Yet, Yeltsin also created the foundation for his successors to succeed and secure for him the more positive modifiers to his legacy. The revolution is not over, but it also has not reversed. The Soviet Union is gone and will never be resurrected. Communism also will never return to Russia. Russia has not gone to war with Ukraine, Latvia or Kazakhstan to defend Russians living there and is less likely to do so today than when Yeltsin first took office. Though
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they threatened with periodic electoral splashes, neither neo-fascists nor neo- Communists ever succeeded in coming to power in the 1990s and do not seem poised to do so in the near future. Even the Russian Communist Party has lagged behind its counterparts in Eastern Europe in not being able to recapture the Kremlin. Individual freedoms in Russia have never been greater.
Finally, by avoiding the temptation of dictatorship, Yeltsin also established an important precedent of democratic behaviour that will raise the costs for future authoritarian aspirants. In defiance of his critics, he did not cancel elections in 1996, he did not suspend the constitution after the August 1998 financial crisis, and he did not stay in power by any means necessary. On the contrary, he won re-election in 1996, abided by the constitution and even invited Communists into his government in the autumn of 1998, and then stepped down willingly, peacefully and constitutionally. Although Putin has shown little proclivity for deepening democratisation in Russia, his cautious approach to decisionmaking will make it very difficult for him to break this precedent. If dissolving the Soviet Union was Yeltsin's most important destructive act, his seizure and surrender of power through democratic means may be his most important constructive act.