MSNBC reports that former Russian President Boris Yeltsin has died.

For whatever else might be said of Yeltsin — and there is plenty, good and bad — no one of my generation will ever forget the picture of him standing on the tank in those crucial days during the attempted coup by old-line Communist generals against Gorbachev.

The amount of sheer physical courage it took for Yeltsin to confront the military was mind-boggling. When the Red Army soldiers didn’t shoot him, I knew the world’s long international nightmare, Soviet Communism, was over.