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I saw him once, his head was the size of a pumpkin and all shiny

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The Los Angeles Times has a very thoughtful, if lengthy obituary.

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Originally posted by Bobolink:
He was, however, the first Russian to be a democratically elected leader and the first Russian to voluntarily step down.

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Hmm, perhaps a dose of the truth will provide a better picture of this heroic democrat who humbly served his country. Pardon me for quoting it in full, but it's way shorter than the L.A. Times whitewash obituary:

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The Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 began on September 21, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin dissolved the country's legislature (Congress of People's Deputies and its Supreme Soviet), which opposed his moves to consolidate power and push forward with unpopular neoliberal reforms. Yeltsin's decree of September 21 contravened the then-functioning constitution; on October 15, after the end of the crisis, he ordered a referendum on a new constitution.

The Congress rejected the decree and voted to remove Yeltsin from presidency through impeachment. His estranged Vice President, Aleksandr Rutskoy, was sworn in in accordance with the existing constitution as Acting President. On September 28, public protests against Yeltsin's government began in earnest on the streets of Moscow where the first blood was shed. The army remained under Yeltsin's control, which determined the outcome of the crisis. The legislators found themselves barricaded inside the White House of Russia parliament building. For the next week, anti-Yeltsin protests grew, until a mass uprising erupted in the city on October 2. Russia was on the brink of civil war. At this point the security and military elites threw their support behind Yeltsin, besieged the parliament building, and through the use of tank artillery nearly destroyed the building and cleared it of the elected legislature.

By October 5, 1993, armed resistance to Yeltsin had been crushed. The ten-day conflict had seen the most deadly street fighting in Moscow since the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. According to government estimates, 187 people had been killed and 437 wounded.

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You obviously didn't read my link where the tragedy of 1993 is fully detailed.

[ 24 April 2007: Message edited by: Bobolink ]

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Originally posted by Bobolink:

You obviously didn't read my link where the tragedy of 1993 is fully detailed.

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Yes, I obviously read it. I'm not afraid of long articles. The reason I posted what I did was precisely because the L.A. Times whitewashed what Yeltsin did in 1993. They presented it as an armed uprising, which he had to squash to maintain civil order. In fact, it was a military and bloody coup by Yeltsin against the constitution and the Parliament. Here is the L.A. Times description:

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After 13 days of tense negotiation, the standoff turned violent. Thousands of parliament supporters took up arms, stormed the Moscow mayor's office and attacked the main television station. Dozens of people were killed and hundreds injured.

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Doesn't even say who killed whom!!!

[ 24 April 2007: Message edited by: unionist ]

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After 13 days of tense negotiation, the standoff turned violent. Thousands of parliament supporters took up arms, stormed the Moscow mayor's office and attacked the main television station. Dozens of people were killed and hundreds injured. The next morning, Yeltsin sent tanks and troops against the White House. Shells tore into the facade, and torrents of black smoke poured from its upper floors. By nightfall, the opposition had surrendered and its leaders were in prison. In all, 142 people lost their lives. It was the worst fighting in the Russian capital since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

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[ 24 April 2007: Message edited by: Bobolink ]

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Originally posted by Bobolink:
Once again Unionist shows his duplicity and mendacity.

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20 Sept/93 - G7 embassies advised of the suspension of Parliament

21 Sept - Yeltsin dissolves Parliament and abrogates the constitution

22 Sept - G7 message of support to Yeltsin

23 Sept - The managing director of the IMF, Michel Camdessus, states that the Russian economic reforms are "not on track". A wave of economic decrees are initiated by the Yeltsin regime.

24 Sept - Troops and riot police encircle the Parliament

25 Sept - Yeltsin's finance minister meets with the G7 finance ministers .. who just happen to be meeting. What a coincidence.

28 Sept - annual meeting of the IMF and World Bank opens in Washington, etc.

4 Oct - White House (Parliament) stormed.

5 Oct - massive purges begin of Yeltsin opponents in Moscow and the regions.

8 Oct - Frankfurt meeting of the London Club regarding the rescheduling of Russia's debt with the commercial banks

12 Oct Yeltsin arrives in Tokyo

14 Oct - price of bread TRIPLES from 100 to 300 rubles.

And so on. These actions were coordinated.

This macro-economic chronology is from The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order by Michel Chossudovsky, p. 253.

[ 24 April 2007: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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These actions were coordinated.

[ 24 April 2007: Message edited by: N.Beltov ][/QB]

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Not so publicly, we have this information, never denied to my knowledge:

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At the height of the crisis, Soviet forces in Cuba possessed 162 nuclear warheads, including at least 90 tactical warheads. The lesson, if it had not been clear before, was made so at a conference on the crisis held in Havana in 1992, when we first began to learn from former Soviet officials about their preparations for nuclear war in the event of a U.S. invasion. Near the end of that meeting, I asked Castro whether he would have recommended that Khrushchev use the weapons in the face of a U.S. invasion, and if so, how he thought the United States would respond. “We started from the assumption that if there was an invasion of Cuba, nuclear war would erupt,” Castro replied. “We were certain of that…. [We] would be forced to pay the price that we would disappear.” He continued, “Would I have been ready to use nuclear weapons? Yes, I would have agreed to the use of nuclear weapons.”

