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: 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. And that, I think, is how he is viewed by the majority of Russians, who associate him with the breakup of a country — they didn’t love the Soviet system — but the breakup of a country and an empire which they associated with, and also throwing the country into the greatest peacetime depression any nation has suffered and creating this small band of oligarchs with such enormous wealth, because they were given, in exchange for electing Yeltsin in 1996, the assets of this country — the great oil, gas and raw minerals of a country — in exchange for electing Yeltsin, who in 1996 understood that he might not have been elected without their help. And that election remains contested in Russian journalism today. AMY GOODMAN: The response of people in Russia to his death? KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: