Former Russian President Yeltsin Dies

Russia’s first president was a controversial and historic figure

Boris Yeltsin died today at the age of 76.

AFP has the official White House reaction to Yeltsin’s death…

“The White House on Monday mourned Yeltsin as “a historic figure” and offered its condolences to his widow, his relatives, and all of Russia.

“He was an historic figure during a time of great change and challenge for Russia. Our condolences go to Mrs Yeltsin, their family and the people of Russia,” said national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe.” | Read more…

The AP has a pretty comprehensive obituary…

“Former President Boris Yeltsin, who engineered the final collapse of the Soviet Union and pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy, has died, a Kremlin official said Monday. He was 76.

“Kremlin spokesman Alexander Smirnov confirmed Yeltsin’s death, but gave no cause or further information. The Interfax news agency cited an unidentified medical source as saying he had died of heart failure.

“Although Yeltsin pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy, many of its citizens will remember him mostly for presiding over the country’s steep decline.

“Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, summed up the complexity of Yeltsin’s in a condolence statement minutes after the death was announced. He referred to Yeltsin as one “on whose shoulders are both great deeds for the country and serious errors,” according to the news agency Interfax.

“Yeltsin was a contradictory figure, rocketing to popularity in the Communist era on pledges to fight corruption – but proving unable, or unwilling, to prevent the looting of state industry as it moved into private hands during his nine years as Russia’s first freely elected president.

“Yeltsin steadfastly defended freedom of the press, but was a master at manipulating the media. His hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, has proven far more popular even as he has tightened Kremlin control over both Russia’s industry and its press.

Yeltsin amassed as much power as possible in his office – then gave it all up in a dramatic New Year’s address at the end of 1999.

“Yeltsin’s greatest moments came in bursts. He stood atop a tank to resist an attempted coup in August 1991, and spearheaded the peaceful end of the Soviet state on Dec. 25 of that year. Ill with heart problems, and facing possible defeat by a Communist challenger in his 1996 re-election bid, he marshaled his energy and sprinted through the final weeks of the campaign. The challenge transformed the shaky convalescent into the spry, dancing candidate. | Read more…

Yeltsin: the “gravedigger” of Russian democracy?

Could Boris Yeltsin be characterized not only as the liberator who moved the Russian nation beyond the crumbling Soviet regime, but also the man who set Russia on its path toward the eventual death (or mortal illness) of Russian democracy? Did the lack of real reform and the surrendering of Russia’s assets to a handful of rich oligarchs give Russians the wrong impression about democracy right out of the box?

Stephen Sestanovich, senior fellow at CFR and former ambassador at large for the former Soviet Union, raised this question in a Washington Post piece late last year.

“Great historical transformations are always bought dearly, often after one has already thought that one got them at a bargain price,” wrote the 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt. Tomorrow marks the 15th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the occasion will surely revive debate about how high the price really was.

“Many commentators will say this event and the hardships that followed permanently colored the ordinary Russian’s view of democracy and gave Vladimir Putin his chance to build an authoritarian alternative. A few will even argue that the whole effort was a mistake — that “reform communism” would have been better than the mess we’ve ended up with.

“Was Boris Yeltsin the gravedigger of Russian democracy? The indictment against him looks strong. If you give people reason to link democracy with economic privation, political corruption and the trauma of national dismemberment, lots of them will miss the stability of the old order. (Some will miss Joseph Stalin!) And it isn’t much of a response to say that this wasn’t what you intended.

“Yet, before we throw Yeltsin to the historical wolves, it’s important to remember that the terrible conditions Russians associate with him were not just the result of his policies but also their cause. The Soviet Union collapsed because ethnic separatism, economic decline and political paralysis were severe problems before Yeltsin came to power. Moderate Communist reformers — even as they eased repression and censorship — couldn’t do a thing about them.” | Read more…

The Economist further reflects on a man of many flaws and some hard pressed principles:

“His mistakes were greatest when prompted by his family and their cronies. While keeping the old man topped up with vodka, they hijacked Russia’s political and economic destiny, enriching themselves and discrediting both democracy and capitalism in the eyes of millions of outraged and contemptuous citizens.

“All the same, Mr Yeltsin stood for three fundamental principles. He believed in freedom of speech, including freedom of the press, no matter what. He wanted Russia to be friends with the west. And he despised the Communist party and everything it stood for—particularly the KGB. It was a tragedy that he did not dissolve it fully in 1991, when he had the chance. It was an irony that the candidate his family chose as a safe successor, the cautious, little-known ex-KGB man, Mr Putin, should have done so much to reverse his legacy, blaming so many of Russia’s ills on what he calls the “chaos” of the 1990s.” | Read more…

The man to bring about monumental change in Russia needed to be as tough as nails. Boris Yeltsin had very little problem preparing for this role. Time Magazine puts Yeltsin’s hardnosed character into the context of a life filled with struggle beginning when he was a child.

