MOSCOW — Apologizing for his failure to lead Russia into a prosperous future, President Boris N. Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned Friday and handed power to Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, who immediately took over as acting president.
Yeltsin, 68, Russia's first democratically elected president and its leader throughout the post-Soviet era, told the nation that the time had come for a younger generation to tackle Russia's formidable economic and social problems.
"I would like to apologize for having failed to justify the hopes of the people who believed that we would be able to make a leap from the gloomy and stagnant totalitarian past to a bright, prosperous and civilized future at just one go," Yeltsin said in a strikingly personal and humble New Year's Eve speech that was televised to the nation.
In his address, Putin sought to reassure Russians that he would continue reforms made under Yeltsin.
Yeltsin's historic role in helping to bring an end to communism in 1991 has long been overshadowed by his faltering success in building a capitalist system to replace it. The high expectations that marked his early years as president have been replaced by poverty, corruption and a struggling economy.
Yeltsin said he had been "naive" to think that Russia could quickly overcome its past.
"Some problems have proved to be too complicated," he said, sitting in front of a New Year's tree and a Russian flag. "We have been making our way through mistakes and setbacks. Many people suffered dramatic tragedies. The pain suffered by all of you was filling my heart and my sleepless nights with anguish. I was racking my brain looking for an answer to what should be done to ease the lives of the people, at least a little."
The president's resignation brings to a close a tumultuous transitional era during which the threat of a Communist return has faded and Russia has engaged in two brutal wars in the separatist republic of Chechnya to prevent the breakup of the world's largest country.
Yeltsin gained worldwide fame as a champion of democracy in 1991, when he defiantly scrambled atop a tank outside the Russian parliament building to lead popular resistance to an attempted coup against then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Shortly after, he became president of an independent Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. Since then, eight years of economic policies that allowed corrupt privatization of national assets and created a new ruling class of oligarchs have destroyed his popularity. Yeltsin and his family members have been personally stained by scandals.
