Ex-Russian Leader Boris Yeltsin Dies
President Barack Obama presents rock legend Bob Dylan with a Medal of Freedom, Tuesday, May 29, 2012, during a ceremony at the White House in Washington. / AP Photo/Charles Dharapak
Boris Yeltsin, who kicked the props out from under the tottering Soviet empire but fumbled his chance to lead Russia to democratic prosperity, died Monday in relative obscurity in the nation he created from scratch. He was 76.
The head of the Russian Presidential Administration's medical center said Yeltsin died of "cardiovascular inefficiency" at 3:45 p.m. local time (7:45 a.m. EDT).
Larger than life during his tenure, Yeltsin shrank from public view following his retirement on New Year's Eve 1999, and in recent years has rarely given interviews. By the time the Kremlin announced his death in a Moscow hospital, he seemed like a figure from Russia's distant history.
Russians today prefer to recall the glory of the Soviet era, not the suffering that followed its implosion, and the initial announcements of his death on state-run and private channels were followed quickly by soap operas and fashion programs. One network, NTV, began continuous coverage in the evening, but there was little sense of a nation in mourning.
President Vladimir Putin's statement came some four hours after the death was announced. He praised Yeltsin as a man "thanks to whom a whole new epoch has started. New democratic Russia was born, a free state open to the world; a state in which power truly belongs to the people."
Yeltsin is to be buried Wednesday in Moscow's historic Novodevichy cemetery, the resting place of such diverse figures as Nikita Khrushchev and Anton Chekhov.
CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer says Yeltsin "wasn't politically correct, but he was politically astute."
After starting his career as a Communist party boss, Yeltsin left the party in 1990 and successfully re-invented himself as a democrat, reports Palmer.
Yeltsin sometimes seemed to have spent his years as Russia's first freely elected president in retreat from the reforms he so theatrically demanded as a Communist Party leader and exultant wrecker of the totalitarian regime.
He presided over the abolition of the old KGB, but then named a KGB veteran as his heir apparent.
However, what angered many Russians was how Yeltsin the crusader against Soviet corruption presided over a fire sale of state-owned industries to Kremlin insiders, which created a small cadre of Russian billionaires overnight.
Meanwhile, during his tenure many ordinary Russian citizens saw their savings wiped out, their jobs evaporate, the society their parents and grandparents had created disintegrate.
"He was one of us," said Galina Alexandrovna, a Moscow resident, recalling the heady days after the Soviet collapse. "When we elected him we all shouted, 'Hurrah for Boris Yeltsin' but then Russia started selling itself off and we the simple people didn't like what was happening."
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, eulogized Yeltsin, both a comrade and a nemesis, as one "on whose shoulders are both great deeds for the country and serious errors," according to the news agency Interfax.
Perhaps frustrated by Russia's stumbling out of the gate after the Soviet era, he increasingly concentrated power in his own hands — and finally handed it over to Putin, the former KGB colonel who rose rapidly through the Kremlin ranks.
After Putin took power, he was careful to cultivate the image of the anti-Yeltsin. The second Russian president always appears sober where Yeltsin often was not; Putin is decisive where Yeltsin waffled, firing Cabinet after Cabinet. Putin appears calculating where Yeltsin could be spontaneous, to the point of being impulsive.
Yeltsin's greatest moments, in fact, came during fitful flashes of inspiration and surges of energy.
Yeltsin cast himself as a fearless defender of Russia against tyranny in August 1991, adds Palmer, when he jumped on a tank and rallied Russians against a coup threatening then-Soviet leader Gorbachev. But within months, the Soviet state itself had fallen and Yeltsin had seized power from Gorbachev.
Ill with heart problems, and facing possible defeat by a Communist challenger in his 1996 re-election bid, Yeltsin somehow sprinted through the final weeks of the campaign. The challenge transformed the shaky convalescent into the spry, dancing candidate.
"A man must live like a great bright flame and burn as brightly as he can," Yeltsin once said. "In the end he burns out. But this is better than a mean little flame."
© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report. The head of the Russian Presidential Administration's medical center said Yeltsin died of "cardiovascular inefficiency" at 3:45 p.m. local time (7:45 a.m. EDT).
Larger than life during his tenure, Yeltsin shrank from public view following his retirement on New Year's Eve 1999, and in recent years has rarely given interviews. By the time the Kremlin announced his death in a Moscow hospital, he seemed like a figure from Russia's distant history.
Russians today prefer to recall the glory of the Soviet era, not the suffering that followed its implosion, and the initial announcements of his death on state-run and private channels were followed quickly by soap operas and fashion programs. One network, NTV, began continuous coverage in the evening, but there was little sense of a nation in mourning.
President Vladimir Putin's statement came some four hours after the death was announced. He praised Yeltsin as a man "thanks to whom a whole new epoch has started. New democratic Russia was born, a free state open to the world; a state in which power truly belongs to the people."
Yeltsin is to be buried Wednesday in Moscow's historic Novodevichy cemetery, the resting place of such diverse figures as Nikita Khrushchev and Anton Chekhov.
CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer says Yeltsin "wasn't politically correct, but he was politically astute."
After starting his career as a Communist party boss, Yeltsin left the party in 1990 and successfully re-invented himself as a democrat, reports Palmer.
Yeltsin sometimes seemed to have spent his years as Russia's first freely elected president in retreat from the reforms he so theatrically demanded as a Communist Party leader and exultant wrecker of the totalitarian regime.
