Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin

It's hard to know what to say about a man with such a deeply ambiguous legacy. I do, however, have clear positive feelings about "Oregon Girl" by Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin:

Let me just observe briefly that I think a lot of American's national security policy elite still loves Boris Yeltsin who, for all his foibles, was pleasingly dependent on US-backing in a way that Vladimir Putin isn't. This probably has more to do with the vagaries of the oil market than with differences between the leaders, but US-Russian relations tend to get personalized, so this is what you get.

Comments

Yeltsin still benefits enormously for his great moment in 1991 standing atop the tank.

Few remember him ordering tanks to open fire on the Russian Parliament just two years later.

Posted by tequila | April 23, 2007 11:48 AM

Pretty much everything that's bad about Russian politics now was set in place during the Yeltsin years- the personalization of political power along with its centralization and the elimination of other spheres of power, the Checan war (started in both cases for cynical political reasons), massive corruption in government, the massive manipulation of media to prevent real competition, etc. Yeltsin should have been a hero but in the end he was, at best, a dangerous buffoon who set his country on a terrible course.

Posted by Matt | April 23, 2007 11:49 AM

"Pretty much everything that's bad about Russian politics now was set in place during the Yeltsin years"

I think that's being a little hard on the guy. There were centuries of repression followed by decades of the most horrible totalitarianism imaginable. That certainly must have contributed to "what's bad about Russian politics now."

(Go Warriors!)

Posted by too many steves | April 23, 2007 12:07 PM

When did Harry Potter start a band? Is this from the new movie?

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | April 23, 2007 12:10 PM

The Dancing Boris video of his last presidential campaign remains a treasured memory.

Posted by JP | April 23, 2007 12:10 PM

This band name either just got 5 times better or 10 times worse...

GO WARRIORS!

Posted by Gregorio GO WARRIORS! | April 23, 2007 12:14 PM

TMS- what I meant was that most of the changes about, say, the Russian constitution that allow for Putin to do what he does were made under Yeltsin. Even the changes made under Putin would not have been possible if Yeltsin hadn't staged a sort of coup in '93 and re-written the constition so as to concentrate power in his own hands. He had a chance to put Russia on a better course and,for a number of reasons, not all of which were his fault, of course, he didn't do it. I'd consider him more of a tragic figure than an evil one if he hadn't started the first Chechan war for the sake of personal political gain. But my point was primarily that the actual changes to the Russian constitution and political structure that are now used by Putin were largely put in place by Yeltsin.

Posted by Matt | April 23, 2007 12:15 PM

Valuing someone because of their personal friendship with him and perception of him as a "good person" over what his actual policies were, as the Clinton Administration did with Yeltsin, certainly began to seem familiar several years later after Clinton was gone.

This also reminds me that I used to maintain the "Alexander Lebed Fan Page," dedicated to one of Yeltsin's rivals.

Posted by Constantine | April 23, 2007 12:51 PM

Yeltsin's no good guy, but I think Matt's been downplaying the difference between Putin and Yeltsin a bit too much. Yeltsin was weaker, but he could have stopped NTV if he wanted to. Things have changed.

Posted by David Weman | April 23, 2007 1:11 PM

Worst Russian leader since Stalin, I think. That's pretty clear. Russian polls show that Brezhnev is about ten times more popular than Yeltsin. To make Brezhnev look good takes a special kind of fuck-up - and the alcoholic Yeltsin certainly fit the bill.

Curiosly, many Russians feel like Putin's era is much like Brezhnev's.

Posted by roger | April 23, 2007 1:22 PM

Great song! Thanks for sharing.

Posted by I can't put my name anymore because my work won't let me, lame huh? | April 23, 2007 1:26 PM

the drummer makes the song

Posted by neil | April 23, 2007 1:27 PM

To make Brezhnev look good takes a special kind of fuck-up

It was a time of cataclysmic economic change where a population with extremely limited choices in an extremely inefficient economic and social system were suddenly thrown into the deep end and told to "swim". Of course there would be nostolgia for Brezhnev and his times - on a personal economic risk level, things were "safe" and "easy" then without the social and economic dislocations needed to move Russia out of the socialist economy. Plus you know about memories, "those too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget". There are plenty of East Germans who pine for the good old days of the DDR too.

Posted by Ethel-to-Tilly | April 23, 2007 2:33 PM

bass player is missing a string.

Posted by boris | April 23, 2007 2:43 PM

I think Yeltsin gets a thumbs up in the West for the reason matt states above, what happened in 1991. That incident was kind of the last brick of the Berlin Wall or the Iron Curtain falling down and it's very easy for a Westerner to think well of someone who sort of said, even if subsequent behavior sullied the moment, "Give me liberty or give me death", when a betting man would have bet on him getting death.

Posted by j mct | April 23, 2007 3:00 PM

Ethel, I didn't know moving the economy out of socialism was a good in and of itself - although I do think that ideology animated the ideologues and oligarchs in Yeltsin's entourage. Although I'm sure they could have come up with another ideology to excuse massive robbery. Somehow, I think "safe" and "easy" are actually mostly good - and I'm pretty sure the average American householder believes the same thing. The economy is not an aerobics workout.

The problem with Brezhnev's economy was, of course, that it wasn't sustainable. It was dependent on corruption and amazing amounts of waste to work. Yeltsin's economy, if you believe all the sky is falling Washington Post editorials, has proved to be just as unsustainable. After all, Putin has practically nationalized the energy sector, Russia's biggest income generator, thus putting a stake through Yeltsin's privatizationomania.

I guess, though, there is Grozny to stand as a monument to the old drunk.

Posted by roger | April 23, 2007 3:31 PM

Roger - at least you're talking more credible stuff now than "the liked Brezhnev better so Yelstin must've really sucked"

Posted by Ethel-to-Tilly | April 23, 2007 5:24 PM

Who Russians think was a good leader is not much of a guide. About 20% reckon Stalin was the greatest Russian leader ever. (Of course, obviously most people in Russia are descended from people who didn't die in the gulags, so there's a natural selection effect going on). Twice as many reckon Stalin was the greatest Russian war leader ever, despite his appalling leadership in 1941. None of them rate Gorbachev at all.

In my darker periods I look at Russia in the 1990s and think "that pack of carnivorous sheep deserved everything they got."

Posted by ajay | April 23, 2007 7:14 PM

Ethel, I don't know - I figure that the Russians might have a reasonable opinion of the man who provided over the collapse of an economy and its takeover by gangster, the drop in health indicators to a point somewhere close to Ethiopia's, and a war that is comparable to Milosevic's. They might think he sucked. Curious people, those Russians.

Americans, who had a great chance to send ripoff advisors over to Russia to advocate programs they could never get away with here - vide Bush's let's privatize social security proposal - will remember him with fondness.

Posted by roger | April 23, 2007 8:15 PM

Uh, what's with the drummer's kit and air-drumming? Anyway, Springfield MO represent!

Posted by daveadams | April 23, 2007 8:29 PM

About 20% reckon Stalin was the greatest Russian leader ever.

Is this for real?

The funny thing is, Stalin wasn't even Russian.

Posted by JP | April 24, 2007 2:21 PM

Hitler was Austrian, Napoleon was Corsican-- what's your point?

Like seriously, dude, national boundaries are-- how you say-- mutable. No country illustrates this better than that big bumbling bear Mother Russia. And so if Iossif Vissarionovich Djugashvili can worm his way to the top of the Soviet slag-heap, more power to the little pitted Georgian peach (also a raging, reclusive alcoholic, BTW, who just so happened to be absolutely instrumental in defeating Hitler, moreso than batshit Churchill and aloof FDR).

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