Quotes About Yeltsin

After President Boris Yeltsin was elected in 1996, I opened a PR firm there to help American companies entering the new market work with the Kremlin and parliament.

I am a Soviet man, and Yeltsin is a Soviet man - maybe our grandchildren will be different.

President Yeltsin's instincts were decent: he encouraged the marketplace, the press flourished, and everything started to open - even the KGB archives. Yeltsin reburied Nicholas II. Free from Soviet anti-semitism, he surrounded himself with Jewish capitalists and advisers who returned to public life for the first time since the 1920s.

Critical to the credence given in the West to official Russian explanations was an inability to accept the idea that the Yeltsin regime would murder hundreds of its own citizens and terrify the nation to hold on to power. This refusal to believe the unbelievable, however, came at a cost. It crippled Western policy toward Russia, rendering it naïve and ineffectual. From the moment Putin took power, the West maintained an image of Russia that bore no relation to reality.

After the devastation wrought by the Yeltsin era, almost any new leader was likely to be perceived as a potential savior. Russians saw in Putin what they wanted him to be, rather than what he was. He also took power at a moment when the Russian economy started to expand.

I was too busy looking into Yeltsin's eyes to notice what was under the table.

I think Putin's popularity was genuine when he first came to power. He was seen as a welcome relief from the Yeltsin era.

One could see that what you are writing was that today's meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster. Now, for the first time, I can tell you that you are a disaster.

I knew President Yeltsin well. He would never have tolerated government officials demonstratively showing off the millions they acquired through corruption, the way it's done today.

We've worked with President Yeltsin. He is the President of the country. He's been a reformer. We've been able to accomplish a number of things together.

And what did Boris Yeltsin himself know about his soon-to-be-anointed successor? He knew this was one of the few men who had remained loyal to him.

Yeltsin also knew, or thought he knew, that Putin would not allow the prosecution or persecution of Yeltsin himself once he retired. And if Yeltsin still possessed even a fraction of his once outstanding feel for politics, he knew that Russians would like this man they would be inheriting, and who would be inheriting them.

On August 9, 1999, Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin prime minister of Russia. A week later he was confirmed in that position by a wide majority of the Duma: he proved just as likable, or at least unobjectionable, as Yeltsin had intuited.

In December 1994, Yeltsin did what so many desperate leaders have done throughout history to hold on to power: he started a war. His national security chief, Oleg Lobov, had confided to a legislator, "We need a small, victorious war to raise the president's ratings," and the defense minister predicted that his army could defeat the forces in the breakaway republic of Chechnya in a matter of hours—a cakewalk. 59

No one can take away the experience of Yeltsin's freedoms, but Russian democracy will never follow Western models: other authoritarian 'controlled democracies' - Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico - ultimately developed into democracies. But it took decades.

Gorbachev gave us freedom of worship and freedom of speech and freedom to see what was going on and freedom to vote, but that freedom won't last unless it is underpinned by economic freedom.

Most famously, Yeltsin made a pact with the oligarchs before the 1996 presidential election. Communist

Yeltsin was admirable but flawed, noble but tainted, but in his own negligent grandeur, he undermined his own real achievements - and accelerated their ruin.

To find his successor, Yeltsin's entourage organized a public opinion poll about favorite heroes in popular entertainment. The winner was Max Stierlitz, the hero of a series of Soviet novels that were adapted into a number of films, most famously the television serial Seventeen Moments of Spring in 1973.

The Yeltsin years considerably lowered the bar [of public expectations] for the country's next leader: Putin's specific policies and actions arguably matter far less than his reassuring symbolic function as "a real man" who can husband the nation's resources and promise a return to greatness. (2007: 227)

How could we know that the Russian military kept testing and developing new systems? With Yeltsin in charge, the military didn't seem to matter very much.

Four months later, Yeltsin met with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine to sign the Belovezhskaya Accord, which peacefully dissolved the Soviet Union.

With Yeltsin, the Soviet Union broke apart, the country was totally mismanaged, the constitution was not respected by the regions of Russia. The army, education and health systems collapsed. People in the West quietly applauded, dancing with and around Yeltsin. I conclude therefore that we should not pay too much attention to what the West is saying.

Nixon urged Clinton to maintain his relationship with Yeltsin but make contact with other democrats in Russia. He warned Clinton away from some ultranationalists and toward those interested in liberty and reform. He pressed Clinton to replace his ambassador in Kiev and concentrate future U.S. economic aid on Ukraine, where it would matter most.