Why Boris Yeltsin's legacy is rosier in the West

Ahead of his funeral Wednesday, Western reflections on Russia's first post-Soviet president – and his contemporaries, Putin and Gorbachev – often contradict Russian views.

from the April 25, 2007 edition

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MOSCOW - To Western eyes, 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."

Such contradictory perceptions have been made abundantly clear following the death Monday of Yeltsin – a man who brought down the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, shaped an independent Russia, and handpicked former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, who has led the country into what many regard as a new era of autocracy. The reflections on Yeltsin's legacy that have poured in from around the world point to a collision of Western and Russian narratives over the place of all three leaders in history. And the most controversial figure is Boris Yeltsin.

"Fate gave him a tough time in which to govern, but history will be kind to him because he was courageous and steadfast on the big issues: peace, freedom, and progress," former US president Bill Clinton, who worked closely with President Yeltsin, said in a typically generous Western accolade to the man who broke the USSR, championed democratic values, and ushered the formerly isolated, state-run Russian economy into the global marketplace.

But, in 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.

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