It’s all too easy to buffer Boris Yelstin’s obituary with tales of corruption, leadership failure, and drunken debauchery, but in the grand scheme of Russian history, the ‘Yelstin years’ will be remembered as a downright magical era.
Yeltsin resigned in disgrace a few hours before the year 2000, saying that he believed Russia needed a fresh start for the new century. And, boy, what a century it was: Lenin and the Bolsheviks, two devastating World Wars, Stalin and the Gulag, an idiot named Khruschev, and the Cold War. But to Russia, the threat of nuclear annihilation was just another cataclysmal chapter in a history wrought with profound psychological fear and uncertainty. A co-worker who was born in Russia told me “One of the biggest differences between the US and Russia is scale. The Boston Massacre killed five people. Our massacres involve millions.”
And suddenly, in the 1990s, Russia was independent and democratic, and it had this elected President named Boris who called communism “a pie in the sky” and was moved to open economic markets after visiting a Texas supermarket. Who cares if he was a corrupt drunk who committed numerous errors in rule? Who cares if he narrowly survived multiple impeachment attempts and his approval rating was a reported 2 percent by the time he left? Under Boris Yelstin, Russia underwent pendulous political, social, and economic change without millions of people disappearing. And when it was obvious he was a failure, he willingly left, without allowing his country to descend to revolution or coup. And that’s an achievement that history will appreciate.
