Title: Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s First Elected President, Dies at 76 | Democracy Now!
Headings: Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s First Elected President, Dies at 76
Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s First Elected President, Dies at 76
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Content: And he is known, Amy, as you know, in this country primarily for that iconic moment when he stood atop the tanks in August 1991 defying the coup plotters. He went to the parliament that day and said, “I am a man of the parliament.” But he squandered the democratic possibilities, I believe, that Mikhail Gorbachev opened for Russia. He did so in three ways: He presided over the greatest fire sale in 20th century history, in my view, strip-mining the country; he launched the war against Chechnya, killing hundreds of thousands of Russian civilians and Chechens; and he presided over a corrosive poverty that to this day afflicts Russia. And the other thing that I think we need to remember is that he abolished the Soviet Union. He abolished it in a forest with three men. And you can argue about whether the Soviet Union, we are better off today without the Soviet Union, but in that undemocratic unraveling of a country, we see today some of the legacy of that undemocratic moment.