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
Chossudovsky's book is easy enough to get. In addition to his extensive footnotes/endnotes he notes his source as ...Financial Times, September and October 1993, several issues.

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imagine if the Soviet Union had been dissolved by Gorbachev/Yeltsin in the 1990s, the Army and KGB revolted against this, and the ex-USSR had turned into a super-gigantic Yugoslavia -- peppered with micro-States (and macro-Sates like Kazakhstan) holding extensive nuclear weaponry ....

Chechnya times 1,000, plus Dr Strangelove

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[ 25 April 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]

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Castro: “If Mr. McNamara or Mr. Kennedy had been in our place, and had their country been invaded, or their country was going to be occupied … I believe they would have used tactical nuclear weapons.”

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This relates to Geneva's point. A "socialist" country collapsed and nuclear weapons were not used to preserve the regime. I'm not so sanguine about the U.S.A. however; when that country collapses I fully expect the U.S. leaders to engage in open, nuclear blackmail. They've got so much practice at it already. Here's McNamara from the same link that Jeff provides:

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It is time—well past time—for the United States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool.

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Castro's willingness to allow the use of nuclear weapons against a country determined to slaughter millions of his countrymen is quite different from such a willingness that is a reflection of the day-to-day foreign policy of the United States. It's just like you, Jeff, to lump these dissimilar things together ... what with your well demonstrated and feverish antagonism to socialist Cuba.

McNamara again:

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The United States has never endorsed the policy of “no first use,” not during my seven years as Secretary or since. We have been, and remain, prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons—on the decision of one person, the President—against either a nuclear or non-nuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so. For decades, U.S. nuclear forces have been sufficiently strong to absorb a first strike and then inflict “unacceptable” damage on an opponent. This has been and (as long as we face a nuclear-armed, potential adversary) must continue to be the foundation of our nuclear deterrent.
What is shocking is that today, more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, the basic U.S. nuclear policy is unchanged. It has not adapted to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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So McNamara thinks it is shocking but ... he agrees with key aspects of the decades old policy of inflicting "unacceptable" damge on another country ... like, say, socialist Cuba.

The United States government, to this very day, considers it acceptable and normal that another small country could be wiped from the face of the earth on the say so of one person - their own President - and that millions of U.S. dead are "acceptable" losses if slaughtering millions of people is in "the interest" of the U.S. Government.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

[ 25 April 2007: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

we were spared that, but it was a fluke of history; the coup of 1991 might have succeeded

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[ 25 April 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]

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What you post only reinforces my post. He was a former Communist apparachnik. He had no idea of democratic governance.

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Partly right. He in fact was a neo-Stalinist apparatchik--a direct product of the Soviet state capitalist economic structure, first set up just after the 1917 revolution and permanently consolidated by the Stalinists in the late 1920s/early 30s rsulting in all sorts of persecution--and a spoiled puppy of the Soviet era ruling class and an IMF brown-noser to boot. Communism never had anything to do with it.

Gorbachev, for all his faults (as in also being a state capitalist apparatchik), actually spearheaded the first freely elected Russian congress in its history. Four years later, Yeltsin shut it down in order to push through the IMF austerity measures that no one wanted and clearly were not needed for anything--a Stalinist to the core.

Yet Yeltsin kept getting all this great praise as the main guy responsible for blocking the 1991 Stalinist coup that toppled Gorbachev and finalized the break-up of the Soviet Union. Yet he was the one who sided with the Soviet state capitalist elite to start selling off assets and pocketing tens of billions of dollars, leading to the horrid and oppressive gangster capitalism of today.

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No sign yet of honours from the I.M.F. or the World Bank.

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Steppenwolf Allende: Why would they honour Yeltsin?

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:
Communism never had anything to do with it.

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And neither did capitalists have anything to do with the dissolution of the USSR. Why?: because there were no capitalists, no capitalist investment banks, no Wall Street and no chamber of commerce lobbying for lower corporate taxes.

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Four years later, Yeltsin shut it down in order to push through the IMF austerity measures that no one wanted and clearly were not needed for anything--a Stalinist to the core.

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But that's like mentioning Saddam Hussein without the CIA. The Russian bureaucrats were presented by western economists with a plan to transform the economy into a free market experiment in neo-Liberal capitalism, like los Chicago boys did with Pinochet's Chile. Everything but the kitchen sink was sold off and privatized in 1970's Chile if we remember, even social welfare, and the results were similar in Russia.

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Yet he was the one who sided with the Soviet state capitalist elite to start selling off assets and pocketing tens of billions of dollars, leading to the horrid and oppressive gangster capitalism of today.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/apr2007/russ-a26.shtml

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A more clear-eyed assessment of Yeltsin’s passing was provided by Vitalii Tret’iakov, former editor-in-chief of Nezavisimaia Gazeta and current head of the weekly paper, Moskosvskiie Novosti. He writes, “for the greater part of his presidency Yeltsin slept, drank, was ill, relaxed, didn’t show his face before the people and simply did nothing.”

