Posted on 04/27/2007 6:10:54 PM PDT by A. Pole
Boris Yeltsin, who died on April 23, was a towering figure in Russian political history. But was he, as so many US obituaries and editorials have described him, the "Father of Russian Democracy"?
As though a wave of historical amnesia had swept over the media, few commentators seemed to remember that it was Mikhail Gorbachev, upon becoming Soviet leader in 1985, who launched the democratic reforms of "perestroika" and "glasnost"--ending censorship, permitting, even encouraging, opposition rallies and demonstrations, beginning market reforms and holding the first free, multi-candidate elections. (Indeed, Yeltsin was the chief beneficiary of those reforms.)
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After August 1991, Yeltsin's anti-democratic policies polarized, embittered and impoverished his country laying the ground for what is now unfolding in Russia--though it is being blamed solely on today's Russian President, Vladimir Putin.
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Beginning in early 1992, Yeltsin launched the disastrous "shock therapy" policies which sent the country reeling with pain. Urged upon Russia by a group of US (primarily Harvard) economists, and supported by the Clinton Administration and energetically implemented by Yeltsin's young "reformers," these policies--almost universally touted as "reforms" in the Western media-- involved the swift elimination of most price controls and a privatization program that resulted in hyperinflation wiping out, in installments, the savings of average Russians. Roughly half of Russia's people thus found themselves living below the poverty level.
** In October 1993, Yeltsin used tank cannons to destroy not only the Parliament that had brought him to power and defended him during the attempted coup of 1991 but the entire political, constitutional order of Russia's post-Communist republic. The US government and media, with few exceptions, acted as Yeltsin's cheerleaders as the Russian President's tanks pounded Russia's first ever popularly elected and fully independent legislature. A senior US official told the New York Times that "if Yeltsin suspends an anti-democratic parliament, it is not necessarily an antidemocratic act"; and an unnamed US official was quoted by Newsweek as saying the Clinton Administration "would have supported Yeltsin even if his response had been more violent than it was." (187 people died and almost 500 were wounded in the attack.)
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In 1996, Yeltsin's reelection campaign---financed by a handful of oligarchs including now-exiled Putin opponent Boris Berezovsky and aided by pro-Kremlin media bias and censorship--was marked by spectacular legal violations. No less enduring in its consequences was the most aggressive giveaway on Yeltsin's watch --the notorious "loans-for-shares" agreement--which allowed a small group of men, in exchange for financing Yeltsin's campaign, to take control of and Russia's most valuable economic assets.(It was a colossal piece of criminality glossed over at the time by almost all US media outlets as "market reform".) Thus was birthed the rapacious oligarchy--leading one Russian journalist to remark the other day that Yeltsin was not "the father of democracy" but "the father of the oligarchy."
**In August 1998, following a number of financial dealings that victimized or failed to benefit most Russians, the government after pledging not to do so,suddenly devalued the ruble, defaulted on its debts and froze bank accounts. In effect, people's savings were once again expropriated, this time decimating the post-1991 middle class.
Such events help explains why for millions of Russians, Yeltsin's rule was an age of blight not democracy. This magazine never lost sight of the social and economic disaster he presided over. But almost no one in the US media wanted to tell that story. Preferring Panglossian narratives, few cared to report that since 1991 Russia's reality included the worst peacetime industrial depression of the 20th century. In 1999, when the UN Development program reported that " a human crisis of monumental proportions is emerging in the former Soviet Union," the report was virtually ignored. And while, as Professor Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski wrote, "for the first time in recent world history one of the major industrial nations with a highly educated society has dismantled the results of several decades of economic development," American press coverage preferred to run glowing stories about Yeltsin's crusading "young reformers" --sometimes called "democratic giants" -- showing a cold indifference to the terrible human consequences of the crusade. (A Reuters journalist later made the observation: "The pain is edited out." ) As Stephen Cohen wrote, "sustaining such a Manichaean narrative in the face of so many conflicting realities turned American journalists into boosters for US policy and cheerleaders for Yeltsin's Kremlin."
Neither these cold realities nor the political and economic consequences today have chastened the the booster-journalists. Indeed, while many of the obituaries in newspapers that were Yeltsin's most uncritical supporters at the time now give a more balanced account than they did at the time --there is no acknowledgement that they helped promote the acts they now criticize or regret.
Embedded in those obituaries is another argument, perhaps stated most clearly by Strobe Talbott, a Russia expert and Clinton's primary adviser on Yeltsin's Russia, that while there are valid criticisms of Yeltsin there was no alternative route to what he imposed. Yet the majority of Russian pro-market economists warned against "shock therapy" --abetted by US-sponsored policies--foreseeing its tragic outcome. The alternative road they offered was more evolutionary, a gradualist approach, a "third way" that would have averted catastrophic impoverishment, plundering and lawlessness. Time has proved them right.
