KitNotes

Boris Yeltsin is dead.

Huzzah.

Now, I may be straying into the ultra-ortho-Trot territory of SouthpawPunch here, but I won’t be mourning this man.

Yeltsin didn’t bring democracy to Russia after the collapse of the dying Soviet Union. The rise to power of Putin is proof of that. Russia today is a neo-liberal hellhole, with the economic policies of the United States - privatising anything that moves. The Kremlin is at perfect liberty to intimidate journalists, to set up Potemkin village political parties, to terrorise an entire people in the name of the “war on terror” and to violently crush any possible dissent, even if it comes from some unsavory corners.

Yeltsin’s rise to power was not so much based on a popular movement. The collapse of the Soviet Union was very much a power game between different blocs based, not on politics, but on ’strong men’. And since then, life expectancy in Russia has plummeted. Curable diseases, once thought to be extinct, jumped up. Anything of value was given away to oligarchs who form the new base of any real power in Russia.

In short, things have gotten worse for the ordinary Russian under oligarchical capitalism. That’s not to say that life in the Stalinist USSR was a peach, either - it wasn’t. But capitalism has practically ransacked Russia and left her people far worse off.

This is reflected in the huge rise of the Far Right in Russia, especially Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party. Don’t be fooled by the lefty sounding name. These people want to create a fascist Russian empire under the thumb of Limonov. It’s no surprise that the NBP has been attracting young people to their banner. They are those who have been given the least strongest hand in a poker game which is rigged.

All of these problems can be traced back to Yeltsin. And now he’s dead. Huzzah. May his bones rot in hell.