“Yeltsin’s whole life seemed to be preparation for the kind of impulsive courage that was required to put him atop the tank that day in 1991. At the very moment of his 1931 baptism in the remote Ural Mountains village of Butko, some 900 miles east of Moscow, a tippling priest carelessly dropped him in a baptismal font and was too inebriated to pull him out. His parents had to rescue him. “It means,” the priest murmured, “that he is a good, tough lad.”

“That was a necessity for survival in western Siberia during that era of Soviet history. Yeltsin recalled that during the bitterly cold winters he and his family in their communal hut used a goat to keep warm. “The six of us slept together around her on the floor,” he wrote. Another of his early memories was the arrest of his father and uncle on charges of “anti-Soviet agitation” during a wave of Stalinist terror in 1934. The experience — the men spent three years in the Gulag — seemed not to dampen a rebellious streak that showed early in his life. Yeltsin recounted several occasions on which he was disciplined in school for fighting or for organizing pranks, once persuading all the students in his classroom to climb out a window and run away from a teacher they disliked.

“Another time, he and a fellow student broke into an army storage area and stole a hand grenade. It exploded while he attempted to disassemble it, resulting in the loss of the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.” | Read more…

Boris Yeltsin is proof that one man (person) can change the history of the world. The Independent puts it this way in tomorrow’s edition…

“It is the classic historian’s question: do individuals or impersonal forces move nations? Anyone who saw Boris Yeltsin, as I did, descend the steps from the Russian parliament and clamber on to the tank to address a message of defiance to the small crowd of Muscovites below, will retain not a sliver of doubt. Individuals move nations – brave, foolhardy, strangely guileless individuals, such as Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.” | Read more…

Anne Applebaum writes in Slate that Yeltsin was a man of transition existing between two worlds: the former Soviet way and the Western way.

Applebaum contends that neither world never really suited Yeltsin. And although today, looking at the remnants of democracy in contemporary Russia, it is fashionable to rail against Yeltsin as an incompetent leader, had the West only taken the time to understand the limits of Yeltsin as a man of transition, then perhaps they would have grown to appreciate his strengths and come to anticipate his weaknesses.

“Now it has become fashionable to turn another 180 degrees and to condemn Yeltsin, for corruption and autocracy, just as thoroughly as we once supported him. This is certainly tempting, especially for those who disliked the lionization of Yeltsin as much as I did. But now that he is dead, perhaps it makes more sense not to classify him as a liberal or an autocrat, a friend or a foe. For in the longer historical perspective, it is clear that Yeltsin, unlike his predecessor Gorbachev, was a genuine man of transition. He knew things had to change, but he had neither the ideas nor the tools to change them. He had some of the instincts of a populist democrat but all of the habits of a lifetime Communist Party apparatchik. He admired Western abundance, but he never understood how Western societies actually work.

In truth, he belonged neither to the Soviet Union, which Gorbachev had hoped to revive, nor to the West, which Putin now rejects. Had we ever been realistic about him, we would have both understood his limitations from the beginning and appreciated his strengths. And had we not embraced him uncritically, we would have been less disappointed when things turned out differently from what we, too, had hoped.” | Read more…

UPDATE: Peter Rutland over at TOL writes:

“Say what you want about Yeltsin – and you’re probably right.”

“Obituary writers will have a hard time figuring out how to judge Boris Yeltsin’s role in history. Yeltsin is a towering figure, central to Russia’s emergence as a modern state out of the collapsed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (even the name seems to belong to a forgotten era). And yet Yeltsin is a difficult man to place. Was he a democrat or a dictator? A Westernizer or a nationalist? A market reformer or the front man for a criminal oligarchy?

“In reality, Yeltsin was all of these things. He was a complex figure, a mass of contradictions that reflected the conflicted identities of Russian society as it made the difficult transition from a failed communist model to a new and uncertain future.” | Read more…

The Chicago Tribune also recognizes that Yeltsin was “the man who bridged a dangerous gap” for Russia . . .

‘History is full of transitional figures, and Yeltsin’s legacy may be as the man who bridged a dangerous gap between the fragmenting totalitarian past and a wild, uncontrolled future. By the time he stepped down as the millennium was ending, an old Russian historical force, the longing for the stability of authoritarianism in troubled times, was palpable.” | Read more…

Farewell Address: Yeltsin asks the Russian people for forgiveness

Below is an excerpt of Boris Yeltsin’s famous farewell speech, where he speaks directly to the Russian people and repents for his failures . . .

Yeltsin: “Today, on this incredibly important day for me, I want to say more personal words than I usually do. I want to ask you for forgiveness, because many of our hopes have not come true, because what we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully difficult.

“I ask to forgive me for not fulfilling some hopes of those people who believed that we would be able to jump from the grey, stagnating, totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilized future in one go.

