Letters to the Editor
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There are drunks ... and then there are drunks
Let's compare superpower drunks:
One ends nearly a decade at the helm of a superpower - publicly intoxicated almost the entire time - having accomplished nothing more than preventing the Forces of Darkness from getting their hands on the world's second-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.
The other touts his jayzuz-inspired dryness while destroying in turn the last secular Arab nation, the 60-year-old system of international cooperation and trust, and the most-admired Constitutional Democracy in the world.
Give me a falling-down "wet" drunk who retains the courage to stand up to bullies with tanks over an unrecovered "dry" alcoholic who acts out his daddy issues by bullying the world.
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Alas, Yeltsin is why we have Putin
Yeltsin's government looked so hopeful from the outside but there was a lot of corruption from the inside.
Like privatization: the laws were supposedly written so that the transfer of state property into private hands would not create a concentration of enormous wealth into the hands of a very few.
Yet by the end of the day, the oligarchy took everything.
The Yeltsin years were so wild, so violent, so crazy and unbelievable -- anyone who was an expat in Russia in the nineties must have plenty of stories to tell. And maybe some they're afraid to tell, or forbidden from ever telling.
Now the pendulum is swinging the other way. Soviet nostalgia is the new black. Old Soviet art depicting heroically toiling workers is being snapped up by the New Russians at high flying auctions.
A recent poll published in the Moscow Times asked Russian citizens in which era of history they're prefer to live. About the same number -- 40% -- said either "Putin era" or "Brezhnev era." The spare change was divided between Yeltsin and Tsar Nicholas II.
Putin is becoming more of a control freak every day, but the majority of the Russian public doesn't seem the least bit alarmed.
It's like watching the pendulum of history swing wildly from one side to another.
One wonders when the next major swing is due.
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Then there was that whole starting the brutal war in Chechnya thing
Good times, good times.
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YouTube Clip
Well, as long as we're going to wax nostalgic about Big Bo and ignore Chechnya and the like, go to YouTube and do a search for "Clinton Yeltsin." The first two or three results are the clip of Yeltzin in the Rose Garden, calling Clinton a disaster and making Clinton laugh so hard that he started crying.
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Gorbachev is the real hero
As these stories ably recount, there was a lot to admire about Yeltsin personally - not least the way he stood up to the decrepit remnants of Stalinism in the summer of 1991 during the attempted coup d'etat.
And Yellow Dog makes a great point - that an honest drunk like Yeltsin is preferable to a "reformed," holier-than-thou, possibly dry one like the Current Occupant. Churchill was perhaps the best of all politician drunks; he of course took on Stalin himself.
But Yeltsin's legacy - and the West's support of him - looks more every day like a miserably failed experiment in liberalization. Life expectancy is lower in Russia today than it was in the 1980s under communism, while crooks run the country and the grip of the state gradually tightens once again. And let's not forget that Yeltsin set a precedent for authoritarianism in post-Soviet Russia by bombing the parliament in 1993.
By contrast, I believe history will be kind to Mikhail Gorbachev, who, like Khrushchev (but with more intelligence and conviction), attempted serious reform within the considerable constraints of the system. It was Gorbachev who brought the world back from the brink of nuclear war, who refused to engage in the belligerent rhetoric propagated by Reagan and Thatcher.
It was Gorbachev's humane governance and forward thinking that created the possibility of an open, democratic Russia - an opportunity hopelessly squandered under Yelstin.
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Speaking ill of the dead
The guy is barely buried and even the left-leaning Salon is relishing the memories of how he was an idiotic drunkard. Some of us, however, are inclined to wonder than if/when Bush, Sr. dies, the glowing tributes to him would involve that vomiting on a Japanese ambassador incident. Likely not. The media, even nice media, like Salon, prefers to insult foreigners and aggrandize its own.
Fair enough. But at least there should be one mention of how Yeltsin stood on a tank (a perfect target for snipers) and declared Russia's independence. Or how he overthrew a group of old-skool Soviet hardliners and rescued Gorbachev from house arrest. Or how he defied Gorbachev's belief that he was a slavish provincial yes-man and began a corruption probe in the Kremlin of unparallelled intensity. Or how nobody could ever assassinate him, and boy, they did try on numerous occasions. Or even his bloody war in Chechnya which, while controversial indeed, is still the work of a world leader.
Of course not. In the West he will be forever remembered as a stumbling drunk. So much the worse for the West.
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New Deal Democrat & Annonymous are right
Hats off to the realists. Yeltsin drove his nation into the toilet, just as Gorbi had set it up for a real future.
Special shout out to the right-wing, think-tank freaks who were shipped by the dozen to consult Yeltsin's goverment down the river.
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Mr. Proton is Wrong
The idea that Yeltsin somehow stopped the coup and "rescued" Gorbachev is just wrong. The Soviet Army overthrew the coup by pulling their support for it and green-lighting the pro-Gorbachev forces. As you might remember, Yeltsin invested a huge effort in making sure the coup plotters never came to trial. Why you think that might have been? Could they have known more than Yeltsin wanted to emerge? You bet your ass. And how about those tanks in the streets of Moscow, shooting up the Parliament, a Parliament that was elected by the same Russian people who elected Yeltsin? A real lover of democracy, that Yeltsin. And then using state media and massive vote fraud to get his handpicked KGB apparachik, Putin, elected to take his place, on condition that the billions in ill-gotten gains of Yeltsin, his family, and his cronies, never be investigated. All this while living conditions collapsed, the nation was looted, and Russians died while thier economy was "privatized" by Western ideologues bent on a free market utopia to replace the Communist one. A paragon of virtue. Spare us the Odes of Boris, please.