MOSCOW. April 22 (Interfax) - Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov negatively assessed first Russian President Boris Yeltsin's political role in Russia's history on the first anniversary of Yeltsin's death.

"As a politician, Yeltsin caused a few tragedies and troubles to the country during his presidency," Zyuganov told Interfax.

In particular, Zyuganov blamed Yeltsin for scrapping Lenin's ideas.

"I saw and heard Yeltsin when he was head of the Sverdlovsk regional committee of the CPSU (the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and then lead the Moscow city committee. In that period, there was not a single report in which he failed to insist on including Lenin's quotes on various pretexts. But later Yeltsin's discarded his previous views and principles and started to mercilessly destroy everything that had been built in this country before," Zyuganov said.

Yeltsin rated his political ambitions higher than the country's interests and the need to preserve its territorial integrity and respect its history, Zyuganov said.

"It is his inner dualism that finally led Yeltsin to moral and physical destruction," he said.

Commenting on allegations that he, not Yeltsin, in fact won in the first round of the 1996 presidential elections, contrary to the officially announced results, Zyuganov said this was impossible to check in 1996.

"There were no proper democratic elections in this country in the 1990s, and there are none now, either. It was impossible to check the results of those elections because all the voting ballots were destroyed half a year later," he said.

"The country in fact split into halves - one half voted for Yeltsin and the other for me," he said.