Happy Birthday, Boris Nikolaevitch!

"No matter how you describe that period, or how you assess the actions of the Russian Federation's first president, one point is undeniable: Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin's time as the leader of Russia was when the people of our country, the citizens of Russia, gained the most important thing, the reason for all those transformations: freedom."
~Vladimir Putin

Boris Yeltsin celebrated his 75th birthday this week with a big party at the Kremlin and extensive media coverage of his presidency.

Much of my personal involvement with Russia spans the Yeltsin era, and I must admit that I got a little nostalgic when thinking about his presidency. I recall sitting on the couch watching CNN in the middle of the night as Boris Nikolaevitch stared down Soviet tanks during the August 1991 coup. I remember going back to college after one winter break and filing the paperwork to change my major from “Soviet Studies” to “Russian Studies”. I was living here when the first Chechen war broke out; seeing the horrified reactions of my neighbors with relatives in Chechnya, and then seeing the influx of refugees.

Yeltsin is a controversial figure here, blamed by all sorts of people for all sorts of evils that befell Russia during his presidency. A lot of the problems were probably no-win situations, anyway. For example, some believe that economic reform was too hasty while others believed he dragged his feet.

Certainly, though, there were many problems that arose during his presidency that were more or less unmitigated disasters. Yeltsin prevented the disintegration of Russia in to random republics, but only through the brutally prosecuted war in Chechnya. In addition, the rise of the “Oligarchs” was a direct result of the loans-for-shares program that his government initiated in what turned out to be a major blow to the states’ long-term economic viability. Simply put, Russia’s problems in the 1990’s are probably too numerous to mention.

Yeltsin’s birthday was a big media event, but it didn’t extend any further than that. And that, I suppose, is the real point of Putin’s Russia. Much of the chaos of the 1990’s has been left behind, and the Russians seem to prefer it that way. Of course, there are still problems in society, but on the whole, the country is far more orderly than it has been in a long time.

And that, it seems to me, is what is exactly at the heart of the current problems between East and West. When Freedom House changed its opinion on Russia from “Mostly Free” to “Not Free”, they benchmarked “Freedom” as what it was like here in the 1990’s. And while I certainly don’t want to be an apologist for Kremlin backsliding on basic rights, I know the typical Russian’s response to all those criticisms:

“If the 1990s represented ‘freedom’”, they say, “then we don’t want it.”

But if Yeltsin’s legacy is still uncertain, if his chapter has yet to be written, there may be one paragraph near the end that ensures him his place in the long, varied history of this country.

When he resigned in 1999, Boris Yeltsin became the first Russian leader ever to voluntarily leave power.