RUSSIA: Yeltsin a Pioneer in His Burial Too

By Kester Kenn Klomegah Reprint | | Print |

Kester Kenn Klomegah

MOSCOW, Apr 26 2007 (IPS) - To the many firsts associated with former Russian president Boris Yeltsin was added his burial in Moscow Wednesday.

It was the first time in more than a hundred years that Russia bade farewell to a departed leader in a church, as Patriarch of the Orthodox Church Alexy II said. Yeltsin was later buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow.

“Our Russia today lives a full life, it is going back to its original roots. For the first time in over a hundred years we are bidding farewell to the head of state in a temple,” the Patriarch said at the burial service at the Christ the Saviour Cathedral.

“The whole dramatic history of the 20th century was reflected in Boris Nikolayevich. As a strong personality, he (Yeltsin) took responsibility for the fate of Russia in a difficult period of radical changes, and he treated kindly the Russian orthodox church,” the Patriarch said.

The Soviet strongman Josef Stalin had dynamited the original church, but under Yeltsin it was rebuilt as a symbol of Russia’s revival.

“Such personalities as Yeltsin do not die, they continue to live in ideas and aspirations of peoples, in successes and achievements of the motherland,” President Vladimir Putin said at a reception after the state burial.

Yeltsin’s legacy continues directly in the shape of Putin. Yeltsin plucked Putin from obscurity and abruptly handed power to him Dec. 31, 1999.

But doubts are rising also that Putin is reversing some of the steps that Yeltsin had considered progressive. That is particularly by way of democratic reform.

“Yeltsin’s period was certainly that of tremendous economic hardship, ‘shock-therapy’ financial reforms and a flawed privatisation process,” executive director for the Moscow Helsinki Group (a group monitors human rights abuses) Tatyana Lokshina told IPS. “So, for many Russians it rhymes with chaos and loss of footing.”

But, she said it was also “the era of great democratic achievements and that of the birth of the Russian civil society. It is under Yeltsin that Russian adopted its constitution that every citizen can be righteously proud of.”

During Yeltsin’s days Russian civil society believed that despite the difficulties of the transition, Russia can eventually become a strong democracy. Unfortunately, Putin has stifled those hopes, she said.

Doubts are raised about Yeltsin’s legacy itself. Some academics acknowledge that Yeltsin dismantled the Soviet Union and guided Russians in attempts to recover from decades of communist repression and economic stagnation, but they say he made mistakes that brought widespread dissatisfaction.

They blame him particularly for the debacle of sending Russian federal troops to Chechnya, and permitting criminal oligarchs to misappropriate wealth at the expense of the development.

After his death there is an inclination to see the brighter side of Yeltsin’s legacy.

“Though my sympathy is not in his favour, I will have to concede that Boris Yeltsin was a strong and extraordinary politician for the Russian people and for his era,” Prof. Raymond Kabaka at the Belgorod State University told IPS. “He didn’t hide his intentions of destroying by any means communism which devoured the social fibre of the Soviet society.

“I would say he was very uncouth in his relationship with his political opponents. In a way his forcefulness and aggressiveness in the battle to dismantle the communist foundation might have shocked him also to the core. Maybe this is the type of leadership style the Russian society really needed, and needs, to begin practical reforms.”

Others say that Russia was not prepared for the changes suddenly imposed by Yeltsin.

“I am pretty sure that the Russian people were not and are still not prepared for democracy and social freedom,” Dmitry Bodarenko, researcher in Soviet and Russian political history at the Russian Academy of Sciences told IPS. “But the events of 1991 gave us an irreversible chance. Yeltsin was not only the one who did much for giving us this opportunity but also one of those due to whom that chance is not realised yet.”

Bodarenko added: “Yeltsin was a very contradictory figure but his ideas and aspirations for the country and its people will forever remain in our memory. I think the country will find prosperity and freedom under a successor, which will mean that the suffering was not in vain.”