Once again, we turn to Masha in Moscow...
I find this excerpt from the NYT's report moving:
A big man with a ruddy face and white hair, he was full of peasant bluster — what the Russians call a real muzhik — and came to Moscow with a genuine warmth and concern for his countrymen.
During a visit to the United States in 1989, he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by the centralized, state-run economic system where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare.
He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.
Leon Aron quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.”
He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’ ”
He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, “’I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.”’ An aide, Lev Sukhanov was reported to have said that it was at that moment that “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside his boss.
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I think Yeltsin is a great example that the best Revolutionaries seldom make the best administrators once the revolution is done. Russia probably would have been better served with something along the French system with both a President and Prime Minister. Yeltsin would have been fine as the symbolic public face as President with a really good technocrat managing things as PM (like say maybe Gorbachev)
I think the Miami example shows why we should NOT go overboard with restrictions letting in citizens of majority countries to America. Bush was an idiot for thinking that liberal democracy could be given to a country externally. In order for it to happen, individuals from Muslim countries must be brave enough to demand it, and the only ways they can truly understand what liberty feels like is to experience it firsthand. Sure, some of them might become sickened by what they see when they come here, but nowadays that seems to be more of a default position.
I don't know could anyone have done a better job running post-Soviet Russia, i m completely ignorant about politics and generally not clever, i only can tell what memories evokes the rule of Yeltsin. For me it is extreme poverty, empty shops and seing no light in the end of tonnel, my mother says she didn't remember such dark age in her life as in first part of 90s, and she is not a communist at all, she says at soviet time there was no mass crime and vandalism on streets, good health care, all people had stable salaries, and were sure that in future they will get pensions, with the ruin of USSR all that ruined too, almost all state institutions closed or started to pay such salaries on which person could buy only 2 pieces of bread and a pack of milk per month, professors had to become sellers of rags at markets after classes,my mother, a first-class engineer lost her job and had to wash floor somewhere, and to be a nurse of other people's children to feed me and my brother. At the age over 40 she had to study new professions, law and business, she studied exellently, but still a person with a 'soviet psychology', as some say can't become a succesfull businessman, especially being a lonely mother with two children, and also considering terrible criminal situation in early 90s.
What else i remember -cheap blocks of foreign soup Maggi and Knorr for dinner, -buffoonery with 'vouchers'-each citizen was presented a paper which meant to be his part of common property for which he and generations of his ancestors worked hard all their lifes, time showed that it would be more good of that vouchers if people used it as toilet paper. -different kinds of mad sorcerers, magicians and false psychiatrists shown on TV, fooling people (such as Kashpirovsky and Chumak) - huge meetings of protestors at the White House in 1993 when Yeltsin sent tanks at parliament (White House was a house of parliament back then), there were a lot of communists and a river of beautiful red banners, i thought that they were good people and that they were right defending the white house, my heart was with them, and i even helped to build barricades and collected leaflets condemning Yeltsin (for a long memory, and because i agreed with what it was written),i remeber one very ancient grandmother boiling water for tea on fire and preparing dinner on cubes near 'humped bridge', it was a peaceful sunset and everything looked so cosy, the white house was white, not black as some days later, and she said to us 'Look kids, history is made before your eyes'. But for kids it was more like a game, as we didn't understood much then and i still don't understand who was right and who was wrong then. My apolitical mother was very upset by my enthusiasm and wouldn't allow me to go there but she couldn't control me and my brother because our school was very close to the White House,and we were hanging around there after classes, we heard constant shooting of kalashnikovs, not scared at all, later we saw ambulances taking bodies, some people were hiding in nearby church from fire (there are still left traces of bullets on it, i think they do no repair on purpose), in our school canteen glass was also broken with bullets, and next week we learned that one girl from senior class was killed walking near metro, and another girl, my classmate, got a bullet in her leg at her home, just sitting at kitchen by the window.
In the second part of 90s i had neither good nor bad feelings about Yeltsin, politics was not among our family interests, we never discusssed it and watched the news mostly because of weather forecasts. The last bright memory about Yeltsin - 31 december 1999- he appeared on tv with a usual presiden't speevh, several minutes before the New Year, when the whole country had champaigne in glasses he said:'Dear friends, i'm tired, I AM GOING AWAY!' It was simply shocking, i suppose all russians were astonished. New Year Eve is the main holiday of the year here, a very special day, and that speech sounded like an insane joke. but it was truth, and very much in Yeltsin's style. I felt that i will miss him, like i would miss an eccntric grandfather and it seems many people had similar feelings. No matter was he good or bad, he had very russian character and it was very difficult to imagine who would be next and would he be better.
Thanks for your informative comments, Masha.
I think that despite his great and many flaws, he was a very brave leader and all in all was a positive figure in the world. A real force of nature who despite hating the Soviet system he dismantled, his own mentality was limited by the Soviet system in which he lived.
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