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 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: Well, I was there about three weeks ago, but I can tell you that if nothing has changed since then, I think, for many Russians, the memory of that Yeltsin era is not a positive one. Amy, you have to understand that Yeltsin’s death, in my view, reminds us that the de-democratization of Russia didn’t begin with Putin, and that Putin is the inevitable consequence of Yeltsin and Yeltsinism. So think about how Russians relate to Yeltsin: If you look at what Putin represents, it’s the antithesis. It’s a man who has come back to take back those assets and to state control.