When I learned of Boris Yeltsin’s death, I immediately recalled the old rule: say good things or nothing about the dead. Russia’s first president clearly deserved silence. But it was difficult to keep silent. The telephone rang constantly as journalists called asking for comments. They had a hard day, as one after another they interviewed experts who took shelter in general and evasive answers. A local journalist would understand their motives, though. It was more difficult to deal with foreigners who could not understand why interviewees were at a loss for appropriate words. Besides, liberal canons required experts to pronounce a ritual phrase, “Yeltsin brought us freedom and democracy,” or something else in this vein. Naturally, several commentators from the Union of Right Forces did say these words, but most others could not. Journalists kept asking suggestive questions: “Wasn’t Yeltsin's rule associated with freedom?” or “Didn’t Yeltsin give the country pluralism, elections, and freedom of the press?” No, Yeltsin was not the one. He has no relation whatsoever to any democratic change in the country. It was Mikhail Gorbachev who accomplished all the reforms. Yeltsin just took advantage of new democratic conditions to unseat his former boss. The Soviet Union collapsed as collateral damage – 80 percent of its residents opposed the dissolution at a referendum, and residents of 12 of the 15 component republics, except for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, wanted to keep living in the Soviet Union. Democratic freedom reached its peak in the spring of 1991, during the last months of Gorbachev’s rule. From that point, Yeltsin rolled back human rights and democratic freedoms. When he seized power and disbanded the Soviet Union government agencies in 1991 by exploiting the hard-liners’ attempt to topple Gorbachev, the international community hailed it as “a victory over communism,” although it was an act as illegal as anything the coup plotters did. On the other hand, the newly elected Russian president was very popular at the time. Popularity gave him the moral right to act outside his formal authority in the emergency. But he kept using the same questionable methods to disband the Soviet Union by signing the illegal Belavezha Accords in 1991 and to order an armored assault on the Russian parliament in the fall of 1993, the parliament he had claimed to defend two years earlier. As support for the president waned, he tightened his grip on power. Ordering tanks to shell the parliament building; attempting to introduce censorship, which met with stern resistance from the media; and adopting an undemocratic constitution that gave the president a wide range of arbitrary powers and reduced the parliament and the Constitutional Court to ornaments were logical steps in the policy that emerged in August 1991 and continues. Compared to Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin may be to blame only for being more consistent and persistent in his effort to eliminate what is left of Gorbachev-era democratic changes. Watchdogs that don't bark Before 1995, the media did not represent a big problem for the Russian authorities because loyal heads installed in all outlets, including “independent” television stations, provided coverage in line with the president’s expectations without external pressure. In spring 1993, the Russian media lambasted the parliament, which opposed the president's moves to consolidate power and push ahead with unpopular liberal reforms. The media supported the government’s privatization program and mounted a smear campaign against its opponents. The media absolutely freely, without compulsion, rejected allegations of government corruption that worried the entire nation. But neither Yeltsin nor the media owners had expected the punitive operation that he ordered in Chechnya in late winter 1994 to lead to a bloody quagmire that alienated the president’s liberal supporters, even those who had defended the previous year's shelling of the parliament building that left hundreds dead and injured. Unexpectedly, the propaganda machine went out of control and turned its guns on the authorities, claiming it could tell the good from the bad in the country. But Yeltsin prevailed, as in all his other battles. He quelled the media revolt by the spring of 1996, when the presidential election loomed. A shrewd master of bluff, Yeltsin presented the Russian elite with a choice: to back him and engineer his "democratic" reelection or go through another coup or a possible civil war. Defeat was out of the question, especially considering that his main rival was Gennady Zyuganov, the artificially created but frightening leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. One could write a book about how the Yeltsin apparatus created Zyuganov and cleared the way for him, suppressing his left-wing and nationalist rivals. But that is another story. The media switched from criticism to complete loyalty and the media-owning oligarchs pledged allegiance to the president. They really had no choice, because Yeltsin's fall would have brought the threat of redistribution of wealth, something