Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation and the man who dissolved the Soviet Union, died today in Moscow at 76. News sources say Yeltsin died of a heart attack. He had a long history of heart trouble, which contributed to his early retirement from the presidency in 1999.

Yeltsin was born in Sverdlovsk and joined the Communist Party in 1961. He had an up and down career within the party, gaining points for demolishing the house in Sverdlovsk in which Russia's last tsar had been killed but losing them--and a key position in Moscow--after he criticized the involvement of Mikhail Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, in politics. Gorbachev had been something of a mentor, but the two grew apart as Yeltsin's criticism mounted. He won Russia's presidency in June 1991 after going up against a Gorbachev-backed rival.

The political and economic pundits will have plenty to say in coming days about Yeltsin's legacy in those domains. Suffice it to say that the Russian economy would not be where it is today--for better and worse--had there not been a Boris Yeltsin.

It is his legacy in adoption that I want to focus on, and that too is mixed. We are where we are now with the accreditations because of Yeltsin. After the United Nations and other child welfare groups criticized Russia's approach to adoption, Yeltsin, in 1998, got legislators to enact changes to Russia's family code. The new rules gave prospective adoptive parents in Russia the right of first refusal. But Yeltsin resigned before implementing the second part of the changes--the rules establishing how foreign adoption agencies were to be accredited. Russia's current president, Vladimir Putin, set that in motion on only his third day in office in 2000.

As imperfect as Yeltsin's reforms were, international adoption from Russia might not even exist today without him. Gennady Zyuganov, who went up against Yeltsin in the 1995 parliamentary elections, was dead set against them. If you want to read how that struggle played out in one adoption journey, get a copy of Janice Cooke Newman's 2002 book The Russian Word For Snow.