of the world at least would look somewhat different without him. What it would look like instead is hard to say; his legacy for us is such a mixture of images often hard to reconcile.

I do not know if history will keep his memory among the greatest of statesmen. But I know that he led the most important nation as it emerged from an evaporated Soviet Union; that is not an easy job, and those were not easy years. He didn’t solve all of Russia’s new challenges, but Russia lives to confront them today. If someone could have done it better, let’s see where they take his legacy forward.