Would Russia been better off without Yeltsin?

[Captain Communism]

Do you think Russia would of been better off if Yeltsin was never on the seen? My opnion is that the USSR would still be around.

[RedAnarchist]

I doubt that the USSR would still be around - there were independance movements growing in strength in a lot of the 15 SSRs in the late 80's and early 90's.

[bloody_capitalist_sham]

Well Gorbachev really didn't understand capitalism, he was trying to get the west to invest in Russia, but still have Russian industry controlled by the state.

He also was very liked liberalism, freedom of speech and the rest of western stuff, so his reforms meant the CPSU and the soviet organs of power were able to be openly criticised when Russia was going through a very troubled period.

Yeltsin was just a guy who played on the reforms of Gorbachev.

The soviet union couldn't have carried on like it was because it was becoming far surpassed by the west, the berlin wall had fallen and the formal soviet democracy was didnt function properly so the proletariat couldn't defend the gains of the Russian revolution.

Reform had to come to Russia, but it didn't have to go capitalist, it could have remained some sort of planned economy, but the democracy just wasn't there.

[Janus]

Do you mean in general or pre/post USSR era?

Even if the USSR hadn't collapsed in 1991, it still probably wouldn't be around today and if it were, it would be quite divided politically.

As far as Yeltsin's policies in the aftermath of the collapse went, that transition could've certainly been handled better by someone more astute and responsible. However, even without Yeltsin, Russia would still probably only be a bit better off economically at the moment.

[Comrade_Scott]

Hell yea it would be. he dropped the set prices so the people sufferd, he opend up the door to oligarchs that controll everything and started not one but two futile wars with checneya. so woild russia have been better without that man yeltsin, yes yes a thousands times yes

[Cheung Mo]

Short of being George W. Bush or Nikolai Ceausescu, there's not much that Yeltsin could have done to be more incompetent with regards to economic management. The USSR was destined to fail: Lenin and Trotsky was unable to wrest the Bolshevik party from the parasitic Tsarist bureaucracy and the corupution and Russian chauvinism that came with it that it. Initially this inability to do so was rooted in the fact that the vanguard had to deal with the aftermath of a catastrophic imperialist war, with the civil war that followed and the twenty-some imperialist nations that fought with the remnants of Tsarist, bourgeois, and Menshevik reactionaries to crush the Red Army and the aspirations of the Russian and the international proletariat, and with the famine caused by those wars and by the temporary disruption in production associated with the shattering and subsequent reconstruction of any socioeconomic order. (The transition from aristocratic to bourgeois rule further West in Europe was as far from being clean and bloodless as any international proletarian revolution will be.) Subsequently, too many leading figures within the vanguard had grown fat and corrupt because they were seduced by the comfort and glamour offered to them as a result of their positions within this co-opted bureaucracy.

[norwegian commie]

Yeltsin is the one of the worst traitors to the workers since Bernstein. He handed out wealth to few, and made sure that whatever Russia had left of socialism went to hell. Then he got drunk in s couple of years, made he's own Vodka brand, and then he managed to give away the property of the people to private persons.

He ruined russia and he is to blame that tha Mafia now controlls Eastern Europe. Along with Gorbatchev of course, that bastard even starred in a Pizza Hut commercial.

[Avtomat_Icaro]

The Soviet Union would have collapsed anyways...there would have been a powervoid and the dude with the biggest balls would have taken power...in this case it was Yeltsin. :unsure:

[Psy]

Originally posted by [email protected] 25, 2007 10:59 pm
The Soviet Union would have collapsed anyways...there would have been a powervoid and the dude with the biggest balls would have taken power...in this case it was Yeltsin. :unsure:
Here is a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDhqDVbubRU) showing pro-Yeltsin getting their ass kicked in the battle for the Mayor's Office. Remember this was far from a popular uprising.

Looking at how unprepared Yeltsin forces were then they would have been no match for a popular revolution with far more people on the streets.

[bezdomni]

Individual people do not cause production relationships to radically change. The Soviet Union dissolved for material reasons, not because Yeltzin was a "great man of history".

[Organic Revolution]

The USSR was on its last dying limbs anyways. Ignoring the problems with Lenin and the early USSR, Stalin completely destroyed any chance for reconciliation with real revolutionary organizations. Yeltsin kicked a dead horse.