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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"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."

That disconnect between Russian and Western perceptions was present from the outset of Mr. Gorbachev's perestroika campaign to reform the USSR. Selected as Communist Party leader in 1985, Gorbachev launched sweeping measures to expand freedom of expression, release political prisoners, and slash the USSR's gargantuan military expenditures. Gorbachev's program initially seized the Soviet popular imagination, while it was greeted with skepticism in the West. Yet ultimately, even the quintessential US cold warrior Ronald Reagan, seemed convinced. Asked whether he still regarded the USSR to be an "evil empire" during a visit to Moscow in 1988, Mr Reagan replied: "No, I was talking about another time, another era."

As Gorbachev's popularity grew in the West, it waned in the USSR. As economic travails multiplied and lineups for basic products grew, the Soviet public stopped listening to Gorbachev's lengthy speeches and flocked to a new breed of radical reformers, foremost among whom was a gruff Siberian with a shock of graying hair, Boris Yeltsin.

Largely ignored in the West, Yeltsin moved from strength to strength at home, becoming Soviet Russia's first elected president in June 1991, facing down a hard-line coup attempt that August, and engineering the USSR's downfall in December.

Gorbachev not revered at home

If Gorbachev's stock remains high around the world, it has never recovered in Russia. When he ran in 1996 presidential elections, Gorbachev won less than 1 percent of the votes.

While Russians recall Gorbachev as a leader who fumbled and lost his kingdom, many say they think of Yeltsin as the "destroyer".

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