Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first president, died today in Moscow.

There is an avalanche of responses to his death in the Russian blogosphere, ranging from “rest in peace” to “be damned.”

Below is a tiny selection (RUS) from the blog of LJ user dolboeb (Anton Nossik):

aristo_big: Ten years ago, this piece of news would have been joyful to me.

emailya: A PITY. No matter how much he is being denounced, everyone obtained real freedom through his policies.

aristo_big: …and they got “a real successor” who obliterated this freedom :)

[…]

emailya: Yeltsin was funny and didn't care when they were making fun of him. Putin is scared and obliterates laughter and parody. And you can see the result of it…

daunit: Yes, only we got anarchy instead of freedom. No one had to do anything to build anarchy on the ruins of totalitarianism – it built itself. It's not clear how we could mistake one for the other all these years. In the 1990s, we were “free” under bandits, and now we are “free” under bureaucrats and the police. It's a pity [Yeltsin] hadn't been jailed while still alive. Jailed for Berezovsky, Abramovich, and [the financial crisis of] 1998. […]

lapkis: R.I.P.

mr_quietest: R.I.P.

[…]

kashtan123: It'll take this country a long time to fully comprehend what this man has achieved. He buried the empire (the USSR), buried socialism and the socialist camp, buried the CPSU, laid the basis for the new country (Russia), and all this was done with little blood spilled, without civil war. He rid the world of the Cold War. Yes, there were times when he sinned, but there were also times when he was a saint! His brains weren't sterilized, unlike the brains of today's [chekists]. Eternal Memory!

m_darklighter: The gravedigger has set out for his own grave. :)

chelobitnik: With little blood spilled? […] The war in Chechnya is a direct consequence of Yeltsin's rule. The criminal privatization is a direct consequence of Yeltsin's incredible stupidity. And much more. […]

[…]

100rm: For some reason, I feel sorry for him… My attitude to him is contradictory […]. A whole epoch is gone…

LJ user drugoi (Rustem Adagamov) has posted photos of Yeltsin from different years – and has received three pages of comments already. Here are a few of them:

dostacha: Some people would genuinely regret, others are going to spit, but it's impossible to deny that a whole epoch is gone.

[…]

tonya_monya: I feel sort of sorry for Yeltsin, looking at these photos and seeing him as an ordinary person, with family, grandkids… He loved tennis (it was amusing to watch him root [for Russian players]), and his politics got erased from memory somehow in these years.

gordita_rusa: You've forgotten his politics??!!! And what about the guys he sent to war in Chechnya, do you remember it? And how the whole world was laughing when this drunk was conducting an orchestra in Germany over the ashes of the Soviet soldiers? And the country [forced to stand in a humiliating position] has also been erased from your memory? And the hungry pensioners? And [the tanks] firing at the legitimate parliament? And Russia's fiasco in international politics?

[…]

zvetaeva_41: I've been thinking whose monument should replace that of [Felix Dzerzhinsky] on [Lubyanka]. [Yeltsin] deserves it.

prelate: I agree.

voutsen_cv: Oh please, let's not erect monuments… there're enough of them for now.

jenyay: Well, it's okay to have a monument, for history, but not on Lubyanka. Because it'll be as if he took Dzerzhinsky down and got up there himself.