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: It’s a man who has decided to take back the media, though it is, I think, inaccurate to argue that under Yeltsin the media was so free. What happened under Yeltsin is to some extent what we’ve seen in this country, where the media was given out to the oligarchical interests into private hands and was often manipulated for political purposes by the government. So I think Russians associate him with this great pain and poverty and chaos, and they saw in Putin, a man — let’s not forget — who was essentially appointed by Yeltsin — the elections were rigged, by Putin, who — his first act was in a kind of Ford-Nixon move to give Yeltsin and his family immunity and from prosecution. They see in Putin a man who is restoring the greatness of the Russian state, whether we like it or not, and who is giving them some stability, a reprieve from the chaos they associate with the Yeltsin years. Finally, the sad part of it is that Yeltsin and his band of merry reformers, those so touted by Larry Summers and Strobe Talbott and others in the Clinton administration, they gave democracy a bad name in Russia, because too many Russians today associate democracy with chaos, corruption and poverty. The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work (s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us. Next story from this daily show
David Halberstam (1934 – 2007):