Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected leader in Russian history, was laid to rest in a church (Russian Orthodox) ceremony yesterday, attended by world leaders, including Mikhail S. Gorbachev, or St. Gorby, as I prefer to think of him.
All my life I figured I'd go out in a blaze of nuclear glory triggered by mistake somewhere between Washington and Moscow. But then Gorbachev, trying to reconstitute Soviet led communism through a process of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), succeeded only in giving his people enough oxygen to revive themselves and break those chains that Lenin spoke about. The result was that when Czechs began to walk across the border into Germany, Gorby had a choice: send in the tanks a la Hungary in 1956 when I was a summer camper-waiter in upstate New York, or as in Prague (the Velvet Revolution, crushed) a few years later, and crush the revolution. Gorby did neither. He stood by and let them walk. He didn't send in the (nearby) Soviet tanks. The Soviet experiment in a centrally planned economy had come to an end, a failure.
Soon after that, in 1989, East Germans began to tear down the wall that imprisoned them in so many ways, economically, militarily, socially, and, not least, spiritually. When the Wall came down, an era was over. The wall had gone up during Pres. John F. Kennedy's term in office, to defeat East Germans who were voting with their feet to come to the West, a walking rebuke to the communist authorities in the Soviet puppet state.
Gorby brought Yeltsin to Moscow, but soon banished him, while allowing open elections for the first time. Yeltsin ran and won the premiership. When communist hard-liners took over the Russian parliament in a coup attempt, he stood on a tank in Moscow, rallied the crowd to his support, and shelled the parliament building, ending the coup.
Since we don't have clean, fresh-off-the-shelf saints in real life, we have to take them as messy as they are. Boris Nikolayich drank a bit, suffered from Russian morosity and depression, and showed up once soaking wet at a police station, as though he'd dragged himself from the river. A real muzhik, or peasant, was how Russians characterized him. But this muzhik freed them once and for all from the political and emotional slavery into which they had fallen since 1917.
A hallmark of the Soviet system was the abolition of organized religion, the opiate of the people, according to Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the October Revolution (you'll remember the movie starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin, "The Hunt for Red October" referring to a defecting Soviet submarine) and the founder of the Soviet communist state that held our very great interest in the West until 1989, some 72 years.
So it is notable indeed that Mr. Yeltsin was buried in a church service.
Don't mess with Jesus, is, I guess, the moral of this story.
The LA Times report is below.