Yeltsin: destroyer of USSR, gross plunderer

The American media suffer from historical amnesia.

They have made Ronald Reagan a saint. A Newsweek columnist reported in March that Reagan supported human rights and democracy.

Does anyone recall Iran-Contra? Reagan’s attempt to undermine the democratically elected Sandinista government of President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. Does anyone remember Reagan’s embrace of murderous rulers? Such as the Argentine generals, dictators in Guatemala and the El Salvador death squads. His invasion of Grenada?

Time ran a story in March contrasting Reagan’s “visionary ideals” with the Bush II administration scandals and corruption. Fact: Reagan had 20 top officials convicted of felonies.

So it is with Boris Yeltsin. When he died in April, the media hailed him as the “father of Russian democracy.” The truth is otherwise. Mikhail Gorbachev founded Russian democracy.

Yeltsin, even as president, remained a drunken peasant. But that was hardly the worst of his faults. The worst was to abolish the Soviet Union--precipitously, illegally and undemocratically.

The second worst was to destroy a budding democracy by crashing tanks into parliament. The third was ruling by decree, mocking the constitutional federalism that Gorbachev espoused.

The fourth was plundering USSR property, the property of all Russian people, turning Russia into a plutocracy and oligarchy. The fifth was his two invasions of Chechnya, causing the deaths of about 100,000 civilians and 20,000 Russian soldiers.

Matt Taibbi, defying the American tradition of de mortuis nil nisi bonum, wrote a scalding obituary in Rolling Stone. Items:

• What the American media called “reform” was “a thinly veiled mass robbery…The great delusion about Yeltsin was that he was a kind of democrat and an opponent of communism. He was not. He was…an opportunist.”

• “Loans for shares (auctions of state properties) formalized Russia’s transformation…into an organized mafia state…Yeltsin was the don.”

• “He personally stole and facilitated mass thefts at the hands of others from just about every office of the Russian state.”

• About his constitutional referendum in 1993, “evidence has surfaced suggesting that the vote was rigged and that Yeltsin actually lost.”

It was Gorbachev who changed history after coming to power in 1985. He introduced perestroika, reformation of the stultifying Soviet economic system. And it was his glasnost (openness) that ushered in democratization and ended the totalitarian communist dictatorship.

Gorbachev allowed the Soviet Union satellites to regain their independence. He ended censorship, encouraged opposition and held the country’s first free, multi-candidate election. He was the greatest Russian since Lenin and Trotsky.

Visiting Israel after his resignation, Gorbachev said that he was the last Russian socialist who came “to honor the first socialist, Jesus.”

Yeltsin did the world no favors by annointing Vladimir Putin to succeed him.

Putin, former KBG colonel, is a czar. He controls the media, exiles his foes, arrests politicians and businessmen who oppose him and apparently goes so far as to have his henchment assassinate critics.

Reporters are his enemies. Fourteen journalists have been murdered in Russia under Putin’s reign. TV is his house organ, radio his cheerleader.

The Duma does Putin’s bidding, passing a sedition law defining extremism as any criticism of state officials. It restricts international human rights organizations. Putin has brought the judiciary under executive control.

He has continued Yeltsin’s ravaging capitalism by creating multimillionaires with his frenzied privatization. Rising energy prices have made Russia richer. Putin has made it unfreer.

Yet nearly two-thirds of Russians live below the poverty line. Even large segments of the educated and professional classes--teachers and doctors--are grossly underpaid.

A former economic adviser to Putin, Andrei Illarionov, noted that Putin, like capitalists worldwide, had “mastered the main principle of state-corporatism: ‘privatize profit, nationalize loss.’ ” Illarionov added: “The state has become, essentially, a corporate enterprise that the nominal owners, Russian citizens, no longer control.”

Stalin, who along with Hitler and Mao, was one of the three biggest mass slaughters in history, sold out the Russian Revolution just as Napoleon betrayed the French Revolution. Stalin shattered the socialist dream of social justice and equality with his purges, gulag, show trials and the Great Terror.

No one is seeking a return of Stalin’s dictatorial, murderous and fearsome ways. But the demise of the Soviet Union, aside from being a crushing blow to worldwide socialism, left the world without a superpower to counter U.S. imperialism.

As Stephen Cohen, Russian history professor at New York University, points out: survival of the USSR “would have been better for world affairs.”