Boris Yeltsin 1937-2007

[KattTx]

MOSCOW — Former President Boris Yeltsin, who engineered the final collapse of the Soviet Union and pushed Russia to embrace democracy and a market economy, died Monday. He was 76.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,267831,00.html

[Redhoss]

And it appears a lot of his reforms are being terminated with the Ruskies returning to the former ways.

[Favpack]

Good grief - he as gravely ill like 10 years ago.

No way could Russia start taking countries back over again - well, maybe Uzbekestan, but that's about it.

[Redhoss]

Pack, I wasn't speaking of taking countries back.

I was talking about the way Putin has taken over thriving businesses like the huge oil company and has taken them back to the KGB days to some extent.
Some of the free markets Yeltsin wanted are disappearing.

He's former KGB for those who didn't know.

[Firebird]

Yeltsin was a man who aptly represents the internal contradictions of Russia itself.

Here was a man capable of astounding, heartwrenching bravery. The image of Mr. Yeltsin facing down the Soviet tanks outside of the Russian White House is a seminal image of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Yeltsin's leadership contributed in no small part to ensuring that the dismantling of the USSR was peaceful. Few would have predicted that the USSR would have gone quietly into the good night, but it did exactly that. For that moment alone, history should remember and honor Yeltsin.

But then, in the space of a few years, Yeltsin would himself order tanks to shell the very same Parliament building he had protected. The image of a burning Russian White House, more than any other, conveys the confusion and turmoil that Russia faced during the 1990's. Mr. Yeltsin's response showed that although he was a democrat, authoritarian impulses still lingered in his soul.

He was a person who loved the Russian people deeply. After viewing the astonishing variety of fruits and vegetables and products at a Houston, TX, supermarket, he despaired of what Communist leadership did to his country. He recognized it, appropriately, as a crime.

Yet he also presided over a corrupt, chaotic, and opaque privatization that left incredible riches in the hands of a select few, while normal people saw saving accounts vanish overnight. Much of Putin's crusades against the oil companies and oligarchs arose as a direct result of the ham-fisted, corrupt efforts of the Yeltsin administration to privatize too much, too soon.

The strains of possibly the world's most difficult job--guiding a newly democratic Russia, visibly wore on him. He drank to much, isolated himself, trusted almost no one. He acted more and more like an old-style Russian autocratic tsar-- firing and replacing ministers at will, making sure that no one built up enough power to challenge his leadership. He roused himself for one last, astonishing campaign, possibly saving Russia from Communists yet again in 1996.

By the end, he withdrew into private life, vanishing from the Kremlin for weeks at a time. He drank more, succumbing to the ever alluring Russian vice. He appeared a man paranoid, broken, and sad, yet again bringing to mind the old tsars. In 1999, he astonished the world yet again-- handing over power to Vladimir Putin, in many ways his polar opposite. Yeltsin lived large-- he let the world see the good and bad in one single Russian soul. You could easily imagine him, two centuries earlier, working the land as a Siberian peasant. That was, in fact, his roots, and he never left those roots behind him.

May he rest in peace. For all his faults, one must always remember the direction Russia could have gone.

[Redhoss]

Good write-up Firebird.

[mad_fan]

He could drink more than me...and wide...together...:eek:

[Firebird]

Yelstin Laid to Rest today:

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2007/04/26/001.html