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Angry Russians lash out at Yeltsin

Even traditional respect for the dead could not temper Russians' deep-seated anger towards Boris Yeltsin as they reacted to news their former president had died of heart failure.

On the streets of Moscow, residents railed against the many perceived failures of Russia's first post-Soviet president, from the break-up of the USSR and the war in Chechnya to the sell-off of state assets to a handful of oligarchs.

Walking arm-in-arm with his wife, a retired doctor reflected the bitterness that many older Russians still feel at Mr Yeltsin's role in bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

"I trusted him and he sold out our country," he said.

"My father spent 50 years in the (Communist) party and thought that what he did was for the good of the people. In the end, everything he did was for a handful of embezzlers."

Looking aghast, the doctor's wife pulled on his arm.

"Why say such things about a dead person? You must not," she chastised, reflecting an especially strong tradition in Russia of not speaking ill of the dead.

But a passerby, overhearing the conversation, also showed no restraint.

"Yeltsin is dead?" he shouted. "He was a traitor, a traitor! He sold Russia to the lowest bidder."
Chechnya failure

For some, Mr Yeltsin's greatest failure was ordering troops into Chechnya in 1994 to suppress a separatist movement in the southern Russian region.

Tens of thousands of civilians and thousands of Russian soldiers died during the 1994-1996 Chechen war, which resulted in an embarrassing defeat for the Russian military.

Russian troops recaptured Chechnya in 1999 but violence continues to plague the region.

"I had no respect for him because I served in the army in the conflict zone and I saw everything," Gennady Alembayev said, a 44-year-old veteran.

"We could have easily put a stop to the war in Chechnya and made reforms, but the top ranks of the army and the politicians were making money with this war," he claimed.
Assets sell-off

Others were especially critical of Mr Yeltsin's part in the privatisation of state assets after the Soviet collapse - a process that left a handful very rich while millions slid deeper into dire poverty.

"I have fairly negative feelings towards him because despite all the negative aspects of the USSR, what he did, particularly the privatisations, he did illegally, even criminally," said 20-year-old Dmitry Ulianov, a philosophy student at the prestigious Moscow State University.

Stuck in one of Moscow's infamous traffic jams, Timur, a 24-year-old analyst with an investment fund, said he had mixed feelings about Mr Yeltsin.

While the former president was closely linked with Russia's democratic transformation in the early 1990s, his subsequent handling of state assets was wrong, Timur said.

"What he did in terms of privatisations - I'm not saying it didn't have to be done, but the way it was done was unacceptable."
Celebration

Some even rejoiced in Mr Yeltsin's death, including about a dozen young members of the Eurasian Union, a marginal nationalist group, who held an impromptu street celebration outside Moscow's famed Bolshoi Theatre.

"I think all of Russia is celebrating in silence," one of them said, 29-year-old Pavel Zarifulin.

"[Yeltsin] destroyed the country - only [Mikhail] Gorbachev did worse."

Not everyone was so unforgiving, but even those who praised Yeltsin did so with caveats.

"Boris Yeltsin showed us that we could live differently, freely, and that we must depend on ourselves, but he was isolated by those around him," Piotr Loznitsa said, a craftsman.

"He never understood his main mistakes: the war in Chechnya, the poverty of the people and Russia's geopolitical losses," as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr Loznitsa said.

Original article posted here.