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Don't Cry for Boris Yeltsin
Anne Williamson
Lew
rockwell.com
Friday May 04, 2007
Boris Yeltsin, who died on April 23, was a man of huge appetite,
and he dined well at the richest table the Lord Almighty ever set
before mankind – Mother Russia. But before taking his seat,
he shattered the centerpiece of the Soviet Union, the final manifestation
of the 400 year-old Great Russian Empire, and in an alcoholic stupor
ordered a sizable chunk of the dining table lobbed off.
The shattered crystal shards and carpentry work were necessary.
So long as there was a Soviet Union, there would be a Gorbachev.
If there were no Soviet Union, there would be no Gorbachev, which
would then allow Yeltsin, elected president of the Russian Federation
in June 1991, to take his seat at the head of the table. It is this
episode of brutal realpolitik which the West has spun into the legend
of Boris the Democrat, the Great Liberator of the Chained Republics,
which annoys the Russian people to this day.
When Yeltsin scrambled atop the tank in August 1991, it was not
the great moment of liberation so widely advertised, but rather
the conclusion of Yeltsin's own and separate political intrigue
to usurp Gorbachev. On that August day Yeltsin's plot preempted
the CPSU's Emergency Committee's coup. (The bad blood between Yeltsin
and Gorbachev was a consequence of Yeltsin's 1988 loss of his job
overseeing Moscow and his resignation from the Politburo in protest,
and the CPSU several years later.)
Like a cunning thug who'd once been fingered for trying to take
over the mob, he suddenly found himself with a second chance to
do just that. (After Aleksandr Korzhakov, Yeltsin's longtime bodyguard,
and Yeltsin had a falling out, Korzhakov reported that they were
in direct contact with the military that day and knew they would
not be attacked.)
With a gambler's eye for the main chance, Yeltsin rolled the dice
– and won. Immediately, the West claimed victory and hailed
the conquering hero, who promptly became so intoxicated four men
were needed to cope with him.
The consequences of that day proved immensely painful for Russia.
By abruptly dismantling the empire, which Stalin had re-structured
in the Soviet era to create a superstructure of economic interconnectedness
and politically- and cunningly-contrived borders that promised violence
if undone, Yeltsin opened Pandora's box. Though certainly the rightness
of imperial dissolution can not be argued (Moscow exploited the
Republics terribly, and managed them horribly,) the inevitable problems
of that dissolution were unnecessarily complicated and extended
by Yeltsin's sudden opportunism. For instance, the alumina might
be in Ukraine, but the aluminum smelters are in Siberia; and the
chemical plants in Armenia supply factories in Azerbaijan, two countries
at bloody odds over the border district of Nagorno-Kharabak. The
quickness of the unraveling created economic dislocations that bedevil
the economies of all the constituent elements of the former Soviet
Union to this day.
The Chechen tragedy, decades of violence and death now in the latest
episode of a centuries' long story, is another consequence of Yeltsin's
clumsy dissolution of the Soviet Union, and his bull-headed approach
to the ancient land's demand for independence. But the war proved
very profitable for a very few – "such a good business"
as one oligarch famously told a Russian general – and very,
very costly in blood and treasure for both the Chechens and the
Russians. As Americans are discovering, long wars with Islamic backwaters
take considerable hide. (Russians wonder why Americans would go
halfway around the world to get themselves into one.)
Yeltsin is further lionized in the West for smashing the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union, but the result was as bad as what happened
in Iraq with the destruction and outlawing of the Ba'athist Party.
The Soviet Union had a dual government, one of the nation, and another
of the Communist Party, and it was the CPSU that ruled. Once the
Communist Party was destroyed there was no way of governing the
huge country. Yeltsinism offered no apparatus to execute reforms
in an orderly and lawful manner, which of course was the beauty
of it from the West's point-of-view. Thus was the door opened wide
to criminal elements – theirs and ours.
Yeltsin rolled the dice a second time in October 1993 and won again,
when he deployed cannon to dissolve the Supreme Soviet, which was
attempting to stop the disastrous voucher privatization Anatole
Chubais and his Harvard advisers had implemented earlier that year
as a self-serving attempt to fulfill that same Supreme Soviet's
July 1991 legislation mandating privatization.
The view from inside the Russian White House in late September
and early October was not the one the West saw on CNN. The elected
parliamentarians within did not recognize the armed forces deployed
without as those of democracy. But this is how they were described
in somber tones by Western newsreaders over footage of artillery
firing point blank at the legislature.
For those within the White House, living without heat or light
or water and surviving on dwindling food supplies, denied access
to the media and therefore the opportunity to make their case, what
they saw outside was a lawless land whose legislative bulwark against
authoritarianism was being crushed by Boris Yeltsin. The opportunistic
leaders and alleged free press of the so-called "civilized
countries," the former enemies of their fallen empire, sanctioned
and even cheered such repression. In the wake of the violence and
the killing, the U.S. Congress voted $2.5 billion in aid to Russia.
