Translated material
Monument to the President
A year ago, Boris Yeltsin passed away
Today a monument to the first president of Russia is to be unveiled at the Novodevichy cemetery. Exactly a year has passed since his death . It's been a year already. Only a year. Almost a whole decade has passed since his departure from politics altogether. But the main monument to the president of a country, especially the first, can only be the country itself.In fact, you and I walk past the monuments to Boris Yeltsin every day and don’t even think about it. These are exchangers where you can freely buy or sell your own and foreign currencies. But before Yeltsin it was impossible. These are stores that now always have a wide variety of goods. But before Yeltsin there was none. These are private enterprises where millions of Russians work (and earn money). This is the entire current political elite of the country, including President Putin, beloved by the people, and his successor.
The public and sometimes almost boorish attack on the Yeltsin years in the 90s, fashionable today in power, is not just a cheap ideological trick and not just a banal attempt to turn the arrows of millions of unsettled ordinary people into the past, with which it is always easier to settle scores. This is also another great oblivion by Russia of its history for the sake of momentary political conjuncture. After all, you will agree, it is absurd and hypocritical to vilify the 90s and at the same time arrange such a pompous, but also humane funeral for the person who personified this era.
Vladimir Putin did not end up with a collapsed, impoverished country, as some political strategists lured by the authorities now like to imagine. It was a country that was saved, survived and began development again not even from scratch, but from negative values. A country pulled out of the abyss by a terrible effort of will and in terrible historical circumstances.
Boris Yeltsin accomplished three main feats of which the ruler of a historically totalitarian country is capable: he spent his rating, which at first was almost no different from Putin’s, on unpopular but necessary reforms; he did not destroy a single political opponent, including those who rebelled against the presidency in October 1993; and finally, he publicly repented to the country for his mistakes as head of state. A high rating is nothing if the country turns into a swamp. The absence of opposition, the forcible displacement of dissidents from the legal political space is not a sign of the authorities' confidence in their abilities. Reluctance to admit responsibility and guilt for anything, complete confidence in one’s own sinlessness is not evidence of strength, it is evidence of moral weakness.
Boris Yeltsin gave the country of Russia, gigantic in its ambitions, extent, and suffering, a corresponding scale of personality in power. A great man, even purely externally, but also internally, overwhelmed by passions and contradictions, ruled a large country at another turning point in its history. And he did not allow this large country to break under the weight of the monstrous sins of the Soviet kingdom, which not only exterminated millions of innocent people, but brought the state itself to the brink of non-existence.
Now we can calmly try to plan life until 2020 on a national scale, but at the end of 1991 it was not clear whether there would be bread in the country at the beginning of 1992. Now we can call ourselves “sovereign democracy,” but at the beginning of Boris Yeltsin’s reign, the very subject of this sovereignty and this democracy was not even very clear, tangible and perceptible.
The monument to President Yeltsin is about people who do not betray ideals for the sake of interests. This is every free citizen of Russia who understands that freedom is within a person and there is no point in waiting for it to be granted from the outside by the state. This is a generation of people who do not know what reprisals for speaking their word are. The monument to President Yeltsin is Russia itself, which, with difficulty, through painful mistakes, and sometimes, alas, even blood, has preserved its territory and is trying to make it more suitable for ordinary normal human life.
Most Russians are not yet able to adequately assess the scale and role of Boris Yeltsin not only in the history of the country, but also in the history of their own destinies. One year of physical death and a little over eight years of political death is too short a distance. It is not a fact that this deformation of the people's consciousness will be corrected over time. But the monument to Boris Yeltsin will still remain. And this monument will not be a cemetery monument made of bronze, but the living life that he breathed into an inanimate country.