Investor's Business Daily, April 23rd, 2007
Freedom Fighter: The suave Mikhail Gorbachev, making a fine living today giving speeches around the world, was not Russia's great hero of the late 20th century. Its real hero was the uncouth Boris Yeltsin.
If your local Rotary has $100,000 to spare, the London Speaker Bureau will arrange to have what it describes as "Soviet statesman" Gorbachev drop by and reminisce about how his catchphrases -- glasnost and perestroika -- ended Soviet communism.
But the magical powers of his "openness" and "restructuring" campaigns were little help against the hard-line Communists who nearly succeeded in a coup against Gorby. Yeltsin, who died Monday, may never have been in much demand as a speaker, but in one of the most unforgettable images of the last century, he stood atop a tank at the Russian parliament, defying the coup plotters and their forces. And the power grab lasted but two days.
"If he hadn't done that," said Polish freedom fighter Lech Walesa on Monday, "all the processes across the world of that sort would have come to a halt and been drawn back. ... And so we bow our heads in his memory."
Again and again, Yeltsin was on the right side of history and Gorbachev on the wrong side. It was Yeltsin who fearlessly stood against seven decades of Soviet tyranny -- and won. It was Yeltsin who called for multiple political parties before his May 1990 election as chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet while Gorbachev accused him of "seeking to separate Russia from socialism."
In December 1991, when Yeltsin and leaders from the Slavic states of Ukraine and Byelorussia issued the Minsk statement declaring that the Soviet Union no longer existed, Gorbachev called it an "illegal and dangerous" coup.
It was Yeltsin who in 1990 revealed to Russians and the world the privileges of Politburo members and other Communist elites.
"Do you want a new suit?" he asked in his book "Against the Grain."
"Precisely at the appointed hour comes a discreet knock on the door of your office. In walks a tailor ... soon you have an elegant new suit."
In Moscow, he told of "whole sections of GUM (the Red Square department store) closed to the public and specially reserved for the highest of the elite, while for officials a rung or two lower on the ladder there are other special shops."
Before that, he had already joined with dissident Andrei Sakharov in calling for the dismantling of the USSR.
Russia today is far from free, and it is to Yeltsin's shame that he let former KGB operative Vladimir Putin come to power, from where he has pitted his country against the U.S. and even helped Islamofascists in Iran in their nuclear weapons ambitions.
But the flawed, hard-drinking first elected leader of the Russian people spent years fighting for their freedom, and will forever be remembered well for it.
