Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, first President of the Russian Federation from 1991 to 1999, the first President of the Russian Federation, passed away yesterday.

Yeltsin brought enormous political change and the introduction of liberal democracy, but the collapse of the USSR saw enormous political, economic and social problems, not to mention widespread corruption, a dramatic decline in the income of average Russians and a decline in life expectancy, and was succeeded by a president with less than liberal views.

Yet as one reporter reminded readers, Yeltsin was the first elected president of Russia because he was the first Soviet politician to discover the sound bite:

His natural tendency to speak in pithy quotes allowed journalists to clip and paste them into news stories at a time when Russians first became voters. He could draw verbal pictures that resonated on a human level – as when he attacked the Communist Party for providing its bosses with country homes with marble floors and countless bathrooms. He didn’t need to say that most Soviet families were sharing a single bathroom with other families.

In his succinct and colorful language, he asked what category of spending this came under in the KGB budget: “Combating spies?”

It may surprise some readers that Yeltsin, who’s tenure was marked by continued speculation about his poor health, was still alive. His health received a great deal of attention in the global press, and he was viewed as an increasingly unstable leader as the years went on. The possibility that he might die in office was often openly discussed, and hypothetically explored in the film of Clancy’s Sum of All Fears.

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