Obituaries: Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin: 1931 - 2007 by Richard O'Connell

Boris Nikolayevitch Yeltsin is dead. His death in Moscow at 76, was announced today.

Boris Yeltsin was born in Butka, a village in the Urals, the son of a construction worker. At age eleven he lost two fingers of his left hand while disassembling a hand grenade stolen from a warehouse. He could have lost his eyesight, or his life. He was a bright student, became an engineer, and had a career in construction. At thirty he joined the Communist Party, during the de-Stalinization era of Nikita Khrushchev. He quickly rose through the ranks.

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In 1977, while a party leader in the Sverdlovsk region in the Urals, he ordered the destruction of the infamous Ipatiev house in which the Imperial Family had been imprisoned and murdered almost sixty years earlier. There is something almost mystical about his destroying the hideous house in Ekaterinburg. Had the house survived the Soviet Union it would have become a place of holy pilgrimage for millions of Russian Orthodox Christians. Now this place is the site of the Cathedral on the Blood, and the Tsar, the Tsaritsa, the Grand Duchesses, and the heir to the throne have been canonized as martyrs.

Mr. Yeltsin's father had been convicted of anti-Soviet activities when Boris was three years old. He served three years of hard labor, then was unemployed for several years before resuming work in construction.

During the era of Perestroika and Glasnost, Mickhail Gorbachev brought Mr. Yeltsin to the center of the new reforms. Mr. Gorbachev, a trained lawyer and dedicated communist, worked for an orderly evolution. Mr. Yeltsin saw that opportunities for anti-Soviet activities stretched to the horizon. He brought down the Soviet Union the way he demolished the Ipatiev house.

His legacy is mixed. The old empire is gone, but the Russian economy has failed, health care for citizens of the former Soviet Union is almost non-existent, life expectancy has shortened. The old oligarchs have been replaced by organized criminals. His chosen successor is Vladimir Putin, into whose eyes George W. Bush looked and saw his soul. I think he saw a mirror.

I think things will look up. President Clinton said, some years ago, that "no one deserves a larger share of the credit for this transformation than Yeltsin himself. For all his difficulties, he has been brave, visionary, and forthright and he has earned the right to be called the Father of Russian Democracy." As we know, democracy is the most difficult and complex of governments.

©Copyright 2007 by AlternativeApproaches.com