He stood on top of a tank during the 1991 coup attempt by Communist hard-liners like a big game hunter celebrating his kill. But in 1993, he ordered tanks to shell upstart members of Parliament. He broke up the old Soviet Union, but then invaded Chechnya when the region joined the rush for independence.
Photo Essay: Boris Yeltsin
He presided over the abolition of the old KGB, but then named a KGB veteran as his heir apparent.
However, what angered many Russians was how Yeltsin the crusader against Soviet corruption presided over a fire sale of state-owned industries to Kremlin insiders, which created a small cadre of Russian billionaires overnight.
Meanwhile, during his tenure many ordinary Russian citizens saw their savings wiped out, their jobs evaporate, the society their parents and grandparents had created disintegrate.
"He was one of us," said Galina Alexandrovna, a Moscow resident, recalling the heady days after the Soviet collapse. "When we elected him we all shouted, 'Hurrah for Boris Yeltsin' but then Russia started selling itself off and we the simple people didn't like what was happening."
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, eulogized Yeltsin, both a comrade and a nemesis, as one "on whose shoulders are both great deeds for the country and serious errors," according to the news agency Interfax.
Perhaps frustrated by Russia's stumbling out of the gate after the Soviet era, he increasingly concentrated power in his own hands — and finally handed it over to Putin, the former KGB colonel who rose rapidly through the Kremlin ranks.
After Putin took power, he was careful to cultivate the image of the anti-Yeltsin. The second Russian president always appears sober where Yeltsin often was not; Putin is decisive where Yeltsin waffled, firing Cabinet after Cabinet. Putin appears calculating where Yeltsin could be spontaneous, to the point of being impulsive.
Yeltsin's greatest moments, in fact, came during fitful flashes of inspiration and surges of energy.
Yeltsin cast himself as a fearless defender of Russia against tyranny in August 1991, adds Palmer, when he jumped on a tank and rallied Russians against a coup threatening then-Soviet leader Gorbachev. But within months, the Soviet state itself had fallen and Yeltsin had seized power from Gorbachev.
Ill with heart problems, and facing possible defeat by a Communist challenger in his 1996 re-election bid, Yeltsin somehow sprinted through the final weeks of the campaign. The challenge transformed the shaky convalescent into the spry, dancing candidate.
"A man must live like a great bright flame and burn as brightly as he can," Yeltsin once said. "In the end he burns out. But this is better than a mean little flame."
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Gorbachev's answer to the same repressive past was to argue persuasively the dictatorship of the proeltariat is no longer relevant. Russians could not believe what they thought they heard-- the Communist Party was supposed to be humane? What about the Marxist dialectic, and impersonal forces of history? It left quite a few Soviet leaders baffled about what Gorbachev was really up to.
That made Gorbachev a marked man, and set him up for the August, 1991, coup attempt. As it turned out, however, we owe Vice-President of the Russian Federation Putin a vote of thanks. Had Yeltsin not made Putin his heir apparent, the coup might have drawn KGB endorsement of the plotters. Instead, the KGB placed its bet on one of its own, and democracy-- after a fashion-- survived a return to the Brezhnev era.
Posted by alphaa10 at 11:19 PM : Apr 23, 2007
Absolutely. Too many people in the West thought it was our job to destroy the Soviet Union, which would have led to a complete catastrophe and a bounce back right into communism or a form of malignant nationalism. Yeltsin saw what few in the West realized, that the Soviet system had to be destroyed, but gently, carefully. It had to be set down as lightly as possible, not dropped. He did that and the world owes him a thank you for it.
It was rival (and managerial) Gorbachev, ironically, whose legacy benefitted the most from popular Yeltsin. Yeltsin carried through, and brought a rush of hope for the very ideas Gorachev originally had broached in astringent "party-ese" but never was able (or dared) to put in more popular terms under the stern gaze of the Kremlin old guard and KGB.
In the end, Gorbachev was widely misunderstood by his people, and settled into semi-obscurity. But not before Russia went through the very old guard crackdown Gorbachev had feared. For days, while Gorbachev was isolated in Yalta in virtual house arrest, the world waited to see whether an attempted coup by the military would succeed.
Everything hung in the balance. But when Yeltsin rose to the rescue, Gorbachev had the satisfaction of seeing at least the core of his perestroika take new life from Yeltsin.
Posted by dallison7 at 04:15 PM : Apr 23, 2007
Hey dallison7, and here I thought he died like 10 yrs ago while in office. I thought they were just keeping him hooked-up on life-support systems for public appearances.
On the streets of Moscow, residents railed against the many perceived failures of Russia's first post-Soviet president, from the break-up of the USSR and the war in Chechnya to the sell-off of state assets to a handful of oligarchs.
Walking arm-in-arm with his wife, a retired doctor reflected the bitterness that many older Russians still feel at Mr Yeltsin's role in bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
"I trusted him and he sold out our country," he said.
abc.net.au
Posted by hypnotoad72 at 06:25 PM : Apr 23, 2007
Nope, he just happened to be the president sitting in the White House when the Soviet system collapsed under it's own weight, as it was bound to do eventually from the day it was put in place. The old Soviet Union would have fallen apart when it did if Pee Wee Herman had been president at the time. It was the Pope who helped it's fall along more then any outsider. Reagan's contribution to the fall was minuscule to the point of being unnecessary anyway.