葉爾欽過逝了，一個改寫俄國歷史，也留下許多缺陷的政治人物。是他和戈巴契夫要在體制內改革不同，他在重要的時刻站出來，堅持實施市場自由制度，解散共產黨，把蘇聯瓦解，讓許多前蘇聯邦國獨立。然後激進式的改革，帶來的卻也是社會問題叢生，尤其是在轉型過程中，國營事業私人化，導致寡頭政治再起，經濟自由沒有秩序導致成掠奪式經濟，少數人掠奪國家資源，形成政治經濟新貴。
但是，他打破專制，輿論自由，市場機制等，都是相當重大的里程碑，只是在統治國家後，他對經濟的外行，在車臣一役採取鎮壓手段，對他的人權民主形象大為破壞。最後，他為了換取「刑事轄免」而自動請辭讓普丁上台，多少也顯示他個人人格的缺陷。一個爭議、卻也是寫歷史的人物。
A flawed hero
By Marilyn Berger
Published: April 23, 2007
Boris Yeltsin, the burly provincial politician who became a Soviet-era reformer, then the first freely elected president of Russia and a towering figure of his time when he presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Communist Party, died Monday in Moscow, the Kremlin said. He was 76.
He died suddenly of heart failure after being admitted to the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow, medical officials told Russian news agencies.
The Kremlin announcement was made without ceremony, reflecting the contradictory legacy of Yeltsin’s presidency in the view of many Russians, including his successor, Vladimir Putin, who remains president.
Putin, in a statement about four hours after the death was announced, 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.”
The Kremlin said a day of national mourning and the funeral for Yeltsin would take place Wednesday. Yeltsin is to be buried in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, the resting place of such diverse figures as Nikita Khrushchev and Anton Chekhov.
Yeltsin had suffered heart problems for years, undergoing surgery shortly after his disputed re-election as president in 1996. In office less than nine years, beginning with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and plagued by severe health problems, Yeltsin added a final chapter to his historical record on Dec. 31, 1999, when he announced his resignation and became the first Russian leader to relinquish power on his own in accordance with constitutional processes.
Yeltsin left a giant, if flawed, legacy. He was at once the country’s democratic father and a reviled figure blamed for most of the ills and hardships that followed the Soviet collapse. Mikhail Gorbachev, his last Soviet predecessor and sometime rival for power, told the Interfax news agency that Yeltsin was one ”on whose shoulders rest major events for the good of the country, and serious mistakes.”
Although Yeltsin’s commitment to reform wavered, he eliminated government censorship of the press, tolerated public criticism and steered Russia toward a free market. The rapid privatization of industry led to a form of buccaneer capitalism, and a new class of oligarchs usurped political power as they plundered the country’s resources, but Yeltsin’s actions assured that there would be no turning back to the centralized Soviet command economy that had strangled growth and reduced a country populated by talented and cultured people and rich in natural resources to a beggar among nations.
Not least, Yeltsin was instrumental in dismembering the Soviet Union and allowing its former republics to make their way as independent states.
The Yeltsin era effectively began in August 1991, when he clambered atop a tank to rally Muscovites to put down a right-wing coup against Gorbachev, a heroic moment etched in the minds of the Russian people and television viewers all over the world; it ended with his electrifying resignation speech on New Year’s Eve 1999, surprising the world.
These were Yeltsin’s finest hours, in an era marked by extraordinary political change as well as painful economic dislocation for many of his countrymen and stupendous wealth for a privileged few.
To turn around the battleship that was the Soviet Union, with its bloated military-industrial establishment, its ravaged economy, its devastated environment and its antiquated and inefficient health and social services system, would have been a Herculean task for any leader in the prime of life and the best of health. But in Russia, the job of building a new state from the ashes of the old was taken on by Yeltsin, the dedicated but imperfect reformer, a man in precarious health whose frequent mysterious disappearances from public life were attributed to heart and respiratory problems, excessive drinking and bouts of depression. These personal weaknesses left a sense of lost opportunity.
Yeltsin left with his fondest wish for the Russian people only partly fulfilled. ”I want their lives to improve before my own eyes,” he once said, remembering the hardship of growing up in a single room in a cold communal hut, ”that is the most important thing.”
In fact, in the dislocation and chaos that accompanied the transition from the centralized economy he had inherited from the old Soviet Union, most people saw their circumstances deteriorate. Inflation became rampant, the poor became poorer, profiteers grew rich, the military and many state employees went unpaid and flagrant criminality flourished. Much of Russia’s inheritance from the Soviet Union stubbornly endures.
Gorbachev had sought to preserve the Soviet Union and, with his programs of glasnost and perestroika, to give communism a more human dimension. Yeltsin, on the other hand, believed that democracy, the rule of law and the market were the answers to Russia’s problems.
During a visit to the United States in 1989 he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by the centralized, state-run economic system where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.
”I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans,” Leon Aron quoted Yeltsin as saying in the biography ”Yeltsin, a Revolutionary Life.”
An aide, Lev Sukhanov was reported to have said that it was at that moment that ”the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside his boss.
Yeltsin was, all in all, a survivor: outlasting expulsion from the Communist Party Politburo in 1987, the Communist coup attempt in 1993, the failed effort to subdue the breakaway republic of Chechnya in 1994, a new challenge from the Communists in 1996, economic collapse in 1998 and a Communist-led drive to impeach him in 1999.
He also survived frequent bouts of influenza, bronchitis and pneumonia, quintuple bypass surgery in 1996 with continuing heart problems, a bleeding ulcer, a bizarre near drowning before he ever achieved high office, uncounted missed appointments and even the spectacle of toppling over at official ceremonies.
