http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/world/europe/24yeltsin.html?th&emc=th
Boris N. Yeltsin, the burly provincial politician who became a Soviet-era reformer and later a towering figure of his time as the first freely elected leader of Russia....Yeltsin's reign was a clownish horror unequalled since Idi Amin went into Arabian exile. His farce was played out on a scale the likes of a Leonid Brezhnev could never imagine. He was a wrecking ball among wrecking balls, a pure trans-nat dream demon so effective in its wrongheadedness, it had to be deliberate.
As far as I can tell he was the protege of an ad hoc CIA/KGB security cartel that picked him out of the parade of political drag queens that the Gorby travesty -- picked him to be the king of topsey-turvey. The man leaped right out of a very large vodka bottle into the command chair of the world's greatest-ever national demolition job.
He imploded Russia's economy. His Harvard-engineered big bang not only ended Soviet stagnation, it blew the fucking place to rubble in a matter of 2 or 3 years. No slow step-by-step removal, just babooom! Down comes all the decaying crumbling edifice with one huge final "indignity", and after that he let the hounds loose. The conutry went straight into a bout of untrammeled, freebooting, swashbuckling, buccanneering horrors unseen among white folks since the British fleet shut down mainframe Caribbean piracy in the 18th century.
This dancing bear of a people's leader ran a whole nation the way mayors ran Chicago in the roaring 20's, and by the time the music stopped, the future of about half of Russia's households had been completely destroyed. He'd sent em back to the level of existence they'd left in 1861. Sur,e he made a few oligarchs "tycoon for a day", but by promoting one Langley-Wall Street stooge after another into the policy limelight, he managed to send Russia spiralling down so low the CIA unilaterally broke up the ad hoc cartel with the KGB, and flew home -- "mission accomplished, super power II is now a total fuckin' wreck."
And after all that -- after presiding over a wholesale poachers' slaughter and butchering of his beloved motherland -- after he'd let the bastards haul off the nation's ivory tusks to accounts in Switzerland -- the dear late departed Boris here had the gall to go out, slurring and boo-hooing and blithering his apologies for letting this pack of westernized wolverines shred the carcass of his nation's productive capacity and then piss all over its bones.
And yet, to his credit he was freely elected, not once but twice -- the second time in full Madison Ave carnival style.
Bye bye, you fuckin' drunken boob of a Wall Street stooge. They played you and rolled you like some lottery-winning rube that's wandered into a big-city cat house.
Comments (4)
The book
_Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia, Updated Edition (Paperback)_
by Stephen F. Cohen (2001) was a real eye-opener for me.
The Harvard boys did for Russia what the "Chicago Boys" did for Chile under Pinochet.
No doubt now that it was deliberate.
There's a rueful joke in Russia that goes something like this:
Russian #1: "Everything the Party told us about Socialism was a lie, but comrade that's not even the worst part!"
Russian #2: "What's the worst part, comrade?"
Russian #1: "Everything they told us about Capitalism was TRUE!"
It's kind of weird to look back at old USSR and East Bloc propoganda posters & images attacking "The West", and realize just pretty much how plain spoken truth is in those depictions. The USSR's take on socialism might not have been as good as, say, Yugoslavia's under Tito, but at least people had jobs, self-respect, food on the table, free health care.
All the things that Cold War Democrats and Republicans used to bitch about vis a vis Soviet society "pliant, toothless media that only touts the party line", "staged events only for show", "pervasive monitoring of citizens", even Gulags (Gulag Archipelago, meet your cousin "Gitmo"), all sound mighty damn familiar. We got versions of all the USSR's bad old days right now, but NONE of the good.
Once the USSR was down and out, the US National Security State apparatus turned next to utterly dismember that pesky Yugoslavia next. Again, mission accomplished.
This is not "foolishness", "mistakes", "wrongheadedness"; the military and intelligence professionals running the show behind the scenes know EXACTLY what they're doing, and do so deliberately. The mainstream Donks are fond of the "incompetence" theory of US Foreign Policy as in "mistakes were made, but..."
Don't buy it, not for a minute.
Posted by JJR | April 29, 2007 10:05 AM
Posted on April 29, 2007 10:05
Well said, JJR. That "mistakes were made" ploy and the handwringing that goes with it are tired, cynical gambits. I'd have better luck getting straight talk from a three card monte dealer.
Posted by Scruggs | April 29, 2007 11:00 AM
Posted on April 29, 2007 11:00
far be it from me to tout the state
uncle joe built
but the party lenin built
that's another story
and it was far more
the target of the security cartel
behind boris
god forbid
the first L party
actually morph effectively
like the chinese cuban and vietnamese parties have
consequently
that spanish hat dancer gorby
is the one
i save my love hate weepy rage for
boris was ...well he was
strictly "for show "
Posted by op | April 29, 2007 1:16 PM
Posted on April 29, 2007 13:16
btw
that failed coup was a phoney
the tank bit pre arranged
cooked up by the security cartel
proof
the conspirators
i bet they're all now wealthy
emigres
gorby never cleaned out the "plants "
inside the party
and they ...not the hard right cadre
pulled this charade
on behalf of the kgb cia boys
that had tapped boris as
beauty queen for the demo derby
this thwarted coup
was a reichstag fire
if i ever smelled one
Posted by op | April 29, 2007 1:23 PM
Posted on April 29, 2007 13:23