The third anniversary of the passing of Boris Yeltsin slid by without much comment here in the United States. Quite a contrast to the hour of his death, when the New York Times tolled the bell for a man it decreed possessed “extraordinary bravery” as he “embod[ied] the last hope of his people,” when, like a veritable colossus, he “eliminated government censorship of the press, tolerated public criticism, and steered Russia toward a free-market economy.”
Poor New York Times. Poor New York Times readers. The piece contains so many errors as to make one weep, contemplating correcting them all. The Times, whatever its worth in the “first draft of history” derby, has a fairly sorry record of limping far behind the
field in getting the big things right. As the June Smithsonian reminds us, in recalling that the Times fretted editorially in the days before black boxer Jack Johnson’s July 1910 demolition of his white opponent, Jim Jeffries: “if the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than physical equality with their white neighbors.”
For even as the Times three years ago was extolling Yeltsin as some sort of bibulous Moses to the Russian people, Perry Anderson, across the Great Water in the London Review of Books, was more precisely describing Yeltsin as a bumbling butcher, misapprehended here in the West because he served as “a pliable, if somewhat disreputable, utensil of Western policies,” whose acts, in truth, will ultimately lay in their graves more Russians than even Josef Stalin managed to plant.
furthur=>
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