Boris Yeltsin, who has died at the age of 76, secured his place in history by precipitating the end of the Soviet Union and becoming Russia’s first elected president. But by the end of his reign, he had fumbled the founding of the democratic, free-market economy that had been his dream.

Always a flamboyant leader, he was a member of the highest communist council – the Politburo of the Communist party of the Soviet Union – when he began to lead the opposition to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s. He then positioned himself to become Russia’s first president, committed to democracy, constitutionalism and a market economy.

Boris Yeltsin had the physical and moral strength to bear on his shoulders the colossal burden of a country in a ferment of transition, its economy struggling with the twin tasks of discarding a tenacious old system and adjusting to an unfamiliarly fast-moving new one. At the beginning of his rule he was able to grasp, either instinctively or through a quick intelligence, much of what was required. But lacking discipline and consistency, he did not set in place, much less sustain, the necessary policies to see his insights through. Increasingly he was forced to observe a country unable, in his period, to reform itself in a coherent way.

Born in the village of Butka, near Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) in 1931 to a family poor even by Soviet standards, Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin was nearly drowned when a drunken priest immersed him in the baptismal fount and then forgot about him. The ceremony was still practised in a region on the very eve of forced collectivisation and submission to the harshest period of forced socialism that had ever been seen. In another miracle, he survived when a grenade he was dismantling exploded – he lost two fingers – and later almost died of typhus. He was blocked from further education for voicing collective resentment at an abusive teacher – but protested vociferously and articulately enough to be sent to the Urals Polytechnic University. He was trained as an engineer and a manager.

He was one of the hundreds of thousands of new men educated to build communism in the harsh conditions of the postwar Soviet Union. But his individualism and strength of character meant he combined the Stalinist virtues of dedicated work and leadership with a streak of defiance of higher authority, when he felt it to be abusive.

He passed quickly into senior management in construction and then into party work culminating in his selection as first secretary of the important Sverdlovsk Oblast (province) in 1976. Energetic and populist, he was in a formal sense a standard provincial party first secretary. His speeches, for example, were as routinely flattering of Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist party from 1964 to 1982, as those of Mr Gorbachev or any other aspiring leader.

But he showed a very different style to other provincial leaders who relied on their status and on fear to keep their constituents in line. Yeltsin – though never dispensing with these necessary tools – developed a populist style much more rarely seen.

He would hold open meetings for workers and students, encouraging complaints: he even encouraged Red Army soldiers, whose living conditions were squalid and whose officers were indifferent – to give voice to grumbles. His biographer, Leon Aron, tells a story of how, failing to get a subordinate to process a claim for extra subsistence from a poor old woman, he pressed a stack of roubles on her, saying – “Here, since I promised you help, I’ll help you myself until the issue is resolved.”

He stayed at the head of the Sverdlovsk province Communist party apparatus – one of the largest and most important in Soviet Russia – until his early fifties, and was then brought to Moscow by Mr Gorbachev in 1986 to head the Central Committee’s construction department. He was quickly promoted to head of the Moscow City party in the same year. It was then that he appeared to smell the change in the political atmosphere, demonstrating an instinctive sense of power and an opportunism that were to serve him well, at least in the early years of his rule, and would never wholly desert him.

Once Mr Gorbachev had announced the reform policies of “perestroika” (reconstruction) and “glasnost” (openness), Yeltsin became a proponent of these never-precise terms. But he was thwarted – and heavily opposed by Yegor Ligachev, a Politburo hardliner who saw both Gorbachev and Yeltsin as threatening the party. Yeltsin was forced to resign from his post in 1987 and finally quit the party in a dramatic walkout in 1990.

Stephen Kotkin, Director of Russian Studies at Princeton and among the best of contemporary writers on both Soviet and Russian affairs, wrote of him in Armageddon Averted that “whereas Ligachev favoured the Andropov school (tough discipline, suspicion of the west) and Gorbachev chased romantic ideals (party democracy, western partnership), Yeltsin inclined towards paternalistic identification with ‘the folk’.” It was one of the constant themes of his later presidency.

Refusing to be sidelined, however, Mr Yeltsin developed both a reputation and a political machine. In alliance with the Democrats, he propelled himself into the chairmanship of the supreme soviet (parliament) of the Russian Federation and then, as the Soviet Union tottered, into the elected presidency of Russia itself in June 1991. His election followed a barnstorming campaign that marked the high point of his popularity. Throughout this period, he was able to present himself as a moderniser to a country disillusioned with Mr Gorbachev’s haphazard economic reforms; and as a westerniser to a population whose feverish disillusion with the Communist party flipped it over from anti- to pro-westernism, at least for a few years. He was also a nationalist, a champion of Russia to Russians who felt themselves drained by the other Soviet republics. For a few glorious years, he could be all things to all Soviets.

The election accelerated the processes of Soviet disintegration. Negotiations on an inchoate federal treaty between Gorbachev and the leaders of the Soviet republics headed by Yeltsin prompted a clumsy effort at a coup led by a group of senior Communist party officials. Yeltsin’s dramatic defiance of this action was televised around the world and made his reputation. His speech calling on Russians to rally to their parliament was delivered from the top of one of the tanks which had defected early on to the side of the Russian government and formed a protective ring round the White House, home of the Russian parliament.