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Headline = No...merely a participant.
It would be a great fund to start...work with an airline that wanted to enhance their PR as a true American airline--course that would target them for terror, but....
Your thoughts?
The difference is that one is working for the benefit of his country (regardless why he is doing it), and the other one was working for the benefits of those whose interest was to weaken and exploit his country.
Politicians of course work for themselves. That is true of ours and as well as theirs.
I suggest this reading (not long) of Putin’s faith...an accurate representation of the man and other culturally relevant issues in Russia today. I’d like your feedback if you wish of course.
http://www.sipa.columbia.edu/REGIONAL/HI/Putin-faith.pdf
What would you say if Putin became Gazprom chairman, the new oligarch?
Putin was an KGB agent, this was certainly anti-religious organization. It is nearly impossible to convince me that he believe in God. An impression of one Russian Orthodox priest is not enough.
Don’t know about “Father of Democracy”, but “Captain of the RedNose Express” seems appropriate.
Well clinton and his third way ilk are anti religious and were not members of the KGB. You are making assumptions based on past association and you cannot do that logically.
What would you say if Putin became Gazprom chairman, the new oligarch?
If I were Russian, I would rather have that than a bunch of closet Israelis running Gazprom.
What would you say if Putin became Gazprom chairman, the new oligarch?
If I were Russian, I would rather have that than a bunch of closet Israelis running Gazprom.
I would chose Clinton above Putin any day. :) Putin was an KGB agent, he is surrounded by bunch of fellow former KGB agents. Are you saying also that they are some Orthodox equivalent of Catholic Rosary Army! :)
I would chose Clinton above Putin any day
You are obviously brainwashed. Anyone who can make a statement like that needs a reality check.
I would chose Clinton above Putin any day
You are obviously brainwashed what is it? the Catholic Rosary Army? Or maybe the Soros Internationale?
Anyone who can make a statement like that needs a reality check.
I think as the scriptures says that most of them their minds have been turn over-
Rom. 1: 28
28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;
2 Tim. 3: 8
8 Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith.
Titus 1: 16
16 They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate.
That’s a poorly worded question, IMO. Naturally, I opposed the Soviet Union on ideological grounds, and opposed the pre-Putin regime for allowing the Oligarchs to rape Russia, to allow Chechens to run amok, and to allow the State Dep’t to pursue a pro-Saudi agenda in Europe and its periphery.
I need to find an article for you from a Russian dissident from the Soviet era who shocked the CIA when he told them (around 1980) that the KGB was actually the most non-ideological institution in the USSR, but that it wouldn’t strike against the regime because of the nationalist/patriotic stance of the KGB at the time. He ended his statement by saying that Andropov’s KGB was a complete 180 from that of Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria. I too always automatically thought KGB=evil automatically until I read this dissident’s comments. Solzhenitsyn echoed the same sentiment some time later.
Lastly, I’d like to recommend Paul Klebnikov’s book on Berezovsky to you. The book outlines how Berezovsky used the Chechen mafia in Moscow to place himself into position thru murder to reap the benefits of the privatization. Naturally, Berezovsky has strong ties to Chechen separatists and funds them. Zakayev, the head separatist, lives near him in London. The author Klebnikov, a journalist for Forbes, was murdered a couple of years back.
In Russia when they converted to Communism they had not only to impose economic restructuring but societal restructuring as well. Which is why the conversion from Czarism to Communism was much more painful than that from Communism to Oligarchism.
What we are attempting to do in Iraq is similar to what Lenin tried to do in Russia: whole scale societal restructuring.
We definitely have a better goal than Lenin did (Free Market Democracy rather than Totalitarian Communism), but we will also fail because our good goal does not guarantee that we will get there by any means.
And we definitely wont get there by expecting the Iraqis to become new people overnight, or even over the course of a decade.
Yeltsin was a far from perfect (small-d) democrat, but he also had to maneuver through an incredibly rough transitionYeltsin wasn’t one of the American Founders — but, actually, the American founders often weren’t the idealized figures we like to remember.
Pragmatism runs head-on into idealism, and a leader has to choose whether to sacrifice some of the ideal to save the rest, or to temporarily defer the dream to preserve the reality. Weimar Germany stayed democratic, and was consumed. Yeltsin had no easy choices, and he had both hits and misses.
That is a lesson worth remembering, especially today. When an Iraqi government is finally ready to take control, it will have to be with restrictions on speech, assembly, religion, and economic controls that we would find unacceptable here. There will be labor pains. Our model is not theirs, and the transition to democracy isn’t one-size-fits-all.
I agree with you. I also find A. Pole to be a valuable poster, and I have always welcomed pings from him.
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