Boris Yeltsin is the founding father of the state called Russia. He’s not just its first president but, I repeat, the founding father of the country we live in. We don’t even know whether this state would have ever come into existence if it hadn’t been for Boris Yeltsin.

Just like Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin wanted to stop the Soviet Union’s disintegration. He failed to do that but he succeeded in rescuing Russia and the other ex-Soviet republics from under the rubble of the former Soviet empire and saved its people from a civil war. The Soviet Union was a country of many political vectors, cultures, ethnicities, religions and civilizations. Avoiding a civil war under those difficult conditions was a great achievement.

Furthermore, Yeltsin gave Russia stability, the Constitution, democratic government, free market economy and free press. This is enough to recognize Yeltsin as a prominent and definitely positive historical figure, albeit a controversial one.

The negative aspects of his presidency were mostly due to circumstances that were beyond his control. Russia was in an incredibly difficult situation, and it was simply impossible to turn it into paradise overnight.

Of course, Yeltsin did make personal mistakes but each of them should be considered separately.

Let’s take the war in Chechnya, his most serious mistake, which he admitted himself. Perhaps he should have found a way to work out a compromise with Dzhokhar Dudayev [the Chechen president at the time] but one can hardly blame him for using force to preserve Russia’s integrity. I wonder what any other politician might have done in that situation.

Next, the bombardment of the parliament building in October 1993. This situation, too, can be interpreted as Yeltsin restoring the constitutional order, resolving the problem of diarchy, and suppressing a fascist coup. Anyway, had Yeltsin lost that fight, other forces would have seized the power. They would have made the country’s normal development impossible, including the writing of these words.

In this case, I am not afraid of sounding bombastic, so I can say frankly: I am proud that I worked under Boris Yeltsin and even worked personally with him, to a certain extent.

He knew how to impress people as a big and strong personality. Charles de Gaulle and Mao Zedong are said to have given the same impression. Yeltsin is in the same category. However, Yeltsin never scared people intentionally. He never put on an angry face, never banged his fist on the table (which, in fact, is quite typical of Russia). He never used foul language – even while in sauna in male company. He was always nice with women, treating them gallantly and kissing their hands. And, of course, he was a very good husband and father.

I remember one episode that occurred several months before his death. At that time, I was making a film about Yeltsin for the Rossia Channel. One day, Yeltsin invited me and my wife for a glass of champagne. At some point, Yeltsin’s daughter came up to him and asked:

“Did you have a nice sleep today, Dad?”

“No, I didn’t sleep well,”  Yeltsin said, pretending to be annoyed. “I spend half of the night talking to your mother about love.”

Of course, he was rather tough in politics and often made executive decisions, but, after all, that’s what presidents do. At the same time, Yeltsin never did anything to influence journalists in their work, even despite their frequent and harsh criticism. He would get offended but he never responded. In fact, he never was cruel or vengeful – even with his political opponents. Vice-president Rutskoy and parliamentary speaker Khasbulatov, the key figures behind the 1993 coup, were granted amnesty and released soon after their rebellion was suppressed. Several years later, Khasbulatov asked Yeltsin if his family could receive medical care at the Kremlin clinic. Yeltsin calmly granted the request. I think few politicians would have done that. This speaks volumes about Yeltsin as a statesman and a person.

Unfortunately, the majority of Russians have a negative view of Yeltsin today. In the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, people were waiting for a miracle. They expected democracy, market economy, private property and free press to turn Russia into another Switzerland. But the miracle did not happen. Consumer goods became available but they were expensive. Soviet bureaucrats grabbed all the top positions in the economy, and monstrous corruption engulfed the whole country. Russia does not have independent and effective courts. The freedom of speech decreased after Yeltsin’s resignation. There’s no genuine separation of powers. Social mobility is not working. People see all that, they are disgruntled, and they blame it all on Yeltsin.

In addition, people tend to feel nostalgic about their young years. Older people have already forgotten, and younger people cannot believe, that it was impossible to buy anything in the Soviet Union. Nobody was allowed to travel abroad and strict censorship was in place. Eventually, they invented a myth about the wonderful Soviet Union, which everybody feared and respected.

This combination of nostalgia, a beautiful myth about a country that no longer exists and serious discontent with the current state of affairs causes people to dislike democracy, Western civilization in general and Yeltsin, whom they see as an epitome of all that.

Nevertheless, what Yeltsin left us with is an independent, sovereign and largely democratic Russia. Despite all the current difficulties, the degree of freedom in contemporary Russia is incomparably higher than in the Soviet Union. We are free to say what we like, travel where we like and buy what we want.

Finally, Yeltsin preserved Russia’s integrity and made sure that all the nuclear weapons of the former USSR went to Russia. Just imagine 15 former Soviet republics having nuclear weapons. That would have been terrible. What Yeltsin did was an achievement of global proportions.

In fact, many politicians of the past who are now famous and renowned were extremely unpopular in their countries in their time.

It seems as if time for objective assessment of Yeltsin’s role in history is yet to come.

­Nikolay Svanidze for RT Politics

­The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.