Boris Yeltsin: Demon or Hero?

On the 1st of February Boris Yeltsin, the first President of the Russian Federation, would have been 85. Commemorating the date, Argumenty i Fakty published a two-polar article about Yeltsin. Two views on what he did to Russia, one negative and one positive. The whole article Boris Yeltsin: Demon or Hero can be read in Russian at the site of AiF.

Here I am only going to translate one view, which reflects the real negative impact of Yeltsin on Russia. I cannot bring myself to translating the positive view by Vladimir Ryzhkov, who was the vice-speaker of the Parliament in 1997-1999 – in the years after the 1993 Yeltsin’s coup d’etat. Ryzhkov’s words are sugar-coated paintings of black as white. IF anyone wants to read them, go to the Russian article above and use Google translate…


Aleksander Prokhanov, writer:

– For me, Yeltsin is an absolute evil, while the recently opened “Yeltsin Center” in Ekaterinburg is a temple where all the haters of Russia can now congregate and worship their idol.

When Hitler was preparing his attack on the Soviet Union, he had “Plan Ost” – to dismember the USSR, to destroy its defence industry, the whole of the Soviet ideology and culture, to reduce the number of Russian and, finally, to introduce external management of all parts of the dismembered country. Hitler’s plan was not allowed to come to fruition because in 1945 Stalin’s T-34 danced a quadrille on the Reich Chancellery bunker.

But in 1991 Yeltsin carried this plan out almost to the point. He made 3 coup d’etats. The first one in August 1991, when he took away all the powers from Gorbachev while he sat in Foros. The second – in December of the same year, when Yeltsin dissolved the Soviet Union by signing the Belovezhsk agreement. And the third coup – in 1993, when Yeltsin, in violation of the Constitution, disbanded the parliament, and then shot at it from the tanks, torching a terrible fire in the centre of Moscow. (Translator note: for more details about the 1993 coup d’etat see my post The ”Wild 90s” in Russia, as reflected in people’s memory)

In 1994, Yeltsin launched a fratricidal war in Chechnya. He compromised the integrity of what was still remaining of Russia – back then Tatar, Bashkir, Ural republics almost became independent… (Translator note: Nikolaj Starikov in one of his video journals demonstrated samples of “Ural Roubles” – a currency that war already printed and was supposed to be introduced in that fragmented bit of Russia.) Yeltsin created the monstrous class of oligarchs who to this day view the country as their prey, and are transferring the loot abroad. At the same time he created in Russia is alien to her way of consumption, saturation, hedonism and egoism – despite the fact that our people had always been a part of a community, cooperative, society… Yeltsin sought to re-encode the Russian people and Russian psycho. Hollywood came here in full power and started imposing Western values.

Finally, as was intended in the “Plan Ost”, our country came under external management. The Yeltsin-Kozyrev Russia did not have its own foreign policy – it was built on the national interests of the US; CIA officers were sitting in our economic centres, managing privatization and allocation of resources.


End of the translation.

The Belovezhsk agreement, which dissolved the USSR was voluntaristic and unconstitutional. Article 3 of USSR’s Constitution was dedicated to the procedures, which needed to be observed if a republic wanted to exit the union. Referendums were supposed to be conducted.

This Yeltsin’s act alone had terrible, tragic consequences: Russian people became the most fragmented nationality in the world, still living as non-citizens in oppression in such “European value” countries as Estonia and Latvia. Millions of people ended up being “abroad” from one day to the other. Hundreds of thousands of families were split up. Millions died in the ensuing war, hunger and economic collapse, which was also in the Hitler’s “Plan Ost”, manifested by Yeltsin.

At best, Yeltsin was a naïve fool, used by Western powers in their Big Game of destroying Russia. At worst, he was a ruthless criminal.