When my grandparents talk about voting in Russia in the 1990s, one phrase is uttered more than most.

“What’s the point?”

From Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Putin to the 20 other candidates you could vote for in any given election in Russia, hope is scarcely found. Crony capitalism, corruption, the pervasive presence of former Soviet leadership and economic crises made voting in the “best” candidate an unlikely option – you voted for who seemed the least likely to completely fail. For eight years and two elections from 1991 to 1999, my grandparents and everyone around them voted Boris Yeltsin into office. Frankly, they had no other choice.

Boris Yeltsin died on Monday. Though this seems to follow the trend of many of my columns by discussing both death and Russia, I can’t help but see Yeltsin’s death as the end of an era.

This era is not the kind most will look back on with nostalgia, though Yeltsin was the first president of a “democratic” Russia. After successfully stopping a coup of the increasingly liberalizing Soviet government of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin was hailed as a great leader and elected as the Russian Federation’s first freely elected president. He negotiated the collapse of the Soviet Union and in his first term in office, heralded widespread economic reforms which involved the privatization of property, industry, and the banking system. He was also responsible for the invasion of Chechnya in 1994, a conflict (while temporarily peaceful in 1996) that has come to be one of the most dangerous and deadly on Russian soil.

This kind of massive reform is no easy task, and so it is not entirely surprising that by Yeltsin’s second bid for office, Russia had effectively become an oligarchy. The reason to vote for Yeltsin, according to my grandparents, was simply to keep the Communists out of office.

Two years later in 1998, Russia’s economy would collapse again when it defaulted on its debts. Yeltsin was seen widely as being in failing health, and from 1996 to 1999, Yeltsin would fire five entire cabinets and Prime ministers, ending finally with Vladimir Putin, whom he recommended to the Russian people as a good choice for the next President of the Russian Federation.

It would be impossible not to hold Yeltsin responsible, at least partly, for all the wrong that has happened in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, it is unclear how much better any leader could have done; the only former Soviet or bloc states which comparatively succeeded following the collapse of the USSR were smaller nations such as the Czech Republic and Estonia who had already had some national experience with democracy. Russia, on the other hand, had gone from backward monarchy directly into autocratic Communist rule.

So, with Yeltsin dead, I look back on the last 15 years of Russian politics and feel a little depressed. Yeltsin, beyond having missteps during his own regime, also gave us the present of Vladimir Putin, another former Soviet politico who has largely hampered democratic and free market progress in Russia. Is this really Yeltsin’s fault? Not entirely. Like any president, particularly like any president in questionable health, Yeltsin had many advisers. Their advice often had catastrophic consequences, however, what was a president to do?

The lessons of Yeltsin’s life and rule seem to point to the difficulty of democratic transition. He is, I think, the semi-deserved whipping boy for the failings of the fledgling Russian Federation. But it’s impossible not to look back and thank him that democratic transition happened at all. Without a vanguard like Yeltsin, perhaps there would still not be a Russian Federation today.