While I hate Yeltsin as much as the next guy, one should note that Taibbi's obit is largely built out of unsubstantiated allegations.
Also, there are no drunken peasants in the Urals. That's like talking about the dirt farmers of New England.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Yeltsin: An Obit of a Drunken, Bloblike Train Wreck
> of a
> Revolutionary Leader
> By Matt Taibbi
>
> Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was always good for a
> laugh, which is
> probably why on the occasion of his death people
> outside of Russia
> are not calling him words like scum and monster, but
> instead
> recalling him fondly, with a smile, as one would a
> retarded nephew
> who could always be counted on to pull his pants
> down at Thanksgiving
> dinner.
>
> Like most people who lived in Russia during the
> 1990s -- and Russia
> was my home throughout Yeltsin's entire reign as
> Russian president --
> I have a wide variety of fond memories of the
> Motherland's drunken,
> bloblike train wreck of a revolutionary leader. My
> favorite came in
> 1995, at a press conference in Moscow, when a couple
> of American
> reporters perfectly captured the essence of Yeltsin
> by heckling him
> as he stumbled into the room. As he burst through
> the side entrance
> with that taillight-red face of his, hands wobbling
> in front of him
> in tactile search of the podium, the two hacks in
> the back called
> out: "Nor-r-r-r-r-r-m!" Such a perfect moment, I
> almost died
> laughing. Boris Nikolayevich, of course, was too
> wasted to hear the
> commotion at the back of the room.
>
> Boris Yeltsin probably had more obituaries ready in
> the world's
> editorial cans than any chronically-ill famous
> person in history. He
> has been dying for at least twenty consecutive years
> now -- although
> he only started dying physically about ten years
> ago, he has been
> dying in a moral sense since at least the mid-'80s.
> Of course,
> spiritually speaking, he's been dead practically
> since birth. ... I
> once visited Boris Yeltsin's birthplace, in a
> village in the Talitsky
> region of the Sverdlovsk district in the Urals, a
> tiny outhouse of a
> place called Butka. I knocked on the door of the
> shack where Yeltsin
> was born and stepped in the soft ground where his
> room had once been.
> Boris Yeltsin was born in mud and raised in shit.
>
> rest: <http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/7043>
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