THE LOW POST: Death of a Drunk

Let's not forget also Yeltsin's role in starting two wars in Chechnya. Obviously there were political reasons for starting both wars, some of them possibly even legitimate, but at their roots both Chechen conflicts ended up basically being bloodbaths and cash boondoggles. Americans who follow the contracts handed out to the likes of Bechtel and Halliburton in Iraq understand the dynamic here. Only in America, the companies at least have to build something for the money they get. In the case of Chechnya it was simpler; Yeltsin could simply hand Chechen Reconstruction Funds to an "authorized bank" that would be trusted to distribute them, and the money would just disappear.

Bank Menatep, for instance, was trusted with the task of supplying food to the military, cleaning up Chernobyl and rebuilding destroyed areas of Chechnya. According to state auditors, over $4 billion dollars disappeared in the accounts of these "authorized banks." One auditor told stories of seeing a piece of Finance Ministry paper in which 500 billion rubles of Chechen Reconstruction money was transferred to a single individual, for no apparent reason...

Meanwhile, in Chechnya, undermanned teenage Russian soldiers -- straight from being sodomized and forced to suck off drunken officers during the notorious dedovschina hazing period of basic training -- would be forced to sell socks and blankets and even rifles to the enemy to pay for the food their commanders now no longer had money to buy. And when that didn't help military morale enough to secure victory, the state would simply cut costs and drop fuel-air "vacuum bombs" on Chechen civilian areas as a way of showing "progress." Estimates of the Chechen disaster now range from 50,000 to 200,000 civilian deaths and from 10,000 to 50,000 Russian servicemen dead -- an endless cycle of military stalemate, atrocities and robbery, a situation that makes the Iraq war look like the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Finally, let's not forget perhaps the most ironic victims of Yeltsin's reign. Few today remember that the make-or-break moment for Yeltsin as a "democratic" leader came when coal miners in places like Cherepovets and Vorkuta went on strike in support of the revolution. Yeltsin rewarded those same miners by telling them to go fuck themselves when ruthless mine owners in his newly capitalist "reform Russia" turned them into slave laborers and left them unpaid for months and years on end. I visited Vorkuta in 1998 and found the same people who had protested in favor of Yeltsin's "democratic" revolt years before now living off tiny daily rations of rotten eggs and bacon fat. I was with one miner who brought home a single package of a boiled egg, a piece of sausage and a hunk of cheese given to him in lieu of salary at the mine, and solemnly divided it up with his wife and his two kids at dinner. The food came from past-due stocks of old food that the mine owners had traded for with a local store in exchange for coal.

Those same steam-boiler-bellied mine executives -- Yeltsin lookalikes -- proudly showed me a new slate pool table they had had imported from St. Petersburg that day and which they kept in the mine's newly-furnished executive lounge, where they hung out boozing all day while everybody else worked in dangerous prehistoric conditions. I visited that mine in June of 1998; 37 people had already died in mines in Vorkuta that year.

That was Boris Yeltsin's Russia. It was a place where pigs got fat and everyone else sucked eggs. Yeltsin wasn't a "reformer" any more than he was a human being. He was born in a Russia where the mean ones got the house with the mill and the wood floors and the losers worked themselves to death in pits and outhouses. He left behind exactly the same country. There will be some Russians who will mourn him today, because for all his faults, he was what the Russians call nash -- "ours." With his drunkenness, his talent for making a slobbish spectacle of himself in front of the civilized leaders of the world, his apelike inability to wear a suit, his perfect and instinctive amorality, his effortless thievery, and his casual use of lethal force, he represented a type intimately familiar to all Russians. There is a famous story in Russian history in which a Russian general who has been living in France for years after the Napoleonic wars meets a fellow countryman, who has just arrived in France from home. "Well, so what are they doing in the Motherland?" the general asks. The traveler pauses, then finally answers: "Stealing." Russia even back then was run by Yeltsins, and it will be again, even though this particular one is finally dead.

Boris Yeltsin, reformer*, 1931-2007. Sleep it off, you drunken slob.

* The headline in the print edition of The New York Times was "Boris Yeltsin, Reformer, Who Buried the U.S.S.R., Dies at 76." Look what word they took out by the afternoon.

[From Issue 1025 — May 3, 2007]

>> See what people are saying about Taibbi's latest column, add your own response and browse a full archive of The Low Post.