The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 made him the dominant figure not just in Russia but throughout the former USSR. He chose a team of economic radicals led by Yegor Gaidar committed to the rapid creation of a market economy. Thus began a wrenching process of economic change and privatisation, which created a class of Russian “oligarchs” controlling swathes of former state industry. The policies, bitterly attacked and subject to constant compromise and large-scale corruption, continued until Vladimir Putin, the Russian president elected in 2000, began a partial roll-back of the economic and political liberalisations of the Yeltsin years. Yeltsin gave the radicals strong protection at first – but later distanced himself, and often ruined their plans by making unchallengeable promises of subsidies or tax reliefs.

The pro-western orientation of his foreign policy was never reversed, but was severely moderated. From a near-submission to the west that was psychologically unsustainable, he moved to a prickly re-assertion of Russia’s greatness that was financially unsustainable. He allowed extensive and sometimes brutal interventions in the surrounding republics designed to dilute their independence and/or protect the 25m Russian speakers left outside Russia’s borders on the Union’s collapse.

His greatest test, however, was within Russia. In 1993 parliament was increasingly challenging his right to govern. It had forced the resignation of Mr Gaidar, neutered much reform and carried defiance to the point where a civil war threatened. Yeltsin dissolved the body, surrounded it with troops when it refused to disband and ordered tanks in to force its submission after a few hours’ shelling.

He took advantage of parliament’s destruction by carrying a constitution via a referendum and by promulgating decrees to underpin the market system. But the ensuing parliamentary election in December 1993 showed a wave of support for the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democrats while the democratic forces faltered. Yeltsin never properly recovered momentum. Though endowed with a formidable array of power, his administration, increasingly centred on a tight circle of cronies, allowed corruption to flourish, along with organised crime, inter-ministerial disputes and bureaucratic disarray.

He himself appeared several times in public to be momentarily uncontrolled in his behaviour, occasions explained by excessive drinking – though sometimes it was the result of medication, and was always explained as such.

He accepted the advice of a coterie of hardline security and military officials to launch an attack on the rebel region of Chechnya in December 1994 – a campaign that never achieved the pacification of the country and pinned down a demonstrably incompetent Russian army at the cost of 30,000 dead, mainly civilians. A long ceasefire was declared to coincide with his re-election as president in July 1996 – a re-election that had been in deep doubt earlier in the year. The campaign was the last sight of the vigorous man he had been, and that burst of energy, together with a lavishly funded anti-communist campaign and the dogmatism of his opponents, enabled him convincingly to beat the communist Gennady Zyuganov in the second round.

His second term was marked by long periods of illness and inactivity, a shifting between different candidates for prime minister, two failed attempts at renewed radical reform and the collapse of the currency in 1998. Finally, Yeltsin settled on Mr Putin – a former KGB officer who had risen to the rank of prime minister – to be his heir. By the time of Yeltsin’s death, Mr Putin had re-established at least some of the power and fear on which Russian power had always, in differing degrees of intensity, relied. In particular, Mr Putin cut back on the powers, privileges and in many cases possessions of the oligarchs who claimed and were given vast holdings in return for their material and media support, and who commanded, in some instances, very large authority within the Yeltsin family “court”. Boris Yeltsin’s wife, Naina Girina, whom he married in 1956, and their two daughters, Elena and Tatyana were said to have influence with him. At the end of his first term, Tatyana became his counsellor and gatekeeper and a central figure in the court – a position that brought her great power but also attracted great envy. It was this, more than any other single act or omission, which tarnished his reputation with the people. He became progressively isolated, surrounding himself with his family and shadowy figures of great wealth and evident corruption. Yeltsin had been pitched too late in life into a wholly new world run by quite different rules that he could not learn, except at the level of slogans – though he remained broadly attached to freedom in its different forms. In her Sale of the Century, Chrystia Freeland writes that “in seven tortuous years, Yeltsin had been won over to a few basic principles: privatisation was good, inflation was bad and a strong and stable rouble was the only foundation on which economic growth could be built”. This kept economic reform at least theoretically on the agenda: it also meant that there was no lead from the top for moderating these articles of faith when the economy cried out for such an approach.

For a time Yeltsin really did seem to be, as he once boasted, irreplaceable. By the time he resigned, on New Year’s Eve 1999, he clearly was not. The conflict in Chechnya had not been solved, the rotting away of the military had not been confronted, the power of the oligarchs was untrammelled; and the indiscipline, corruption and inertia at every level of bureaucracy was probably greater than during Soviet days, when the party could sometimes act as a disciplining force. But the failures, which were obvious and grave, must be set against what was a triple breakdown – in the Communist party; in the Soviet central-command economy; and in the imperial boundaries. All three of these sustaining principles and practices crumbled more or less simultaneously: and Yeltsin was, even more than Mr Gorbachev, at the epicentre of the collapse.

It is at least arguable that a stronger hand, wielded in the manner strong hands have always been wielded in Russia, could have been counter productive – inhibiting a destruction that was often necessary, even if necessarily painful. Boris Yeltsin left his successors a constitutional base, the early infrastructure of a market economy and the beginnings of a civil society that he himself had never tried to suppress. He had permitted the flowering of a more or less free media; more or less free travel; and more or less free politics – processes that absorbed many of the energies of active Russians, even if much of this energy was devoted to survival. A man from the people, he rose far above them, appeared often indifferent to them – but probably always wished to improve their lot and broaden their horizons. And he probably did.