Boris Yeltsin, the former president of Russia who died yesterday at 76, led his people out of the bondage of communism but was never to see the promised land of a thriving market economy and a state ruled by law.

He took control of a Russia in chaos and left it in a different kind of chaos when he suddenly resigned on the last day of 1999. During his time in office two very different Yeltsins etched themselves on the world’s consciousness.

There was Yeltsin the fighter, who climbed on top of a tank in August 1991 to raise the standard of liberty against the putschists who wanted to restore communism.

And there was the later version, another broken-down Brezhnev, puffy-cheeked, stiff-gaited, who disappeared from view when most needed, paralyzed by heart disease, a fondness for the bottle, and bouts of depressive indecision.

Yeltsin thrived in opposition but aged visibly in power. His finest hour was his campaign in 1991 to unseat the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the course of which he killed off the Soviet superpower and ushered in the modern Russian state.

Once in power, Yeltsin seemed less comfortable. He was not a naturally popular figure in the West. In opposition, he was caricatured in the West as an axwielding Russian peasant and rarely appeared in cartoons without a vodka bottle. Yet he got things done. While Mr. Gorbachev dithered about economic reform, Yeltsin grasped the nettle, freeing state-controlled prices in 1992 and engaging in a massive privatization of industry the next year.

But the Russian economy remained chaotic, and intractable; his political opponents held up reform; Western bankers were reluctant to lend. The busiest entrepreneurs in Russia were the mafia.

Crises punctuated Yeltsin’s career. In August 1991, hard-liners from the KGB and the army incarcerated the then-Soviet leader, Mr. Gorbachev, in his Crimean holiday home and declared a coup.

It was typical of the bone-headed (and often drunk) coup leaders that they did not arrest Yeltsin – then president of Russia – at dawn. The flag of resistance was raised at the Russian parliament, based in the Moscow White House. Television cameras showed Yeltsin clambering onto a tank to condemn the putschists. From that moment, the putsch was doomed – and the fate of Mr. Gorbachev and the Soviet nation with it.

Using his new prestige to humiliate Mr. Gorbachev, Yeltsin became the undisputed leader of Russia. On August 23, he suspended the Communist Party. By the end of the year the Soviet Union had collapsed, its 15 constituent republics suddenly nation states.

In the ensuing chaos, the poor lost their life savings in the huge price rises and hyper-inflation. Privatization was manipulated by old party bosses and the criminal mafia; it became a synonym for theft. But there was no turning back to communism.

In March 1993, Yeltsin made a vain attempt to rule by decree, and by September he ordered the assembly dissolved. When his vice president and the parliament’s speaker insisted on staying put, he ordered his security ministers to storm the White House. With the glistening building in flames from dozens of rounds of tank fire, the rebellion collapsed; 176 were killed.

But Western-style reforms were becoming unpopular, and the elections of December 1993 put power back in the hands of the old Soviet nomenklatura. Yeltsin gathered around him associates from his days in the Communist Party.

The Kremlin became a court, filled with intrigue, where real power was wielded by the most unlikely people. Alexander Korzhakov, who rose from being bodyguard to become chief of presidential security, was seen as the second most influential man in the land.

The apogee of General Korzhakov and like-minded men suspicious of the West came in December 1994, when the Russian armed forces were turned against the rebellious republic of Chechnya, a small territory on Russia’s southern border that declared itself independent in 1991.

The bungled planning, inept execution, and sheer brutality of this campaign shocked the world. Yeltsin, who had been told it would be over in days, absented himself to a hospital for a nose operation at the start of the campaign.

Yeltsin himself suffered three heart attacks during the months of war with Chechnya. He later admitted it was his greatest mistake. Yet in 1999 Russia launched another offensive against Chechnya, claiming that terrorists were using it as a base.

For the 1996 election, Yeltsin enlisted his daughter Tatyana, a manager, ensuring that modernminded advisers took over the campaign. Yeltsin scattered bribes like confetti and, thanks to ruthless manipulation of the press, was re-elected with a handsome majority.

But the effort of campaigning, which had the old man jigging on the stage at a rock concert, had caused a heart attack — his third. The new government lurched on, improvising.

Yeltsin was not a modern politician. He was camera-shy. Russians were understanding of his love-hate affair with vodka, but Western Europeans and Americans found his public drunkenness embarrassing.

Yeltsin insisted that he would serve out his term, which would have ended in 2000. But his “colds” became more frequent, and by 1999 he often seemed heavily drugged or drunk. This did not stop him appointing Vladimir Putin as the fourth new prime minister in 18 months. Then, he suddenly resigned, naming Mr. Putin as acting president and his successor.

“I ask you to forgive me,” Yeltsin said in his resignation statement, “for not fulfilling some hopes of those people who believed that we would be able to jump from the gray, stagnating, totalitarian past into a bright, rich, and civilized future, all at once.”

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born into a poor peasant family on February 1, 1931, at the village of Budko, in the Sverdlovsk region of the Urals. His family was declared “kulaks” (rich peasants) and driven off the land.

The boy Boris was frequently in trouble at school. In one of his childhood escapades, he lost the thumb and index finger of his left hand playing with a hand grenade.

He trained as a construction engineer at the Urals Polytechnic Institute, and in 1961 he joined the Communist Party. Over the next few years he made great use of television to promote his image and became popular by introducing rationing as a more just way of distributing scarce goods. The big change came in 1985, at the start of the Gorbachev era, when he was given a seat on the Communist Party’s Central Committee, and then became Communist Party boss of Moscow.

Yeltsin became a charismatic reformer. Lazy or inefficient officials were publicly berated. He cut through bureaucracy to ensure that fresh vegetables would reach the capital rather than be left to rot. This Latin American approach to politics made him an instant hero. He gained a reputation as a David fighting the Goliath of the establishment.

In 2002 Yeltsin launched a vain comeback, claiming to be alcohol-free. Three years later, it emerged that, when president, he had killed a man in a hit-and-run accident while drunk.

Yeltsin was well supported by his wife, Naina, an astute but retiring woman – “a very necessary contrast to my fairly extrovert nature.” They had two daughters.