“Despised by the majority of citizens in the country,” continued Tret’iakov, “Yeltsin will go down in history as the first president of Russia, having corrupted (the country) to the breaking point, not by his virtues and or by his defects, but rather by his dullness, primitiveness, and unbridled power lust of a hooligan...” (Moskovskiie Novosti, 2006, No. 4-6)

Hailed as a “democrat” and a “reformer” by Western governments, the corporate media and the Russian billionaires and millionaires whose fortunes he helped spawn, Yeltsin represented, in the final analysis, the excrescence produced by the betrayals and crimes carried out by Stalinism over the course of nearly seven decades.

The greatest of these crimes, was undoubtedly the systematic repression and destruction of genuine Marxism and socialist consciousness, leaving the Soviet working class politically unprepared to confront and defeat the unprecedented economic and social catastrophe unleashed by the restoration of capitalism and the rise of the clique of ex-bureaucrats and gangster businessmen who formed the real constituency of Boris Yeltsin.

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And neither did capitalists have anything to do with the dissolution of the USSR. Why?: because there were no capitalists

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Yes there were, as I have shown that fact over and over again. The same profiteering bureaucrats and executive bosses over the state owned corporations that you condemn played fundamentally similar roles as macro-capitalists traditionally do.

How do you think they were/are capable of cutting deals with western capitalists--all throughout the Soviet era as well as during its break-up and afterwards?

They have almost absolute state-sanctioned executive authority and power of trust and attorney over corporations and capital--exactly the same conditions that create private property and always have.

It's no different than publicly traded corporations that are run by exclusive CEOs and senior corporate administrators and bureaucrats who, by law, are given the same powers of attorney and mastery as a private capitalist which they hold in trust--supposedly on behalf of shareholders.

A similar situation exists in public sector corporations, which are technically publicly owned, yet are administered by exclusive capitalistic executives and managers who, again, are sanctioned with the full power of trust over the assets, capital and business plans.

Ownership means little without the power of control. Private property is simply state sanctioned exclusive, or dictatorial, control over assets and wealth expropriated from other people. State property, unless it is democratically owned and controlled by the participants in giving it value, is simply a direct expression of private property with similar resulting conditions and relations.

I've skimmed over a few articles on what went wrong in Russia, and this is a good short essay and makes sense to me. I like it because Kotz, an American economist no less, describes what should have been done but was not from a Keynesian point of view. The Asian crisis was wreaking havoc around the world at that time, and IMF policies were doing damage to Russia's economy.

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Originally posted by Geneva:
How can Russia Recover?

A.: high oil prices and more stable government ....

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The Russians have looked at Norway's Petroleum Fund, U.S. $292 billion, and are attempting to do similar. Russia's Stabilization Fund was setup in 2004 and is expected to grow to $141 billion dollars by 2008.

They've noticed that foreign investment in oil-rich nations tends to push up the value of the currency, which then hurts other exports. So the Norwegians separate petroleum revenues from the rest of the economy by maintaining Petroleum Funds in foreign banks. A two or three percent cap on withdrawals from the fund in a given year is written into the constitution. The U.S. should think about something similar to prevent war hawks from raiding the Treasury.

Come to think of it, Alberta has the Heritage Fund, and Ottawa has the CPP-investment fund, and we've been pumping oil and gas(and massive amounts of electrical power) south for quite a few years now. I wonder what the two funds combined are worth today ?.

[ 26 April 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Hope the Russian venture results in some good things there.

The Alberta Heritage Fund has a current net worth of about $112 billion.

In BC, the previous NDP government set up the Forest Renewal BC in 1994, in an effort to do with forest revenues what Alberta was doing with oil royalties via its fund.

About the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec:
The Caisse de dépôt is a financial institution that manages funds primarily for public and private pension and insurance plans. As at December 31,2006, it held CA$143.5 billion of net assets. As one of the leading institutional fund managers in Canada, the Caisse invests in the main financial markets as well as in private equity and real estate.

[ 27 April 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]

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Originally posted by Geneva:
How can Russia Recover?

A.: high oil prices and more stable government ....

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Originally posted by Free_Radical:
It is high oil prices that are fueling Putin's anti-democratic antics, even if the government is arguably "more stable" and flush with cash.

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I think that's true, although some have wanted to say that it's been the economic reforms toward capitalism that have turned things around in Russia. It's certainly a turnaround from 1986 when the Saudi's were dumping oil on world markets, the trade embargo, and a proxy war with the west raged in Afghanistan. Today the Saudi's seem to be working with the Russians to maintain higher oil prices. Extreme ways.

Parizeau's Caisse de dépot, Ontario teacher's pension fund, and even Russia's oil stabilization fund started in 2004 are each worth more than Canada Pension Fund and Alberta's Heritage Fund combined. Something's rotten right here in Canada.

[ 27 April 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

yes, Russia since 2000 is more stable than in it was the 1990s, and Putin has become a bit of folk hero for it

you seem to be confusing "tolerant" or other value with "stable"; Russia is not broadly more tolerant than under Yeltsin, just more stable

.

[ 27 April 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]