This evening I went to see Yeltsin’s body lying in state at the Church of the Saviour in central Moscow. At first, I thought there wasn’t any queue at all, which would have been harsh but appropriate. But actually the police had lined up the queue on the other side of the church. It was big, but not that big. Maybe 500 people in the line at any one time, being constantly re-filled with new arrivals. The queue was just as big when I walked past again at 11pm. We only had to queue for 20 minutes or so before we were in, filing past his coffin with his pale pig-like face peaking out. A small crowd had gathered at the end of the church, some old ladies with tears in their eyes, but on the whole, this was a dry-eyed and reflective affair.
He oversaw such a painful and humiliating time in this country’s history. And for many, he was part of that humiliation, with his drunken tomfoolery on the international stage.
Many were the mistakes of his era. His big mistake, as a man in front of me in the queue put it, were the people he trusted – people like Boris Berezovsky, who was only interested in power and money for himself. Yeltsin did not have the strength to control events around him, in direct contrast to Putin, who feels he has to control everything down to what conferences his country’s business elite attends.
The West’s mistake, meanwhile, particularly the mistake of the Clinton regime, was to put all their hopes in Yeltsin and his ‘young reformers’, even to the point of pressuring the IMF to give them a $10 billion loan just before the 1996 election, in effect funding the theft of the election to stop the Communist Party getting in. They faced a choice between socialist democracy and gangster capitalism, and they chose the latter.
And the western media’s mistake today is to think that somehow the authoritarianism of the Putin era is a turn away from the direction of the Yeltsin era. This isn’t true. It was Yeltsin who ordered the tanks to fire on the democratically-elected Duma in 1993, Yeltsin’s cocky young liberals who consistently ignored the constitution while ramming through their reforms from above onto a miserable population, Yeltsin’s cronies who stole the election in 1996 and made the Russian people disgusted with words like democracy and liberalism.
That’s my opinion anyway. But as I saw the body of this man who, as my friend put it, had exerted a massive influence on our personal lives, the lives of young westerners living in Moscow, this man who I’d never seen, or heard talk, or even read a contemporary interview of, yet who still defined the modern political stage to a huge extent, I thought to myself that it was impossible to judge Yeltsin considering I had not lived in Moscow in those chaotic post-Soviet times. Sure, some enormous mistakes were made. But who’s to say worse mistakes were not avoided? The collapse of the Soviet empire has, compared to the collapse of other empires in recent history such as the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman Empires, been a relatively unbloody affair, so far.
So much of Putin’s popularity stems from the fact he is everything Yeltsin was not. He is young, energetic, healthy, sober. His government is massively in credit. He stands up to the US. He defends the territorial integrity of the country and even tries to extend it.
But Putin has limits too. He is a control freak. He doesn’t understand there are some things which the executive can’t do, which only other institutions can do, such as a free press or civil society. He just doesn’t see the value in these things, which is narrow-minded and even ignorant. He has failed to crack down on corruption in any way. China, for example, is not afraid to put senior party figures in jail for corruption. Even Nigeria has its anti-corruption squad putting away senior ministers. In Russia, ministers can still steal billions with impunity.
It is to be hoped, then, that with the departure of Yeltsin, Putin’s government will look slightly less rosy to Russians, who will stop comparing their government to what came before, and start comparing it to other governments around the world.
As Mark Ames, the very intelligent editor of notorious local rag The Exile put it in an article about the recent anti-government demonstrations:
At some point, it is no longer enough to be satisfied that you are ruled by a corrupt, despotic elite whose best quality is that it is less bad and less foreign than the previous elite; it is no longer satisfying enough to live in a country which has achieved mere stability; and it’s no longer enough to blame one’s problems on the machinations of rival nations. As many protesters said, it’s shameful and embarrassing to live in a country which beams crude pro-government propaganda from every TV station, and which massively and crudely manipulates its political process. The protesters are those who expect more from Russia. And their numbers could grow.