Nevertheless, he brought about fundamental economic change: a market economy, however distorted and corrupt, an emerging younger class of business executives, and in the last years of his presidency, a gradual reduction in crime.
He failed when it came to the undramatic work of hammering out the political and economic framework needed to consolidate the new Russian state. His refusal to establish a new political party left him without a structure for his reforms. Once he spoke of the possibility of creating a ”two-party system” for Russia, but like many of his proposals, this one was half-formed.
Yeltsin’s evolution as a politician was ultimately stymied by the fierce opposition that arose to the changes he brought and by the unpopular war he began in Chechnya, which he was unable to win and was unwilling to end. His campaign to subdue the secessionists, starting in December 1994, left as many as 80,000 people dead, undermined his moral authority and threatened his hold on power.
The action exposed the breakdown of the military machine of Russia and raised concern about its stability even as it remained in possession of a huge nuclear arsenal. The killing of civilians and widespread human rights abuses tainted the image of a democratic Russia in the West.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born on Feb. 1, 1931, to a peasant family in Butko, a village in the Sverdlovsk district of the Urals.
When his father moved to Berezniki as a laborer, during what Yeltsin remembered as ”Stalin’s so-called period of industrialization,” the family was allocated a single room in a communal hut. He recalled in the first volume of his autobiography, ”Against the Grain,” that they lived in that hut for 10 years.
”Winter was worst of all,” he wrote. ”There was nowhere to hide from the cold. Since we had no warm clothes, we would huddle up to the nanny goat to keep warm. We children survived on her milk. She was also our salvation throughout the war.”
He did not join the Communist Party until 1961, when he was 30 years old. For Yeltsin, membership was a move to further his career in the Sverdlovsk construction agency, not an expression of his fervent belief in communism.
When Gorbachev became general secretary of the party in 1985, he sought out regional leaders, among them Yeltsin. But he may have gotten more than he bargained for in this populist from the east. Seeking a clean image, Yeltsin wrote in his autobiography, he turned down an offer of a government dacha that had previously been assigned to Gorbachev.
”We were shattered by the senselessness of it all,” he wrote, after he and his family were taken to see a ”cottage” of enormous fireplaces, marble paneling, parquet floors, sumptuous carpets, chandeliers, crystal and luxurious furniture. Enumerating the reception rooms and bedrooms and playrooms and television sets, the man who grew up in a wooden hut with an outhouse wrote: ”I lost count of the number of bathrooms and lavatories.”
To this he contrasted the simple tastes of his own wife, Naina, and his daughters, Lena and Tatyana, who, along with several grandchildren, survive him.
In the spring of 1990, Yeltsin was elected in a landslide to the Russian state legislature, which voted him president of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. This, however, was not enough for Yeltsin; he wanted a popular mandate and called for elections. He stunned his fellow delegates when he resigned from the Communist Party and still won the popular vote for the presidency on June 12, 1991, getting more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round.
It was two months later, in August 1991, that Yeltsin strode from his office in the Russian Republic’s headquarters to thwart a right-wing coup. From atop a T-72 tank, Yeltsin declared: ”The legally elected president of the country has been removed from power. We proclaim all decisions and decrees of this committee to be illegal.”
His ability to rally Muscovites that night suggested that a democratic spirit was taking hold in a land that had known nothing but czars and commissars. His ability to attract support from segments of the Soviet armed forces demonstrated the breakdown of centralized control. Five days later, Gorbachev effectively closed the Bolshevik era when he resigned as general secretary of the Communist Party and dissolved its Central Committee.
Under enormous pressures of economic disintegration and political disarray, Yeltsin set about almost immediately to negotiate the dismantling of the Soviet Union and its constituent republics. Yeltsin first let the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia go their own way By the end of that year, with the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine, he broke the Soviet Union apart and negotiated what became the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose confederation to serve as a successor to the Soviet Union.
In September 1993, Yeltsin dissolved the Russian legislature, declaring that the ”irreconcilable opposition” of its large number of Communist holdovers had paralyzed his reforms and his ability to govern. The Supreme Soviet, the Parliament’s day-to-day policy making arm, responded by voting overwhelmingly to depose him. Two weeks later, supporters of Parliament broke through police lines and rampaged through Moscow, taking over the main television tower in what became a street battle.
Yeltsin was in a panic. He won the reluctant backing of his top generals only after an all-night session at the Defense Ministry and called in elite troops. In a 10-hour barrage by tanks and armored personnel carriers, Yeltsin routed his rebellious opposition, leaving dozens dead. It was the worst civil strife in Moscow since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
By 1996, the threat of a Communist resurgence behind his chief rival for the presidency, Gennadi Zyuganov, energized Yeltsin. He threw himself into the campaign like a much younger man, flying all over the country, shaking thousands of hands and performing everything from peasant dances to a much-televised version of the twist.
Just before the final round of the voting, Yeltsin had what his doctors later acknowledged to be a heart attack, and he nearly disappeared from sight. But the latest setback to his health was hidden from voters by a compliant Russian media that feared what a Communist victory might mean. He revived sufficiently to win the election by a substantial majority.
When he left office at the end of 1999, he was a man worn down: ”I feel like a runner who has just completed a supermarathon of 40,000 kilometers,” he wrote in his memoir, based on a diary he kept during bouts of insomnia in his years as president. ”I gave it my all. I put my whole heart and soul into running my presidential marathon. I honestly went the distance. If I have to justify anything, here is what I will say: If you think you can do it better, just try. Run those 40,000 kilometers. Try to do it faster, better, more elegantly, or more easily. Because I did it.”
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