“I myself believed in this. But it could not be done in one fell swoop. In some respects I was too naive. Some of the problems were too complex. We struggled on through mistakes and failures. At this complex time many people experienced upheavals in their lives. But I want you to know that I never said this would be easy.

“Today it is important for me to tell you the following. I also experienced the pain which each of you experienced. I experienced it in my heart, with sleepless nights, agonizing over what needed to be done to ensure that people lived more easily and better, if only a little. I did not have any objective more important than that.” | Read more…

Blog Scan: What the blogs are saying…

Lincoln, de Gaulle, Yeltsin?

Leon Aron over at American.com posts an excerpt from his book Russia’s Revolution . . .

Few protagonists are better suited for the man-and-his-times genre than Boris Yeltsin. The great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva used to say that her dear friend Boris Pasternak looked at once like an Arabian thoroughbred and its rider, the driven and the driver. Yeltsin was both a bellwether of the gathering Russian storm and part of the storm itself. As the pace of the revolution quickened, Boris Yeltsin’s personal story and his country’s history became tightly intertwined and, in several shining instances, welded together. The revolution was the wind, he the sail. Together they began to turn Russia around.

Like Lincoln or de Gaulle, Yeltsin took over a great nation at the time of a mortal crisis and held it together. In Yeltsin’s case, there were three crises at once—political, economic, and imperial. Not only did the country’s political and economic systems lie in ruins, the country itself had to be reinvented. Against impossible odds, he succeeded, forging, for the first time in a thousand years, a sustainable Russian state that was neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship. | Read more…

For the love of vodka!

Understanding Yeltsin’s love for the vodka, on occassion of his death, The Devil’s Kitchen wittingly states that “Vodka shares plummet.”

Some world reaction . . .

Meanwhile, Leading Blog posts reaction from some leaders across the globe…

British Prime Minister Tony Blair: “It is with sadness that I learned of the death of former president Yeltsin. He was a remarkable man who saw the need for democratic and economic reform and in defending it played a vital role at a crucial time in Russia’s history.”

Exiled Russian multi-millionaire and critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Boris Berezovsky: “For me personally he was a teacher — he made me a free person. If my mother taught me how to love then Yeltsin taught me not only how to understand what a free person is but also how to become free.

“Russia has a lost a brilliant reformer. No-one has done as much for Russia as Yeltsin did. He was a unique person and absolutely Russian in his soul, in his impulsiveness and in his intellect.”

Vytautas Landsbergis, first president of Lithuania after it was declared independent from the Soviet Union: “Yeltsin was a decent man and he could not stand political intrigues. His rise to the post of Russia’s president was a very good thing for the Baltic states. It was Yeltsin’s Russia, which recognized Lithuania’s independence by signing a bilateral treaty in the summer of 1991. He also stood to defend us when Gorbachev let the Soviet troops storm buildings in Vilnius.”

President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso: “Mr. Yeltsin was a key reference in the post-Communist transition in Russia. As president he had enormous challenges and difficult mandates but he certainly brought East and West closer together and helped replace confrontation by co-operation.

“He is best remembered when standing up to the coup d’etat aimed at restoring a dictatorial regime in Russia. With great personal courage he had merit in defending freedom. The Commission sends its condolences to Mr Yeltsin’s family, the Russian authorities and the people of Russia.”

Boris Yeltsin in his own words:

“A man must live like a great brilliant flame and burn as brightly as he can. In the end he burns out. But this is far better than a mean little flame.”

“It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.”

“You can make a throne of bayonets, but you can’t sit on it for long.”

Yeltsin’s shining (very brief) moment in time

Blog of the Moderate Left, makes the case that he was the right man at the right time . . .

. . . If Yeltsin failed to build a perfect model Russia, he was at the very least equal to his moment. Had Yeltsin failed to act when he did, or had he tried to cut a deal with the [State Emergency] Committee, perhaps the coup would have gained traction. Perhaps Russia would have tried to impress itself on its recalcitrant provinces. Certainly, as bad as Putin is, the hardline Soviets proved themselves to be worse.

So today, as we mark the death of Boris Yeltsin, let us remember that whatever his ability to govern, at the very least he was equal to a singular moment in time, one where his country’s future hung in the balance, and at least at that moment, he chose the right path.
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Erick over at RedState says:

His early days were his finest hours, and his last hour in office was his noblest.

Ed over at Captain’s Quarters makes reference to Yeltsin’s infamous tank ride to democracy, but not before quipping about what Putin has done in his wake.

Boris Yeltsin, the man who saved Russian democracy so that Vladimir Putin could dismantle it . . . Yeltsin will always be remembered for that tank ride that stopped the Soviet Communists from retaking the Kremlin in 1991 and ending Mikhail Gorbachev’s political career. Whatever else he did, that one shining moment of courage and tenacity will serve as an example not just for the Russians, who could use one right now, but for all people to remember as they seek — or protect — their liberty. | Read more…

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