Boris Yeltsin Quotes

We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Freedom is like that. It's like air. When you have it, you don't notice it.

You can build a throne of bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long.

A trained Soviet KGB operative then heading its successor outfit, the FSB, Putin had done the sitting Russian president the memorable favor of successfully derailing the criminal investigation into the Yeltsin clan. He did so by blackmailing Russia’s prosecutor general with a fake sex tape.

You can make a throne of bayonets, but you cant sit on it for long.

On September 20th, 1996, then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin posthumously conferred on Legasov the honorary title of ‘Hero of the Russian Federation’ for the, “courage and heroism,” shown in his investigation of the disaster.

And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, “No Drunk Natives.” Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the Lethbridge Herald to voice their outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke. Now, I’ll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It’s just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not. Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter’s generation. And let’s not forget some of our politicians and persons of power who control the fates of nations: Winston Churchill, John A. Macdonald, Boris Yeltsin, George Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hard drinkers, every one. The somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks. They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the ex-premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star Lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others. More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.

As president, I fought for the unity of the country until the very end. I fought by political means – it is important to emphasize this – and I tried to win over Soviet citizens and my colleagues, the leaders of the Union republics. Even today, I believe that the integrity of the country could have been preserved and that a new Union was in everyone's interest. But the coup weakened my position, and the leadership of Russia, the largest republic of the USSR, under Boris Yeltsin decided to dissolve the Soviet Union instead. The country fell apart, the state collapsed.

I know what things look like, superficially. After all, we saw Alexander Yakovlev – the ideology chief of the Communist Party Soviet Union – denouncing Lenin in 1991! The idea that communism was defeated, that Lenin was no longer an icon, was underscored by Soviet Russia’s leading Leninist! Ask yourself how this is possible. Why would a party and an empire intentionally pull the plug on itself? They had nuclear weapons. They had the KGB. They had the Red Army. And then, Boris Yeltsin stopped a coup by walking out and standing on a tank while his KGB bodyguard looked on passively. Do you really believe it was honestly done? J.R.Nyquist

As Boris Yeltsin was to acknowledge many years later, in a speech to the Hungarian Parliament on November 11th 1992, ‘The tragedy of 1956 . . . will forever remain an indelible spot on the Soviet regime.’ But that was nothing when compared with the cost the Soviets had imposed on their victims. Thirty-three years later, on June 16th 1989, in a Budapest celebrating its transition to freedom, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians took part in another ceremonial reburial: this time of Imre Nagy and his colleagues. One of the speakers over Nagy’s grave was the young Viktor Orbán, future Prime Minister of his country. ‘It is a direct consequence of the bloody repression of the Revolution,’ he told the assembled crowds, ‘that we have had to assume the burden of insolvency and reach for a way out of the Asiatic dead end into which we were pushed. Truly, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party robbed today’s youth of its future in 1956.

Oligarchy: Rule by the few, usually the richest One Percent. In Aristotle’s political theory, oligarchy is the stage into which democracy evolves, and which ends up becoming a hereditary aristocracy. “The essence of oligarchic rule,” wrote George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life ... A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors ... Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.” The word “oligarchy” has been applied to Russia’s kleptocrats who obtained natural resources and other assets under Boris Yeltsin, most notoriously in the 1994-1996 “bank loans for shares” insider deals. It also applies to Latin American and other client oligarchies that concentrate wealth in the financial and propertied class at the top of the pyramid. However, U.S. media vocabulary defines any country as a democracy as long as it supports the Washington Consensus and U.S. diplomacy.

On August 9, 1999, Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin prime minister of Russia. A week later he was confirmed in that position by a wide majority of the Duma: he proved just as likable, or at least unobjectionable, as Yeltsin had intuited.

And what did Boris Yeltsin himself know about his soon-to-be-anointed successor? He knew this was one of the few men who had remained loyal to him.

And yet, if Putin was able to sell these upside-down claims to many, it’s partly because the U.S. government consistently does this kind of mirror imaging itself, feigning outrage over Russian interference in U.S. elections with no concern for the irony that its intelligence operatives have meddled in elections and helped overthrow democratically elected governments the world over since the 1950s, from Iran to Chile to Honduras—and let’s not forget the gloves-off U.S. interference in post-Soviet Russia to back Boris Yeltsin, who passed the baton on to none other than Putin.

And so I trust that it is not too petty to point out that it was George H. W. Bush, not Ronald Reagan, who was president when Boris Yeltsin ended the Cold War.