that happened in 2003. A new wave of propaganda swept the nation during the 1996 election. Television programs at the time were like the Two Minutes Hate foreseen in George Orwell's 1984. To older people the campaign was reminiscent of the propaganda hysteria of 1937 and 1938, but those who had not lived under Joseph Stalin were totally confused. Such overt and aggressive propaganda had not been practiced under Leonid Brezhnev. Genetic memory told older people that hysterical propaganda usually ends in mass arrests and reprisals. Experts patiently and kindly explained that arrests would follow if the nation voted for the wrong candidate. Surprisingly, Yeltsin received support from pensioners and older people who had severely criticized his policies before. But it was not people voting, it was fear. The propaganda drive perfectly did its job of influencing voters at the level of instinct. "You should lock your conscience in a safe before these elections," an editor of the pro-government newspaper Izvestiya said then. But the key to the safe was later lost, the journalist Akram Murtazayev commented a few months afterward. Not surprisingly, many Russians despised the media in the early 2000s. Early in his first term, Putin easily crushed the second media revolt with the public's overwhelming approval. The press and television were so corrupted and contaminated during the Yeltsin era that freedom of the press made no sense and Russians seemed content to do without it. Time's up A new era began after the 1998 financial crisis. Yeltsin resigned not because he was feeble and out of touch, and not because the constitution required him to do so – he had ignored the constitution on many previous occasions – but because conditions and Russian capitalism changed dramatically. Yeltsin's economic policies were a great success. Not that people were better off (millions of Russians plunged into poverty), but the reform objectives were achieved. Soviet ministries were replaced with large private corporations, the oligarchs were no longer a gang of plunderers but the respectable bourgeoisie, and business needed predictability and stability. Prone to gambles and erratic as he was, Yeltsin realized that it was time to step aside in favor of Putin, an obscure bureaucrat who became the face of a new epoch, just as Yeltsin personified his era. One may admire or revile Yeltsin, but he was a genius in politics. He relied on his instincts like an animal, not on analysis of situations. Yeltsin fits perfectly Aristotle's definition of man as a political animal. Unlike instinct, reason and analysis can lead to wrong decisions. An accurate political instinct told Yeltsin, who desperately clung to power, that it was time to step down. His era was ugly but it was not boring. He was hated, but also admired at times. His weaknesses – irresponsibility, sloth, and alcoholism – were in public view and could not but inspire sympathy since half of his countrymen were like him. He was truly a popular president in that he embodied the shortcomings of the people. And Russians appreciated it: they fell in love, which changed later to intimate and deeply personal hate. The popularity of Putin, a man without charisma, charm, or expressiveness, was guaranteed because he was the antidote to Yeltsin, a man two-thirds of the population considered their personal enemy. Only a man like Yeltsin could hold the country together through the wrenching transition to capitalism that struck fear into two-thirds of Russians. People followed him because they initially did not understand where they were headed, later trusted him, and in the end did not know the way out of the chaos. But he continued to lead the nation in his flamboyant and charming way without listening to the groans behind him. If he had turned round even once and listened to the desperate voices, it would have been the end of him. But he never looked back. I met Yeltsin twice. First at a 1989 rally in Luzhniki by supporters of the Congress of People's Deputies, on which they pinned their hopes for democratic change. Yeltsin's blunt speech was enthusiastically received by the crowd, which I (time to come clean) warmed up as presenter. Yeltsin, a member of the Congress, showed up as a popular hero, tall, upright, and loud of voice. When police tried to arrest someone close to the speaker's platform, he jumped over the steel fence and put his hand on the victim's shoulder, shouting, "This man is under my protection as a deputy." The crowd roared in delight. I ran into him a few months later when I had become sick of speaking at "democracy rallies." Looking for a familiar face I wandered into a hallway of the Moskva Hotel, not far from where a new manifestation of the people's love for democracy was in progress. A group of people led by Boris Yeltsin headed for the exit. They closed ranks and marched heavily past, staring blankly like rhinos capable of trampling anyone who gets in their way. The hall was narrow. I pressed myself against the wall. The rhinos thundered past. I didn't have the slightest desire to meet them again. Translated by Aleksandr Yanussik. Copyright © 2007 Transitions Online