I am far from sure either, but Yeltsin had some "street cred" speaking for him. I remember the 1990s quite well, being a teenager with intense interest in politics.

He got to power by organizing a folk uprising against an attempted coup by KGB generals Kryuchkov et al., who were hardliners and quite skilled people as well; they caught Gorbachev and held him hostage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_attempt

That coup could very well succeed and that would mean death for Yeltsin, possibly after a torture session in Lubyanka. He certainly demonstrated personal courage there.

What followed was "too free Russia". As in, lawless. It had certain advantages. For the first time in Russian history ever, multiple independent media sprang from the ground and journalists would criticize and attack powerful figures in a way that they no longer can; we're used to it, but open media criticism of powerful people is actually not that typical in the world. But at the same time, crooks stole everything and the regular Russian suffered. As a nasty consequence, democracy and freedom became one with poverty and corruption in minds of many Russians.

Yeltsin only contested one election, in 1996. His opponent Zyuganov was a classical communist. The result was 54.40% for Yeltsin and 40.73% for Zyuganov. Was this election clean? How can I know? But it wasn't a travesty with 90 per cent for The Leader and paper figures for "opponents"; Zyuganov was a real politician with a competing party and a very different program, and he got 40 per cent of the vote, and nobody fell out of the window etc.

Everything is relative, and I believe that for the standards of Russia, Yeltsin was by far the most liberal leader in its history.

Good points.

It didn’t matter that Yeltsin was the most liberal of all. He did not roll over and play dead for NATO expansion and balkanisation projects. So he became a pariah overnight and was painted as an alcoholic and corrupt.