He Was Better Than Putin, Anyway
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Foreign Affairs — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Cathy Young misses Boris Yeltsin. And so do I. Key passage:
One little-noted aspect of Yeltsin's presidency was his decisive rejection of the Soviet period. He came to understand that Russia needed to make a clean break with the Soviet legacy. In 1992, when Russian communists sued to contest his 1991 ban on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin's legal team used the case to literally put Soviet history on trial, unrolling a catalog of the party's crimes, from the gulag, forced famines, and religious persecution to the financing of international terrorism. (In the end, the ban on the party was lifted.) Yeltsin accepted and embraced the anti-communist view of the Soviet regime as an "evil empire." At a campaign rally during the 1996 elections, he told supporters, "We have to win so that Russia can never be called an evil empire again."
This attitude shifted under Putin, who speaks reverentially of Soviet-era "achievements" and of the valuable services rendered to the Motherland by the KGB (his former employer), and who refers to the dissolution of the USSR as a tragedy. He also brought back the old Soviet anthem (with changed lyrics) and dusted off the old Soviet flag as the banner of Russia's armed forces. This symbolic restoration was followed by a very real rollback of post-Soviet freedoms.
Yeltsin buried the Soviet Union. Now Putin's Russia has buried him. In yet another paradox, both Putin and his liberal opponents sought to canonize Yeltsin and claim him as their own. Putin extolled his predecessor as the founder of Russian democracy, with the official media following his lead; dissenters hailed him as "the liberator of a slave country" (in the words of the pro-demo-cracy activist Valeria Novodvorskaya) whose legacy had been trampled and betrayed. Some commentators, in Russia and in the West, have expressed the hope that the foundation of freedom laid in the Yeltsin era --in the political and social order, and in people's minds--was strong enough to survive Putin's assaults.
No, we are not in another Cold War with Russia. And we are still more friendly with Russia than not. But we are at a stage where it is appropriate to mourn the loss of the brief, but great period when Russia appeared prepared to rise above its history.
That golden moment has passed. Russia is mired anew in its tragic and tyrannical legacy. And there does not appear to be another Yeltsin about to save the country from itself.
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He Was Better Than Putin, Anyway 3 Comments (0 topical, 3 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
he was still a damn site better than the communists.
You engage in the same fallacy as many on the left do. You see, it is often not a choice between Jefferson and Adams. but often a choice between Pinochet and Allende.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
Oh hell, I'll say it. We may have liked Yeltsin, but maybe to Russians he was their Jimmy Carter. Yeltsin, man who presided over their decade of humiliation and retreat, which would make Putin, roughly, their Reagan.
Obviously Reagan was a force for freedom and Putin isn't, but this similarity remains: two leaders who restored the honor and might of their respective great and very proud nations when they had fallen on hard times.
Now, what Ronald Putin does now is the big question. He can make Russia the spoiler, a policy of spite and resentment which will benefit only China and Islam in the long run. Or he can make Russia the friend and partner of the West, to the prosperity and security of both.
We'll find out whether he's wise or merely cunning.
I recall the day when I turned on the evening news and saw Boris Yeltsin climb on that Soviet tank in defiance of the USSR. However, the truth of the matter is that Yeltsin turned out to be a drunk and an incompetent surrounded by corrupt oligarchs who enriched themselves at the expense of the people. Hence, the unfortunate rise of Putin.
Ceterum censeo, Iran delenda est!