News from the New Party

Yeltsin, the improbable hero

Boris Yeltsin was always an improbable hero, and now he is dead, the notion implicit in some of the comment on his career that somehow he could have done more to prevent Russia's descent into chaos seems rather misplaced.

As one Russian commentator stated on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, Yeltsin was better at breaking things than building things, as though the former Russian President were an overgrown toddler attacking household objects with a toy hammer.  It is worth remembering that the biggest thing Yeltsin broke was the Soviet Union.  As for what happened afterwards, it beggars belief that the main complaint of British newspaper commentators was that the economic reform that followed was too much, too fast.  To our knowledge nobody has written a manual on how to dismantle a communist superpower with next to no bloodshed (though there was enough of that later in Chechnya, admittedly).  But the man most qualified to write such a book was Boris Yeltsin.  That a former communist official, suddenly finding himself President of a country held in an economic stranglehold for over seventy years, should make some mistakes in the process of removing that stranglehold is hardly surprising.  The thought that anybody else could have done so is preposterous. 

Russia after communism was always going to be a problem, but never as much of a problem as Russia under communism.  It is understandable that the Russian people, who have suffered much, may have mixed feelings about such a remarkable but flawed man.  It is nevertheless inexcusable for the rest of us to fail to honour the momentous achievement of the man who outlawed communism in Russia.

Yeltsin was undoubtedly a hero.  May he rest in peace.