From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 5/1/2007 5:04 AM
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
TOO RUSSIAN
None of Russia’s leaders, apart from Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007), has asked its people for forgiveness. Yeltsin was also unique in following that up, in the same speech, with the simplest of injunctions to the people: “Be happy. You deserve happiness.” This was his farewell speech, after a sudden and voluntary resignation at the end of 1999. Vladimir Putin was his chosen successor then, having presided now over Yeltsin’s impeccably lukewarm state funeral. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had found Yeltsin “almost too Russian”. But the contrast between Yeltsin and Mr Putin is better dramatized in English, than in Russian, literature — Sir John Falstaff and Prince Hal. The impulsive, high-hearted, excessive, often drunk and publicly embarrassing old survivor, instinctively libertarian and thriving in chaotic change, yet also a blundering, wrongheaded and authoritarian statesman. That was Yeltsin, his father a peasant who spent three years in one of Stalin’s labour camps. Mr Putin, on the other hand, lean, cold, inscrutable and seemingly in control. His is a far more chilling authoritarianism — proud of its own apparent lack of chaotic turmoil — that would have few public stakes in “happiness”, and even fewer in allowing dissident voices for the sake of democratic freedom. Falstaff creates Hal, only to be superseded, and rejected, by him.
History would put Yeltsin down as “a man of transition”, who dismantled, in one fell swoop, the Soviet Union in December 1991. It was Yeltsin who initiated Russia’s deliverance from what he described as its “grey, stagnating, totalitarian past” into the beginnings of modern democracy. The cost was widespread corruption (Yeltsin’s greedy oligarchs), profound economic instability, Chechnya and, some would say, President Putin. But Russia’s first popularly elected leader standing on a tank outside the Russian parliament, in 1991, to rally the people against a communist coup to oust Mikhail Gorbachev is an image that will endure.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070501/asp/opinion/story_7718177.asp
