Five years have passed since the death of the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and twelve years have passed since he quit politics. Yet it's still too soon to judge Yeltsin and his political era objectively.
This is because the Yeltsin era never ended: not emotionally (fierce debates about the 1990s still rage), not psychologically (the trauma of the Soviet Union's collapse has not healed), not even politically (the man who owes his first term as president to Yeltsin will soon return to the post). Yeltsin is a symbol of Russia's difficult and tragic transformation into a new kind of state. This transformation continues to this day, and we still don't know how long it will take.
Yeltsin held power during a unique, dramatic and radical transformation of one of the pillars of the geopolitical order, which, significantly, did not cause Russia to lose its global status. Yeltsin's legacy is not simply a new Russian state that emerged from the remnants of the Soviet Union, but a new great power that managed to survive what could have been a fatal shock.
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