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Ever the king of the grand gesture, Yeltsin stepped down suddenly in the 20th century's last hours, in favor of Vladimir Putin, a hand-picked successor. Russia's first elected leader also became the first to leave power of his own free will.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1023841420070423
All the same, Mr Yeltsin stood for three fundamental principles. He believed in freedom of speech, including freedom of the press, no matter what. He wanted Russia to be friends with the west. And he despised the Communist party and everything it stood for—particularly the KGB. It was a tragedy that he did not dissolve it fully in 1991, when he had the chance. It was an irony that the candidate his family chose as a safe successor, the cautious, little-known ex-KGB man, Mr Putin, should have done so much to reverse his legacy, blaming so many of Russia’s ills on what he calls the “chaos” of the 1990s.
http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9063728&top_story=1
As democracy turned, in words of Yelena Bonner, to "dermocraty" - a play on words which translates in Russian as "shitocracy" - the people around Yeltsin, including his younger daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, accrued vast personal fortunes which they keep to this day. Much of this money was whisked away and laundered in businesses in the west. People like Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich, Oleg Deripaska, Anatoly Chubais and Mikhail Khodorkovsky all made their billions in that period.
Khodorkovsky, the man who is now languishing in a jail in Siberia, was at that time a smiling Kremlin insider. Before Yukos had even been thought of, the oligarchs could translate their unparalleled access to the sell-off of vast state assets into personal fortunes. If you want to know why the founder of Yukos today has a hard time persuading many Russians about the injustice of his fate, look no further than the period that has now become known as the wild nineties.
At the time, Yeltsin had almost total western support. The nationalist anti-westernism that is such a feature of Russian politics also dates from that period. It need not have been like this. Russia could have developed into a functioning democracy, where a presidency could share power with a parliament without losing control. It was not inevitable that democracy turned once again to autocracy, but for that, Boris Yeltsin is largely, not wholly, to blame.
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Ex-Russian president Yeltsin dies [re: npocmak]
Ex-Russian president Yeltsin dies