The image of Russia in the Western media during the Yeltsin era was often one of severe economic, social, and political disorder, including widespread unemployment and poverty, massive corruption in the privatization of the economic holdings of the socialist state, and extensive corruption of government officials. Yeltsin himself was often portrayed by the press and television abroad as an enigmatic, authoritarian former senior communist leader, seriously incapacitated by alcohol and a bad heart, president over a failed reform policy. (5-6)

...

With proper recognition of the formidable obstacles Yeltsin faced and of the considerable reforms accomplished despite them, it is certainly possible to compare his achievements favorably with those of the major reformers of Russian history. One can acknowledge his pivotal role in the emancipation of the nations of the Soviet Union, the replacement of communist dictatorship by democratic constitutional rule, and the planning and substantial implementation of Russia’s shift from a failed communist to a modern market economy. His leadership and his achievement are immensely impressive when contrasted with the failure of democratic leadership following the collapse of the tsarist power and the tragic results of the communist policies that followed. (6)

...

Following the end of the Soviet Union and the founding of the new Commonwealth of Independent States, Yeltsin and his colleagues turned their attention to the challenges of political and economic reconstruction within Russia. The tasks they set for themselves—the building of democracy and a market economy—would have been daunting under the most favorable circumstances, and the Russian situation was scarcely that. With the economy near collapse and the structures of national and local administration in disarray, a sense of pending chaos prevailed. The country’s inherited constitution, with its weak executive powers and cumbersome legislative structure, was poorly suited to the demands of radical reform, and in any case the political leadership lacked a basic consensus on what those reforms should be and how to attain them. The building of a system of political parties had barely begun. Yeltsin faced much resistance to his plans for political and economic reform and widespread hostility over his role in dismantling communist power and the Soviet Union.

The eight years of Yeltsin’s presidency of the new Russia would be dominated by a sustained and powerful effort to block the implementation of the plan he and his reform team offered for achieving a transformation to democracy and a market economy. The opposition, chiefly communist and nationalist, remained powerful until near the end of his leadership, succeeding in either blocking or crippling the major reform programs. Yeltsin’s opponents even attempted a counterrevolutionary coup in 1993 and, in 1999, tried to impeach him and cancel the 1991 agreements granting independence to the republics of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin’s successes in restructuring the economy and the political system despite such relentless and powerful opposition offer compelling evidence of the same skills and courage he had displayed as a political strategist and tactician in the democratic struggle before the communist collapse. Equally impressive was his tenacious and successful pursuit of constitutional reform and his willingness to confine the protracted and perilous struggle for Russia’s democratic future to a constitutional framework providing for democratic parliamentary elections and an elective presidency. (68-69)

...

The Russian reform leader Anatoly Chubais once described Boris Yeltsin as one of the three greatest leaders of Russian history, ranking him with Peter the Great and Emperor Alexander II. Yeltsin destroyed the communist dictatorship, freed the national republics of the Soviet Union, launched a vast program to create a market economy, and then, in 1993, replaced a non-functional communist constitution with one modeled on that of a Western democracy. Three parliamentary and two presidential elections at the national level and a vast decentralization of power to elected regional and local governments followed these events. And although one cannot ignore the many shortcomings of the reform process—particularly in the economy—his success, Vladimir Putin, would have had scant hope of realizing his own program for Russia without the Yeltsin legacy. (139-40)

...

[Yeltsin’s] stunning political victory [in the parliamentary elections of 1999], soon to be followed by Putin’s victory in the presidential elections the following March, achieved a transformation of the relationship between president and parliament, opening the way for major new political initiatives. Yeltsin had succeeded in building a strong presidential power in the 1993 constitution, but the parliamentary elections of 1993 and 1995 (especially the latter) gave the communists and their parliamentary allies a veto over legislation needed in vital areas such as landownership, privatization of state-owned enterprises, banking and foreign investment, taxation, and budgetary control. Such opposition, which continued until the final days of Yeltsin’s presidency, greatly reduced the effectiveness and scope of his reforms, as well as the power and fiscal resources of the central government. (140-41)

...

The scale of the Yeltsin team’s achievement in privatizing both the urban and rural economies is impressive, and the reversal of the Communist Party’s fortunes in both the 1996 presidential and the 1999 parliamentary elections (continuing in those of 2003) offered assurance of the irreversibility of the change. But Yeltsin left much of the job unfinished, and the remaining problems of the new economic system were serious. Government revenue was still a problem, though taxes were high and often duplicative. Much of the revenue was wasted even as the serious social needs of much of the population were neglected. The parliament’s failure to pass a functional tax code was one part of the problem. Another was the persistent competition for revenue between the federal center and the regions.

Russia still had far to go in developing the basic legal and institutional structure of a market economy. One major deficiency was the lack of effective legislation providing for private property in land for urban and rural areas. Another was the continuing weakness of the financial situation, in which heavy capital flight continued, domestic investment was low, and foreign investment had been greatly discouraged following the financial collapse of 1998. Meanwhile, the lack of legislation on private property in land and of supportive legislation on mortgages was a constraint on the development of private enterprise in both the urban and rural economies. These problems, combined with the heavy burden of bureaucratic regulation and taxation, explain the large proportion of business enterprises in the “unofficial” economy and the still small proportion of officially licensed enterprises in Russia in comparison with the economies of Poland and Hungary, not to mention those of Western Europe.

Vladimir Putin’s description of his views on future economic policy suggested that he was committed to continuing the building of a market economy, that he understood the huge problems Yeltsin’s economic reformers had inherited from the Soviet period, and that he had a good sense of both the achievements of the Yeltsin years and the problems remaining to be solved. In these matters he appeared to be representative of the young reformer generation to which Yeltsin had long been committed. Also encouraging was his skillful leadership in the preparations for the December 1999 parliamentary elections, which brought the government, for the first time, a parliamentary majority with which it would be able to secure supportive legislation for its programs and undertake major new reform initiatives. (191-92)

...

The vigorous debate about proposed changes and the active political opposition, both in the regional governments and in the regional and national press, offered evidence of confident commitment to the constitutional rights and freedoms inherited from the Yeltsin years. Unfortunately it sometimes also obscured the element of illegal and corrupt activity, which was a major concern for Putin. Another impressive example of the Yeltsin legacy was the powerful Ukrainian resistance to the Putin government’s intervention in the Ukrainian presidential election in 2004. It was accompanied by the commitment of the Ukrainian democratic leadership to the national independence that Yeltsin had supported and to a domestic reform program resembling Yeltsin’s Russia and the other former Soviet republics had every reason to be deeply grateful to the main leader of one of the most ambitious, progressive, and successful political transformation in modern history. He had brought them much closer to reaching the reform goals that had been brilliantly and courageously articulated by intellectual dissidents of the post-Stalin era but only partially implemented by the reforms the Gorbachev years. Yeltsin’s words and deeds amply justify calling him “Russian liberator.” (262-63)

T’ank you,...

...t’ank you very much.