Boris Yeltsin, the West's best boy.
And you wonder why the Russians don't trust, and increasingly disdain,
Americans?
The Yeltsin the Russian people saw was a great, drunken bear of
a man stumbling about, breaking the crockery, scaring the horses
and the women and children. He allowed in foreign meddlers and opened
Russia's mighty natural resource sector to direct dealings with
the West, in return for huge foreign loans which left the country's
property at risk and its income flooding into foreign real estate
and brokerage accounts.
Harvard's reckless privatization scheme based on vouchers was so
ludicrously (some say cunningly) designed that the Russian government
became the controlling shareholder of all enterprise – enterprises
that had formerly belonged to all the people undivided, not the
government. A second privatization to correct the "error"
of government control resulting from the first, not designed but
certainly unopposed by the West, amounted to an outright gifting
of company shares to the quick and the favored (who allegedly lent
money to Yeltsin's 2004 presidential campaign though more commonly
only promised such loans.) At the conclusion of the two privatizations
seven people controlled 60% of the economy.
Some of those seven, and many people associated with them, live
today in almost incomprehensible luxury in London, sheltered by
British authorities from the Kremlin who'd like to extradite them
to face charges in court. Or in Israel, whose banks (which had no
money laundering laws until 2000,) are stuffed with Russian oligarchical
cash.
Yes, there were elections and Boris played his part, they kept
the loans coming. Yes, there is a new constitution, which created
the powerful presidency the West rues today, but it kept the loans
coming back then. And yes, the media was free, so too were the arts
and the peoples' shouted opinions, but who was paying attention?
There were buildings and businesses to privatize, cash flows to
seize, diamonds, gold, silver, platinum, copper, oil and gas, aluminum
smelters, timber, ancient icons, works of art, rare animal pelts,
to purloin and sell.
In the course of Yeltsin's rule, the Russians lost their savings
in the great inflation of 1992–93 Harvard advisers engineered
by having Yeltsin free prices in a monopolistic economy, their jobs,
or well, their jobs' paychecks anyway. The population was halved
literally overnight, and the nation's boundaries pushed back to
what they had been 300 years earlier.
Russians lived through the loss of their chance at becoming owners
of a piece of their national estate and the public humiliation of
social collapse and national insolvency. The psychological burden
on the Russian people, citizens of what was for centuries a great
and powerful country, was a heavy one. Each man, each woman was
robbed and swindled several times over by street rackets, by lotteries,
by government failure and stupidity operating under the banner of
"reform." Deaths from accidents, suicides, sudden illness,
drunkenness and violence skyrocketed. More died than were born.
And then in 1998, they got to do it all again!
In the wake of the collapse that summer of the Western-designed
and IMF-funded bond market [GKOs], savings and jobs once again disappeared.
"It seems that just no matter what we try, nothing, absolutely
nothing, works," sighed one babushka, standing in line at a
besieged bank.
The looting Yeltsin permitted out of inattention, disregard, and
irresponsibility profited him comparatively little personally, until
men like Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch now living in London, took
control of the family's finances. It is not Boris, but his daughters
and their husbands and their agents who have built the family's
wealth, no doubt considerable. Boris, a top-of-the-world-ma! kind
of guy, hungered for power alone, but the very top rung.
Yet this is the most puzzling aspect of the man's life. Boris Yeltsin's
determined reach fell far short of his grasp. Contrary to the West's
myth-making rhetoric, there is no evidence the man had a larger
purpose beyond the personal attainment of power. Once in the Kremlin,
he fell into a roaring, drunken revelry from which he only emerged
in retirement.
For the people the life of Boris Yeltsin had but one grace note
and that was the selection of his successor.
Yet, the last laugh might be Yeltsin's.
Under Putin, Russia has boomed, paid her debts, accrued $356 billion
in reserves (the world's third largest), set aside some $108 billion
from the country's energy windfall, and now proposes to form a Reserve
Fund of $142 billion and a "future generations" Fund of
$24 billion more. The United States, however, has sunk deeper into
the Iraqi-Afghanistan quagmire while accruing the greatest debt
the world has ever seen, after having enticed tens of millions of
Americans through below-market interest rates to exchange the equity
in their homes for liabilities. U.S. exports are principally, in
no particular order, paper dollars, scrap metal, speculative financial
schemes, and war weaponry. (You could even add "social security"
to the comparison, a sort of unfunded and hollowed-out "dying
generations" public liability.) Contrarily, the Russian people
are not in debt up to their eyeballs, live in a country with things
to sell that can't be produced on a printing press, and is the only
one on earth that could survive the collapse of the dollar.
When history marks the leaders of the first decade of the 21st
century, the highly-destructive George W. Bush may well be put down
the loser along with the American people, and the sober-minded,
disciplined Vladimir Putin the success and today's Russians the
early beneficiaries of what could prove to be decades of growth
and increasing prosperity.
Just a thought.
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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