Noted more or less in passing

Since the death of Boris Yeltsin, both the news and some lefty blogs have featured encomiums to the man who was supposed to have lead Russia to democracy. Wednesday's Christian Science Monitor, for example, quotes Bill Clinton as calling him "courageous and steadfast on the big issues: peace, freedom, and progress," which the paper called "a typically generous Western accolade."

However, the CSM reports, those who saw him at closer range were less impressed.

[I]n Russia, even many of Yeltsin's former close allies temper their eulogies with references to his "serious errors," while much of the commentary has been sharply negative. During Yeltsin's nearly nine years in power, Russia's gross domestic product slumped by over 50 percent, millions of people lost their savings in repeated financial crises, and life expectancy plunged to third-world levels.

"Yeltsin inherited the Russian state in 1991, and left it in much worse shape than he found it," says Roy Medvedev, one of Russia's foremost historians, who has known all three leaders. "His legacy was mostly unhappy, and I don't think the Russian people will remember him with much warmth."

The "three leaders" are Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and his handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin.

Which brings to mind one of my old writings, from the September 1991 issue of the print version of Lotus, commenting on the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev the preceding month.

There was a second coup in August, this one partly successful. Only it wasn’t by generals and KGB officers with bad timing, it was by a politician with good timing. His name, of course, is Boris Yeltsin.

“Coup” is the right word. Yeltsin used the crisis as an opportunity for what can only be called a naked power grab. Using first Gorbachev’s absence and then his weakened political and emotional condition when he returned, Yeltsin issued a string of edicts about the KGB, the Communist Party, military forces in Russia, recognition of the Baltics, and so on, many of which blatantly exceeded his authority. He was determined to gather as much power as he could as quickly as he could. He succeeded not only in making himself equal to Gorbachev, at times he seemed to eclipse him: During their joint press conference after Gorbachev’s return, Yeltsin deliberately humiliated him by interrupting him to sign a decree suspending the activities of the Communist Party in Russia. ...

[I]n addition to his seizure of authority he also undertook a variety of actions that frightened some of his neighbors and angered some democratic activists within his own country. Yeltsin, who seeks what he calls a “federation,” threatened to “press territorial claims” against any republic that breaks away completely, which sent shivers of fear through - and Russian Vice-president Alexander Rutskoy scurrying to - the Ukraine and Kazakhstan to calm fears about what Ukrainian officials labeled “resurgent Russian chauvinism” and Kazakhstan’s president called a “great-power, chauvinist attitude.”

Meanwhile, activists in Russia are raising complaints of illegal searches, seizures of property, intimidation of political opponents, and closings of newspapers and nonconformist institutions, raising doubts about how democratic his “democratic movement” really is.

Let it be noted for the record that I do not like Boris Yeltsin and I’m not at all sure I trust him.

(As for the economy, in that same essay, I said "the real question now is where things will go from here. Sadly and in a word, downward.")

Democracy? It was a George Bush-style democracy, one that valued institutional fealty to Dear Leader, differing only in how harshly arranged.

To Western eyes[, CSM reported,] it was the new, democratic Russia. Boris Yeltsin, the man who had wrested the country from the grip of communism two years earlier, was facing what he described as an armed "mutiny" by communist holdovers in the country's elected parliament. So when Mr. Yeltsin sent troops and tanks to disperse the Supreme Soviet legislature and arrest its leaders, Western leaders cheered his actions.

But many Russians were appalled.

"When I heard [then US President Bill] Clinton describing Yeltsin's actions as 'a triumph for democracy,' I was horrified," says Viktor Kremeniuk, deputy director of the official Institute of USA-Canada Studies in Moscow. "The president shelled parliament, killed lawmakers, and destroyed the only elected branch of government capable of challenging him. That had nothing to do with democracy."

Another memory, from a November 29, 1993 letter to a friend in the UK:

An outrageously self-serving, two-sentence comment on Boris Yeltsin’s coup, which played here as a struggle of democracy (i.e., Yeltsin) against “hard-line Communists” (i.e., the parliament) instead of as one man trying to force the dissolution of an elected legislature because it wouldn’t do what he wanted: “[Recent events have raised] doubts about just how ‘democratic’ Yeltsin’s ‘democratic movement’ really is. Let it be noted for the record that I do not like Boris Yeltsin and I’m not at all sure I trust him.” - Lotus, September 1991.

The Yeltsin era was marked by war in Chechnya, corruption, electoral abuses, major economic decline, and, in the wake of his destruction of Parliament, the imposition of a new constitution that dramatically increased the powers of the presidency, enabling Putin to become increasingly autocratic "without changing a single word," as Kremeniuk put it.

No, I did not like Boris Yeltsin. And I was right to not trust him.