Boris Yeltsin Turns 70
Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, spent his 70th birthday in the hospital on Thursday, with a parade of visitors including his successor Vladimir Putin.
Yeltsin, who was hospitalized Tuesday with a high fever and a suspected viral infection, enjoyed champagne and a cake baked by his wife Naina, protocol chief Vladimir Shevchenko said, according to the Interfax news agency.
Putin and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov presented Yeltsin with large bouquets of red roses, and Shevchenko said the former president had received a pile of telegrams from foreign leaders and Russian citizens. Doctors said that Yeltsin was suffering from a cold, RTR state television reported.
Yeltsin has been largely out of public view since his surprise resignation on Dec. 31, 1999, showing up only occasionally at Putin's side at a state ceremony and granting interviews rarely. He has been living in a country residence outside Moscow and working on his memoirs; one volume was published last year.
As his 70th birthday approached, Russian media again turned the spotlight on Yeltsin with televised retrospectives of his life and newspaper editorials about his contradictory legacy.
Yeltsin is praised for introducing the basics of democracy — freedom of speech and religion, multiparty elections, the right to private property — and the underpinnings of the free market. But he has been roundly condemned for the botched reforms of the 1990s, which enriched a few and impoverished millions, and for the widespread corruption that engulfed Russia during his tenure.
A group of former Yeltsin aides has attempted to lift the veil on some of the conflicting motivations that guided Yeltsin. Their book, The Epoch of Yeltsin: Essays on Political History, is expected to come out by early spring.
Vyacheslav Kostikov, a former Yeltsin spokesman and one of the authors, said they tried to write an "honest and objective book...which Boris Nikolayevich (Yeltsin) probably will not like."
The aides wrote that Yeltsin believed in his "mission" as Russia's first president, but lacked a clear view on where he wanted to lead the country — and ended up leading with confused and contradictory actions.
"Without being a theoretician or a profound thinker, he certainly saw his mission rather vaguely, very personally, at times even naively," the authors wrote. Excerpts of the book were published Thursday in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily.
Yeltsin was one of Russia's few public figures who experienced profound public love — and later equally profound hatred.
His successor, Putin, is admired for his youth and vigor, and public opinion polls indicate he has restored Russians' hope for an economic and political revival. But Putin lacks his predecessor's flair for dramatic, populist gestures, his forceful style and his unpolished, man-of-the-people charm.
"There was a time when Yeltsin was the embodiment of faith and whn he epitomized the hopes of millions of people," his former aides wrote.
"He was seen almost as a Moses leading his people to the promised land," the book says. "Then, after it became clear that things never improve fast, that the road is long and fraught with losses, people recalled that Moses led his people around a desert for 40 years."
By Anna Dolgov
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