Matt Taibbi’s Boris Yeltsin obit in Rolling Stone is essential reading for anyone harboring romantic notions about the saviour of Russia. The basic theme is that Yeltsin was a drunken, vicious sot who stole Russia rather than saving it, but the treat is in the details. A sample:
[T]he Yeltsin family lived in a workers’ barracks where men, women, children and the elderly slept on top of each other like animals and fought, literally fought with fists and lead pipes, for crusts of bread, or a few feet of space upon which to sleep at night. The communist government found its leaders among the meanest and greediest of the children who survived and thrived in places like this. Boris Yeltsin was such a child. As a teenager he only knew two things; how to drink vodka and smash people in the face. At the very first opportunity he joined up with the communists who had liquidated his grandfather and persecuted his father and became a professional thief and face-smasher, rising quickly through the communist ranks to become a boss of the Sverdlovsk region, where he was again famous for two things: his heroic drinking and his keen political sense in looting and distributing the booty from Soviet highway and construction contracts. If Boris Yeltsin ever had a soul, it was not observable in his early biography. He sold out as soon as he could and was his whole life a human appendage of a rotting, corrupt state, a crook who could emerge even from the hottest bath still stinking of booze, concrete and sausage.
Read the whole thing. Follows a few of my favorite bits.
On Yeltsin’s drinking:
Like most people who lived in Russia during the 1990s — and Russia was my home throughout Yeltsin’s entire reign as Russian president — I have a wide variety of fond memories of the Motherland’s drunken, bloblike train wreck of a revolutionary leader. My favorite came in 1995, at a press conference in Moscow, when a couple of American reporters perfectly captured the essence of Yeltsin by heckling him as he stumbled into the room. As he burst through the side entrance with that taillight-red face of his, hands wobbling in front of him in tactile search of the podium, the two hacks in the back called out: “Nor-r-r-r-r-r-m!” Such a perfect moment, I almost died laughing. Boris Nikolayevich, of course, was too wasted to hear the commotion at the back of the room.
On Yeltsin’s thievery, through which he managed to cut one of the world’s largest economies nearly in half:
The word “corruption” when applied to Boris Yeltsin had both specific and general applications. Specifically he personally stole and facilitated mass thefts at the hands of others from just about every orifice of the Russian state. American journalists, when chronicling Yeltsin’s “corruption,” generally point to minor cash-bribery deals like that involving the Swiss construction company Mabetex, which was given the contract to renovate the Kremlin in exchange for cash payouts to Yeltsin (at least $1 million to a Hungarian bank, according to some reports) and no-limit credit cards in the names of his two daughters, whose bills ultimately were paid by Mabetex. (According to reports, charges on the Eurocards in the names of the two women ran to $600,000 in 1993 and 1994 alone). This is the kind of simple, Boss-Tweed/Tammany Hall corruption that Americans understand, and in the eyes of most of the Western world, for a Yeltsin to dip his beak in a few million here and there in the midst of such a violent societal transformation was not really a big deal. A guy’s gotta get paid, right?
Well, not exactly. What Americans missed during Yeltsin’s presidency — and they missed it because American reporters defiantly refused to report the truth of the matter — was that under Boris Yeltsin the Russian state itself became little more than a cash factory for gangland interests. This was corruption on the larger scale, a corruption of the essence of the state, corruption at the core. Some of the schemes hatched by Yeltsin’s government were so astonishing and audacious in scope that they almost defy description.
On the economic benefits of the wars in Chechnya:
Let’s not forget also Yeltsin’s role in starting two wars in Chechnya. Obviously there were political reasons for starting both wars, some of them possibly even legitimate, but at their roots both Chechen conflicts ended up basically being bloodbaths and cash boondoggles. Americans who follow the contracts handed out to the likes of Bechtel and Halliburton in Iraq understand the dynamic here. Only in America, the companies at least have to build something for the money they get. In the case of Chechnya it was simpler; Yeltsin could simply hand Chechen Reconstruction Funds to an “authorized bank” that would be trusted to distribute them, and the money would just disappear.
And so on. ‘rah, Matt. Had to be said.
