RAVI
I am curious: what part did he (as opposed to Yeltsin) have to play in handing over the country to IMF-style manipulators and oligarchs?
JOHN IIRC, not much. Some do criticize him for economic reforms that began to make it possible for party bosses and plant managers to undertake rogue privatizations, ones that mostly amounted to asset stripping, if I'm not mistaken. I could be wrong about this. He took heavier heat for the way he bargained away the USSR's remaining influence over its buffer states. He naively took at face value Bush's and Kohl's fake assurances that German reunification was not on the agenda, if memory serves. (That is, my memory of reading stuff about this, not my memory of the time.)
Somebody help me out here.