There's a long but interesting piece about Yeltsin by Matt Tiabbi here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/14272792/the_low_post_death_of_a_drunkHere's an excerpt:
"Inconsistent reformer" is exactly the kind of
language the American media typically used when
describing Yeltsin during a period when he and
his friends were robbing the Russian state like a
gang of New Jersey truck hijackers. When I sent
bits of this obit to a friend of mine who had
also been a reporter in Russia during Yeltsin's
reign, here's what he wrote back:
"Yeah, it's a hoot. He simply had no power, for
example, to prevent the misuse of the $1-$3
billion a year that his tennis partner at the
National Sports Fund (Shamil Tarpishev) was
getting from duty-free cigarettes...much of which
inexplicably ended up in his daughter's foreign bank accounts."
What we were calling "reform" was just a
thinly-veiled mass robbery that Yeltsin
perpetrated with American help. The great
delusion about Yeltsin was that he was a kind of
Democrat and an opponent of communism. He was
not. He was, like all politicians who grew up in
that system, an opportunist. He read the writing
on the wall and he threw his weight behind a
"revolution" that turned out to be a brilliant
ploy hatched by a canny group of generals and KGB
types to privatize Soviet assets into the hands
of the country's leaders, while simultaneously
cutting the state free of its dreary obligations
toward the rank-and-file Russian people.
The word "corruption" when applied to Boris
Yeltsin had both specific and general
applications. Specifically he personally stole
and facilitated mass thefts at the hands of
others from just about every orifice of the
Russian state. American journalists, when
chronicling Yeltsin's "corruption," generally
point to minor cash-bribery deals like that
involving the Swiss construction company Mabetex,
which was given the contract to renovate the
Kremlin in exchange for cash payouts to Yeltsin
(at least $1 million to a Hungarian bank,
according to some reports) and no-limit credit
cards in the names of his two daughters, whose
bills ultimately were paid by Mabetex. (According
to reports, charges on the Eurocards in the names
of the two women ran to $600,000 in 1993 and 1994
alone). This is the kind of simple,
Boss-Tweed/Tammany Hall corruption that Americans
understand, and in the eyes of most of the
Western world, for a Yeltsin to dip his beak in a
few million here and there in the midst of such a
violent societal transformation was not really a
big deal. A guy's gotta get paid, right?
Well, not exactly. What Americans missed during
Yeltsin's presidency -- and they missed it
because American reporters defiantly refused to
report the truth of the matter -- was that under
Boris Yeltsin the Russian state itself became
little more than a cash factory for gangland
interests. This was corruption on the larger
scale, a corruption of the essence of the state,
corruption at the core. Some of the schemes
hatched by Yeltsin's government were so
astonishing and audacious in scope that they almost defy description.
