Do we like them?

Do we like Boris Yeltsin?

Our score: 4 out of 10. He helped end Soviet rule, but he also ordered the 1993 shelling and a Chechen war with heavy civilian death, and left no clear record of campaigning for LGBTQ+ people.

Yeltsin was born in 1931 into a peasant family near Yekaterinburg in the Urals. He trained as a construction engineer, then climbed the Communist Party ladder before turning on the system he had risen through. Al Jazeera's obituary notes he led the dismantling of communist rule and the lurch to free-market capitalism.

His defining moment came in 1991, when he climbed onto a tank in Moscow during a coup attempt and rallied pro-democracy crowds. The Soviet Union fell apart that December. Tony Blair called him a remarkable man who saw the need for democracy and economic reform, and Putin credited him with the birth of a new epoch.

The democratic gloss got scuffed in October 1993. In a standoff with parliament, Yeltsin ordered the army to fire on the parliament building in Moscow. Official figures put the death toll at 187, though other estimates go far higher.

Then came Chechnya. Yeltsin sent troops in on 11 December 1994, and the Christian Science Monitor reported that civilian deaths, many from Russian bombing raids, were the single most damaging factor for his campaign. A poll at the time had 40 per cent of Russians blaming him for the crisis, and 63 per cent wanted troops pulled out.

On the harm test, there is no sign in what we read that he campaigned against trans or LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants. We didn't find anything on the climate or vaccines either, and the record on those is thin. What counts against him is conduct: the 1993 shelling and a war that killed civilians in large numbers. That keeps this one at mixed.

His 1996 re-election is the other stain. Reporting from CBS says oligarchs financed his struggling campaign, led by Boris Berezovsky, who later described his influence in the second term as enormous. Yeltsin named Berezovsky deputy head of the Security Council that year. His free-market programme also reportedly devastated living standards for much of the population.