One person's comment on YouTube sums it up well: "At least, when one was drinking vodka and the other one receiving blowjobs the world was going much better than now."
...the burly Siberian who was Russia's first freely elected leader in 1,000 years did more than anyone to raze the rotting communist superstructure of the former Soviet Union and build from its ruins the framework of a newly democratic and capitalist country.
Rest in peace, Boris Nikolayevich. (more pictures and video on the "flip," including one of Yeltsin dancing drunk to something called "Peanut Butter Jelly Time")
The iconic moment, Yeltsin defying a coup in 1991 by hardline Communists, standing on a tank turret and calling on the army, the police and members of the KGB to switch allegiance.
Yeltsin and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, after the coup attempt.
And man, could that boy dance!
Interesting video of Yeltsin's life.
Comments
One more point about Yeltsin. (Lowell - 4/23/2007 5:43:08 PM)
He may have been a drunk and deeply flawed in many ways, but he wasn't an authoritarian, anti-democratic, amoral, murderous KGB thug like Vladimir Putin.
Not the first democracy... (mjp - 4/23/2007 9:30:46 PM)
Actually, Yeltsin was not the first elected leader in over 1,000 years...around the twelfth century, there was a principality in Russia called Novgorod, who used an ancient model of elections...representatives from a Zemstvo were elected by a select group of people (not everyone got to vote, but hey, even today, in a lot of democracies, not everyone gets to!) It's often looked to in Russian history as the first Russian democracy.
First in 800+ years, then? (Lowell - 4/23/2007 9:36:57 PM)
n/t
Who selected the select group? (Detcord - 4/24/2007 12:18:54 AM)
It can only be considered a "democracy" if the people were the ones deciding on who the "select group" was. The latin words demos and cracy mean "people rule." This sounds more like elite council rule which makes sense if it's that old since only elders were thought to have enough wisdom for such weighty matters as a civic decision.
