So, farewell then Boris. Yeltsin entitled his biography Against the Grain. But as is well known, Boris was very much in favour of the grain in all its mellow forms: vodka, whisky, gin, rubbing alcohol, eu de cologne, fermented potatoes. He endorsed them all on a daily basis. Nor did he neglect fruit-based concotions, and when he wished to line his stomach would turn to the vegetable soup known as beer.
Doctors used to say that people who die in an alcoholic coma inflict a severe insult to the brain, and this seems to have been the cumulative effect of his rule in Russia on the Russian people. They loved our Levis and yearned for our freedom, or so the story goes, so we endorsed for them a drunken clown whose lucid moments were devoted to the enrichment of his cronies. Sometimes he would defend parliament, at other times shell it with tanks. Why? Don't remember, it's all kind of woozy. Anyway, the man was a sport.
Now we have Vladimir, whose preferred drink is the ice water that runs through his veins and who views the world through the eyes of the kind of creature found at the crush depth of nuclear submarines.
A thought experiment. Imagine waking up with the worst hangover of your life. Through the red fog you dimly remember that the evening started off with lots of big smiles and backslapping. Sometime later your pocket gets picked, and not only that: there's the vague anxiety that you've been signed up for something, taken for a ride in a way that you can't quite put together, stuck as you are in a swirling fog of shame and anxiety. In such a mood, who do you vote for? Who represents you at this particular point in time?
You mean you don't regard him as a great democratic statesman but rather as an opportunist career politician who exploited the collapse of the Soviet Union and the popular desire for change in order to install himself in semi-authoritarian rule? If so I'm in full agreement.
Posted by: Igor Belanov | April 24, 2007 at 10:05 AM