Boris Yeltsin, Dead at 76

Yeltsin was clearly a natural born leader of immense political skill, which he courageously used to navigate the world’s largest and most repressive empire to peaceful extinction. But in the aftermath of the dissolution, he returned to the same anti-democratic faith in technocratic rule that had characterized the Bolsheviks. Post-Soviet Russia was probably bound to be an economic maelstrom, but it didn’t have to be a political disaster, and that political disaster didn’t have to turn into the crypto-authoritarian mafia state that his country has become. The New York Times summarizes my view of Yeltsin’s short epoch:

His leadership was erratic and often crude, and the democrat often ruled in the manner of a czar. He showed no reluctance to use the power of the presidency to face down his opponents, as he did in a showdown in 1993 when he ordered tanks to fire on the parliament, dominated by openly seditious Communists, and in 1994 when he embarked upon a harsh military operation to subdue the breakaway republic of Chechnya. That costly and ruinous war almost became his undoing, and it flared ferociously back to life in 1999, continuing to rage long after his resignation.

The fall of the Soviet Union provided Yeltsin with a momentous opportunity to redefine the basis of political legitimacy in a country tainted by centuries of despotic cruelty. Instead, he squandered the opportunity by indulging the fantasy of resurrecting Russia as a great power, and wound up declaring war upon the seeds of participatory democracy just as they had made their entrance – this, I’m convinced, is the real legacy of the Yeltsin presidency.

That being said, we can celebrate his achievements. There might have been a whole hemisphere of Chechnyas. There might have been a regional war for land or oil, making those Soviet nuclear stockpiles more dangerous than they'd been since 1962. Or there might not have been a Soviet dissolution at all. And by the end of the 90s, he had set the stage for establishing what Russians appear to value most: order.