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: In the Belovezh Forest, there was an unraveling of the Soviet Union. They signed a document. There was no referendum, as Gorbachev had tried to put through a year before. So I think all of those elements, particularly — Amy, two years later, after Boris Yeltsin had stood before the parliament and said, “I am a man of a parliament,” he launched with cannons and tanks, as you may recall, a destruction of the very parliament that had elected him. In this country — let’s not forget, it’s very interesting to read the media today — most of the media in those Yeltsin years were boosters and cheerleaders of Yeltsin because, as so many Americans, particularly in, I think, our media, they wanted to see in Russia what they wanted to see, which was this transition to democracy and free markets. But it was far more complicated than that. And you see the kind of mea culpas in these editorials you just read. That line in The Washington Post is very strong, in terms of what Yeltsin did in Chechnya, comparing him to Joseph Stalin. But in those years, those Yeltsin years, it was Yeltsin as the guarantor of democracy. But as one Russian journalist once quipped to me, Yeltsin in Russia today is viewed more as the guarantor of oligarchy than the guarantor of democracy.