Boris Yeltsin, the former president of Russia who died earlier this week, leaves a decidedly mixed bag behind for his legacy.

An excerpt from the BBC story:

For many Russians, it is a huge paradox that the current government has not only given Boris Yeltsin a nearly royal funeral but has even described him as "a man, thanks to whom a whole new era has begun".

These are the words of President Vladimir Putin, who went on to say that thanks to his predecessor "a new democratic Russia was born, a free state open to the world".

The two leaders' views appear to be incompatible

Really? Many Russian liberals are flabbergasted. According to them, the country under Mr Putin is moving fast in the opposite direction to the one that Mr Yeltsin envisaged.

Russian conservatives who revere Mr Putin and disdain the Yeltsin legacy must also be surprised.

The two leaders' views of recent Russian history seem to be incompatible: Mr Putin has famously described the demise of the USSR as "the biggest geo-political tragedy of the century" while Mr Yeltsin certainly saw the end of the Communist empire as one of his life's main achievements.

The biggest issue regarding Mr Yeltsin's legacy is exactly this: is Russia now giving up on individual human rights and democracy after a short flirtation with liberalism in the 90s?

And did Mr Yeltsin himself, perhaps inadvertently, make this turn-around inevitable not only by bringing the former KGB secret police, with their particular view of the world, into the heart of the government, but also by allowing the all-permeating system of corruption to take root? ...

This story then goes into the fact that Yeltsin was long on popularity but short on real ideas, the "shock therapy" he imposed on the Russian economy, his decline and the current popularity of Putin.

There are two opposite conclusions that can be drawn from all of this.

First, that Russia's fling with Western-style freedoms and democracy was a freak short accident and the country is now going back to its normal traditional ways.

If this is true, all Yeltsin's struggles and heroism would have been totally wasted.

The second view is that Boris Yeltsin continued what Mikhail Gorbachev had started before him - that they, in fact, worked for the same goal even if they both would hate to admit it - and that in the long run they have succeeded.

If this is the case then it would mean - the current backlash notwithstanding - that the true significance of Yeltsin's achievement will be finally recognised by future generations.

The majority of Russians will probably vote for the first notion. But, as Russian history shows, being in majority does not always mean being right.

For more on Yeltsin, see this and this from Globe and Mail journalist Mark MacKinnon who has a new book out, The New Cold War.