boris yeltsin:
In certain other contexts, such as the economic “shock therapy” that reduced a large proportion of Russians to penury, liberal western media organs are now prepared to admit that Yeltsin was seriously mistaken, albeit without acknowledging the folly of their uncritical contemporary support. The blanket stamp of approval was somewhat more difficult in the case of the systematic violation of human rights in Chechnya. But then, what’s indefensible can often be ignored, and perhaps it’s not surprising that images of the havoc wreaked in Grozny and the massacres perpetrated in Chechen villages by ill-trained Russian conscripts have generally been absent from recent coverage of the Yeltsin years.
(...) If Muscovites could have envisaged at that point the sort of future that lay in wait, their attitude may have changed dramatically - as it eventually did: on the eve of his departure from the Kremlin at the end of 1999, Yeltsin’s popularity had dwindled to two per cent.
(...) Meanwhile, the coup attempt set the scene for three momentous events: the humiliation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the disbanding of the Communist Party and, within months, the dismemberment of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin was instrumental in each of them.
(...) In the brave new Russia, the sudden removal of state subsidies was accompanied by the sale of state assets at throwaway prices. A handful of enterprising folk grew very, very rich while millions saw their savings rendered worthless: in 1992, inflation went up by 2,000 per cent. These policies inevitably invited parliamentary efforts to overturn them, leading to the 1993 confrontation. It seems perverse for the man who ordered military action against his nation’s parliament to be hailed as the father of Russian democracy, but in some eyes Yeltsin could do no serious wrong: he may have been a bit of a monster, but he was a monster who devoured communism and usually obeyed the west.
(...) So who cares that in 1996, faced with the prospect of defeat in his re-election attempt, he seriously toyed with the idea of dispensing with the democratic process, until the crony capitalists he had nurtured came to his aid? Vladimir Putin, who isn’t always prepared to kowtow to the west, is often accused of possessing an authoritarian streak, but it’s seldom noted that he inherited it from Yeltsin - whose choice of successor, incidentally, was guided by one overriding factor: it had to be someone who would guarantee the outgoing president and his family immunity from prosecution. Yeltsin’s distaste for privileges and corruption had not survived the collapse of communism.
(...) Towards the end of his tenure, a pair of scholars, Professor Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, offered this scathing opinion: “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.”