Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, first President of the Russian Federation from 1991 to 1999, the first President of the Russian Federation, passed away yesterday.
Yeltsin brought enormous political change and the introduction of liberal democracy, but the collapse of the USSR saw enormous political, economic and social problems, not to mention widespread corruption, a dramatic decline in the income of average Russians and a decline in life expectancy, and was succeeded by a president with less than liberal views.
Yet as one reporter reminded readers, Yeltsin was the first elected president of Russia because he was the first Soviet politician to discover the sound bite:
His natural tendency to speak in pithy quotes allowed journalists to clip and paste them into news stories at a time when Russians first became voters. He could draw verbal pictures that resonated on a human level – as when he attacked the Communist Party for providing its bosses with country homes with marble floors and countless bathrooms. He didn’t need to say that most Soviet families were sharing a single bathroom with other families.
In his succinct and colorful language, he asked what category of spending this came under in the KGB budget: “Combating spies?”
It may surprise some readers that Yeltsin, who’s tenure was marked by continued speculation about his poor health, was still alive. His health received a great deal of attention in the global press, and he was viewed as an increasingly unstable leader as the years went on. The possibility that he might die in office was often openly discussed, and hypothetically explored in the film of Clancy’s Sum of All Fears.
I was surprised he hadn’t died earlier – he seemed a sort of W.C. Fields figure – rather too fond of the vodka…. He looks quite out of it in the photo…
Farewell, indeed. Who now will play the spoons on the heads of hapless leaders of mountainous Central Asian states? Memory eternal.
More seriously, though, a quick comparison between Boris and the goons many ex-Soviet republics got lumbered with (karimov, Niyazov, nazarbayev, Lukashenko, Aliyev etc) reveals that Russia was lucky, to an extent. My impression is that he tapped into the popular consensus and created a distintinctly un-kulturnyi personality that chimed with many Russians in a way few Russian or Soviet leaders had (perhaps the last being Khrushchev).
I’ll amend my above comment – it seems I was wrong, having just spoken to a recognised Slavophile. Yeltsin was indeed kulturnyi, but what he did have in abundance, of course, was ducha (‘soul’) – and what Putin clearly does not.