OPINION

Let’s Hear It for the Birthday Boy

By Vladimir Gryaznevich

I wanted to avoid the subject of Boris Yeltsin’s birthday, believing that the topic was largely understood and there was little more to be said. The results of a poll on attitudes to the former president carried out by the Yuri Levada Center, however, demonstrated the vast extent of my naivety.

Only 9 percent of those questioned by the Levada Center were positive in their take on Russia’s first president. Negative attitudes were held by 55 percent, while 70 percent believe that Yeltsin did more harm than good for Russia. Only 13 percent believe the opposite to be true.

Typically, Yeltsin is accused of impoverishing the majority of the population, ripping off the entire nation with his privatization program, destroying the USSR, destroying the economy (industry in particular), frittering the country’s status as a superpower away, and turning Russia into a Third World state. My response is to wonder how the majority of the Russian population can be so mistaken — in reality, they’ve earned the life that they have.

Let’s take a look around us. The United States is forever being plagued by tornadoes and hurricanes. In Europe, it’s either torrential floods and blazing fires or record-breaking frosts. The U.S. and Europe have little in the way of natural resources. Nevertheless, their populations live, in my opinion, well. Over here, we don’t have American hurricanes or European fires and floods, but we have vast amounts of oil and gas. It’s clear then, that the lives that we live here are the result of our conscious choices.

Neither Yeltsin, Gorbachev, the Soviet authorities nor even President Vladimir Putin can seriously influence those choices. All of them, the leaders of our state, constitute one of the social institutes called upon to organize our lives. We ourselves make all the choices that affect and influence our lives — what sort of state we have, how it’s organized, who heads it, and what policies it pursues.

Thus, President Putin himself admitted that he was giving away $5 billion in gas every year to Ukraine. Unlike Yeltsin, Putin boasts a 70 percent popularity rating, so we can assume that this must have been what the Russian public wanted. If we divide $5 billion by the 150 million inhabitants of Russia, we find that 70 percent voluntarily handed over 1,000 rubles ($35.40) each to Ukraine. Why give all this money away? The majority of those questioned in numerous surveys state that one of the priorities of state policy should be that our country is respected. The raising of the standard of living of Russians isn’t the key priority — we have to be respected in the international arena.

Thus, the elected president, instead of spending that money on pensions, wages and support for the population at large, annually handed it over to Ukraine in order that Russia be respected. Similarly, he’s also been generous to those that are close to him. Friendship is the key element for Putin, and that, no doubt, accounts for his enormous popularity. He has, essentially, given away $23 billion to his friends in the form of oil companies bought up by state enterprises that are run by his chums. He’s planning on passing a few coppers in the direction of his voters — $5 billion has been allocated to state employees within the framework of his national projects. The difference between those two sums speaks volumes about Putin’s priorities. Russians love the man, and that must mean that they’re happy to donate their money to his friends. So far, these donations amount to about 5,000 rubles ($177) per citizen, but it needn’t stop there.

I could go on. As far as the accusations directed at the birthday boy go, the bulk of them should be redirected towards the Russians themselves. The destruction of the USSR and the privatization program, for example, weren’t Yeltsin’s doing — the Russians forced him into it, largely through the deputies that they elected to the Russian Higher Council.

Some of the other accusations are slander, pure and simple, often based on non-existent facts. Take, for example, the impoverishment of the Russian people. In order to convince ourselves of the absurdity of this claim, it’s enough to do a before-and-after comparison of the contents of fridges and car parks and the furnishing of apartments across the country. Anyone who claims that any of those three areas were better during the Soviet era than they are now is simply lying. Even the Soviet bureaucracy was worse off than the majority of the Russian population today. And that’s without even mentioning the main achievement of the Yeltsin era — freedom.

To paraphrase the American philosopher Eric Hoffer, those that bite the hand that feeds usually lick the boots of those that beat them. The attitude of the majority of Russians to Yeltsin and Putin is a perfect example of Hoffer’s words of wisdom.

Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. His comment was first broadcast on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Friday.

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