On January 25, 1995, Russian president Boris Yeltsin came within minutes of initiating a full nuclear strike on the United States because of an unidentified Norwegian scientific rocket. Concern has been raised over a U.S. project to replace the nuclear warheads on two of the twenty-four D5 ICBMs carried by Trident submarines with conventional warheads, for possible use against Iran or North Korea: Russian early-warning systems would be unable to distinguish them from nuclear missiles, expanding the possibilities for unfortunate misunderstandings. Other worrisome scenarios include deliberate malfeasance by military commanders triggered by mental instability and/or fringe political/religious agendas. But why worry? Surely, if push came to shove, reasonable people would step in and do the right thing, just as they have in the past? Nuclear nations do indeed have elaborate countermeasures in place, just as our body does against cancer. Our body can normally deal with isolated deleterious mutations, and it appears that fluke coincidences of as many as four mutations may be required to trigger certain cancers. Yet if we roll the dice enough times, shit happens-Stanley Kubrick's dark nuclear war comedy Dr. Strangelove illustrates this with a triple coincidence.

when Gorbachev tried to restructure the Soviet Union into a federation of independent republics, but with the Communist Party still in control over the economy. A committee formed by Gorbachev’s Vice President Gennadi Yanayev, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, Defense Minister Dmitriy Yazov, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, and other high ranking officials, put Gorbachev under house arrest while he was on vacation. They reintroduced censorship of politics and the newspapers, and banned all political activity. They thought the population would support them, including most politicians, but they were wrong. Boris Yeltsin, who was the President of the Russian Republic, declared the coup illegal, and ended up with the support of the majority of the Russian citizens. The coup collapsed, when the military wouldn’t kill the people trying to protect the Russian Parliament building, nor would they put the Russian politicians under arrest. When he returned to power, Gorbachev was left without popular support from the citizens or the political class.

Berezovski logró que le concedieran el control de la televisión del Estado y con ella montó una campaña electoral colosal. En dos meses consiguió resucitar a Yeltsin en los sondeos, o más bien acabó con todos sus rivales dando la impresión de que su elección habría supuesto la inmediata reapertura de los gulags siberianos y la vuelta a las colas del pan. El único problema era que, a dos semanas de las elecciones, al viejo le dio un infarto. Ese día, en teoría tendría que haber grabado su último mensaje a la nación. La grabación fue anulada, pero al cabo de unos días, con los rumores disparados por todas partes, se imponía a toda costa una aparición pública del presidente. Entonces, como Yeltsin no estaba en un estado que le permitiera volver a su despacho, Boris dio la orden de trasladar los muebles del Kremlin a la residencia del presidente, de manera que pareciese que estaba plenamente operativo. En el momento de grabar su alocución, Yeltsin estaba tan débil que no era capaz de permanecer erguido sobre la silla y tuvieron que ponerle una tabla en la espalda para sostenerlo. Quedaba el problema del discurso: el presidente no podía articular las palabras de modo comprensible. Se le pidió, entonces, que moviera los labios como si hablase y todo el llamamiento fue confeccionado en la sala de montaje, ensamblando partes de otros de sus discursos anteriores.

Berezovsky went so far as to propagandize for the notion that the power of big capital was natural. He could say to FSB director Mikhail Barsukov, ‘If you can’t understand that we have come to power, we will simply remove you. You will have to serve our money, our capital’ (Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin: From Dawn to Dusk, 289). It is likely that Berezovsky believed the West was actually ruled by big capital, as Soviet propaganda had always insisted, but considered this acceptable. Here again we see the monstrous influence of vulgar Marxism on post-Soviet anti-Communist sensibilities.

Without help from a team of American political consultants and especially without a Clinton-arranged loan from the IMF coming on the eve of the elections, it is very likely that Boris Yeltsin would have lost his bid for re-election in 1996.

It was not Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank that overturned the 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, but rather the clandestine network of fax machines, photocopiers, video recorders, and personal computers that broke decades of totalitarian control of information

It was as if the Allies at the end of the Second World War had not demanded the unconditional capitulation of Nazi Germany, but contented themselves with its perestroika, namely a certain liberalization of the regime. Had that been so, what would Europe be like today?” Bukovsky had traveled back and forth to Russia from Cambridge, England, in the early 90s after President Boris Yeltsin’s government invited him as an expert witness in a trial before the Constitutional Court in which the communists were suing the government for outlawing them and taking their property.The West was entirely complicit in the soapy dismissal of the entire Soviet communist death apparatus. Had there been Nuremberg-style trials, many shocks would have emerged, including the vast number of Western media correspondents who were on the Kremlin payroll, and chirping along accordingly.

Russia is the biggest mafia state in the world, the super power of crime that is devouring the state from top to bottom.