Boris Nikolaiovich Yeltsin

As someone who had a ringside seat for the collapse of the Soviet Union-serving as correspondent for the Jerusalem Post and Maariv in Moscow from early 1990 until mid-1992--I remember Boris Yeltsin when he was not considered a drunken clown, but as a brave, resourceful and inspiring political leader who broke with the corrupt Communist elite to become the avenging angel of the long-suffering Russian people. I was in Moscow for the sublime three days in August 1991 when Yeltsin stood atop the tank and faced down the enemies of human freedom, inspiring thousands of other Muscovites at a critical moment to rise above their very justifiable fear and demand an end to a horrible system. As one middle-aged woman told me that day as the tanks drew closer and closer to the barricaded White House and a repeat of the massacre of Tienemen Square 1989 seemed likely; "I cant leave here and go home to safety right now even though I know my life may be at risk because I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I gave in again and allowed these fuckers to do to my children what they did to myself and my husband."So the big question is this; what happened to the inspiring leader of 1991 to reduce him within several years to a sick joke; a drunken bufoon seemingly intent on destroying the very vision of Russian democracy he had brought briefly, shimmeringly to life? I think I know the answer; Boris Yeltsin's heart was broken by the results of his government's disastrous free-market policies of the first year of his rule of independent Russia and after the bloodletting he ordered around the White House (Parliament) in 1994, he was a broken man who turned to drink to drown out the anguish he was feeling. Yeltsin was sold a bill of goods; namely, the free-market fantasies of the Russian democrats who he trusted and empowered. They believed that democracy and capitalism are identical and all that needed to be done was to open Russia to the free market and everything would proceed beautifully. So Yeltsin's Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar tried that in the early months of 1992, with every citizen being given a chunk of the former Soviet state to do with as they wanted--mainly to quickly sell off to the bigger fish for a few hundred rapidly diminishing rubles, and within less than a year, Gaidar and company had allowed most of the resources of the state to be accumulated in the hands of a few ruthless 'oligarchs', while the vast majority of Russians sank into abject poverty. Within a year or two, Yeltsin was hated by the very masses who had once adored him.

Then came the events of 1994, when he used violence to stand down his parliamentary opposition, the disastrous first invasion of Chechnya and the 1996 elections, which he bought with the support of the oligarchs. Yeltsin ought to have resigned before going through with any of these actions, which were all in direct violation of the humane and democratic values he championed against Gorbachev and the harder-line Communist Party hierarchy from 1987-1991. Unfortunately, Yeltsin allowed himself to be convinced that he had to stay in power to prevent the return of the self-same nomenklatura and had to use every possible means to do so. Through all of that, Yeltsin corroded the meaning of democracy to the point that the vast majority of Russians came to hate the very word and were glad to turn themselves over to the updated totalitarianism of Putin.

The problem, in my mind, was less with Yeltsin personally than with the illusions of the Russian democrats of the Gorbachev era; among them many of the bravest and purest human beings I ever had the privelege to meet. Brave and pure, but deeply deluded. Their fatal flaw was that in their just hatred of everything related to the Soviet system, they assumed that the seeming opposite of the Soviet system--i.e. pure capitalism--must be the answer. In those years, I had discussions with many of these people---some Jewish or part-Jewish and others ethnic Russians--who were leading demostrations demanding the end of Communist Party rule and the creation of genuine democracy. Few of these people at that point had ever travelled outside the Soviet bloc and their vision of America was literally Reagan's rhapsody of a shining city on a hill. I hated to be the bearer of bad news, but was frequently forced into that role, feeling compelled to acknowledge that Reagan-era America was hardly a paragon of justice and freedom; that, yes, as Soviet propaganda said, we DID have serious problems related to race, poverty and social dysfunction in America, that we DID have whole areas like the South Bronx that looked a lot like Berlin after World War II, that, in my mind, the Reaganites were reversing many of the gains built up over generations in America since the progressive era by breaking unions, eviserating needed government programs and starting a process of huge tax cuts for the rich which was greatly increasing the gap between rich and poor in our country. When I would say these things, my Russian interlocutors would seem at first bewildered and then turn away from me with the apparent conviction that I was one of those deluded, self-hating Westerners who for mystifying reasons didnt understand what a paradise I was priveleged to live in.

And sure, they were right in their main conviction; the American system, despite all its flaws, WAS much better than the Soviet one both in terms of allowing human freedom and in providing a decent standard of living. But what they didnt understand was that what made the American system, and even more so, the European social democracies, work, was precisely that they were NOT pure capitalism, but because a certain level of social protection had been built into it over the the decades, minumum wage, social security, unemployment insurance, unions, and so much more. Without all of that, without the willingness of the system to bend for its own good, we might have had a socialist revolution of our own back in the 1930's. But the Reagan era was a time of the rhetoric of unalloyed capitalism and because Reagan had called the Soviet Union an "evil empire", he was a hero to dissidents and democrats in Moscow.

So the leaders of Democratic Russia sought to create pure capitalism in Russia in 1992, and they ended up re-creating the robber baron era in America before the dawn of the progressive era, when most of the resources of the country were in the hands of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Henry Ford and a few others. They were given the chance to use Russia as a laboratory for this wildly misgotten social experiment because of the popularity of Yeltsin--the muzhik, the man of the people, who had been convinced by Gaidar and the others that it would work--and within a few months, they ended up impovershing millions and, in the process, destroying Yeltsin. He saw how quickly his popularity among the masses turned to disillusion and contempt toward him, and he was contemplated that he had sanctioned the process and was responsible for the result, something inside him snapped. He had spent his life as a Communist, was converted late in life to capitalism, came to power on the capitalist wave, and was destroyed politically and emotionally when it abruptly receded. He had staked everything on the capitalist way; when it clearly screwed Russia and the common people, he was demoralized and turned to drink.

But I honor the man who I saw standing on that tank that day; the man who summoned first in thousands and then in millions for a fleeting time the belief that despite its 1000 years of despotism, Russia was not fated to remain a shithole, that Russians were full human beings with the power to transform their own lives and the society in which they lived. If I die tomorrow, I will remember the experience of witnessing that uprising as an enormous privilege, a deeply spiritual experience, which showed me the transcendant possibilities of the human spirit. The Yeltsin Revolution came apart within a year or two on its own contradictions; but it happened and it was a shining moment like 1789, 1848, 1905, 1968 etc, which in the long run helps move the human race toward a happier future where people can live more fulfilling and purposeful lives. Boris Nikolaiovich Yeltsin, z"l, you may be a prophet without honor today, but at a critical moment, you grabbed history by the horns and thrust it boldly in a new and better direction. Few are privileged to play such a role, and whatever came later, your greatness at that moment can never be tarnished.