ok back here with r t here's a look at the top stories new radiation leaks exceeding legal limits are detected in seawater near japan's crippled fukushima plant comes amid growing criticism facing authorities accused of underestimating the ongoing nature of the nuclear crisis and. nato plans to expand its airstrikes to levy as northwest of target cut off his forces meanwhile the colonel unself used a high profile game of chess to reiterate his refusal to leave the country despite mounting ever national pressure. and fresh protest on

a massive scale is expected in greece following sunday's rally against a second round of hysteria measures that he used demands new cuts before the country can receive over one hundred billion euros in a bailout money. but also the top stories here in our time now for our debate show cross talk today could all of our and his guests discuss the legacy of russia's first president boris yeltsin twenty years after he was elected the country's leader. hello and welcome to crossfire camp you know about boris yeltsin was he a great man who made history or was he merely a product of his time and opinions differ widely though no one denies the important role he played in creating our present proscar to continue that series from the collapse of the soviet union twenty years ago.

to cross-talk yeltsin's russia i'm joined by dmitri barber chair in the studio with me he's a political analyst at ria novosti news agency in washington we have donald jensen he's a resident fellow at the center for transatlantic relations and in london we go to alex project he is director of russian and eurasian studies center at the university of oxford all right gentlemen crossed out rules in effect i mean you can jump in anytime you want well the reason why we're doing this we're doing our series here on cross talk on the collapse of the soviet union twenty years ago and twenty years ago on june twelfth one thousand anyone else who came the first popularly elected president of the russian soviet federated socialist republic would basically the beginning of the demise of the soviet union that would follow her in the year dimitri bondage let's look at that time twenty years ago and how the soviet union unraveled how much was yeltsin involved with that unraveling of

the soviet union people talk a lot about going to much of what about yeltsin at this time but i think there are two parallel process that's going on which should not be mixed up there was the process of democratization and i think it was yeltsin starro for the first time in russian history and man came to power while honest election against the will of the government that was an achievement i asked for the collapse of the soviet union it had begun long before there. back in one thousand eight hundred nine already there was a lot of talk about it and by one thousand nine hundred pro the process was almost complete i would remind you of that in march two months before the election. seven republics out of fifteen did not take part in the referendum on the reform of the soviet union so the process has already gone very very march forward and yeltsin of course when the soviet union was just virtually collapsed and in some one thousand

one thousand von he didn't shed tears he started building the russian federation of the unique thing at that point and i go you know in washington from a russian perspective in two thousand and eleven that was the good yeltsin ok the ultimate had the right thing ok because right now in two thousand and eleven most people in this country are very pleased that the soviet union is gone there's still a small minority that regret it but yeltsin was seen as a great banner to bring the end of a system that wasn't working for the people anymore so yeltsin twenty years ago what kind of character do you see some to be. i said some looking back i'm very contradictory figure both i would almost say heroic certainly someone who displayed tremendous political courage and i would note in passing that i agree with the most comments and the ultimate was ahead of even the us government many outside observers and moving forward were a lot of people and most notably the first president bush seemed to indicate they wanted to preserve the soviet union i'll be it any more reforms way but you ask

about yeltsin i think he was in many ways one of the most politically courageous people i've ever been around and i was in moscow with time as a diplomat but also as a tremendously contradictory contradictory figure whose career has to be separated into a number of phases not in not all of which are performed admirably alex and if i go to you in london let's turn it up a little bit let's have mr yeltsin is president of the of russia the first president of russia how do you see his the beginning of his reform process because this is where people start disliking yeltsin then and very much to some extent hating him today i'm talking about the liberalization of the economy. yeah before i come to that can i say that i agree absolutely with the fact that he's a larger than life historic and historical leader who has huge pluses and huge

minuses and this goes with his economic reform program as well you remember that in one thousand nine hundred nine when handing over to putin yeltsin reflected on his own contribution to russia and he fought started by saying of course the great achievement was we broke with communism broke as you just wanted to know the commodity kaname into broke into a liberal market capitalism but then he added an apology and he apologized for the fact that he was along with others so naive to think they could do it all in one big breakthrough that breakthrough politically breakthrough economically breakthrough socially and if you break through you break things and ended up with a lot of inequality a lot of corruption a lot of the things that yeltsin i don't think would have wanted i remember meeting him in the in the two thousands and he sincerely came over as someone who was a big clumpiness leader concerned with people's wealth and he. reflected that it was a shane with so many poor people still in russia after all he tried to do so the economic

change was necessary whether it could be done in one big leap but would have been better done in small stages is a very very big question even when you think about it in the studio here more ideologically driven a theory driven in the early years because as our just pointed out i mean it in a in a lot of people know is that the the russian economy contract is fifty percent at one point during his administration and i like to point out to my audience here the great depression in the united states the u.s. economy contract of twenty five percent so if we can put that magnitude out there well i think it was not an ideological president and if you listen to his speeches if you read his speeches now he never said the word capitalism. all the world sort it isn't that was not right he style i mean i remember him saying in one of his interviews back in the ages that people are tired of lady origin people just wanted

to live better and they wanted more economic freedom and he gave them economic freedom in one thousand eight hundred nine hundred eighty two the problem was that of course people were cool and the only ones who were reach and influential were criminals or some former party boss us so obviously they benefit from this privatization more than an average russian but unfortunately i think it was a global tendency if you will look at the world was tremendously on just during all of the ninety s. and it continues to grow and just now it's built on some really wrong premises which have little to do with the real liberalism and with real capitalism they wage war stored by local hopes and in the seventeenth or eighteenth century or that there be some people who say that yeltsin in the russians around him a clear idea of a market cap a market economy too seriously because you got rid of you know you privatized the family jewels that actually created wealth in this country and all the rest of it just fell apart i mean and in the process by golly you've done on this one one of

the one of the biggest criticisms to this day is the creation of oligarchy the controlled so much of the economy and the and this is exactly the inequality the demon here was talking about and it still plagues this country today there's still a concentration of wealth in this country and it comes from yeltsin's or but. i very much agree i think that if he and others have talked at the top more about strengthening the rule of law i think russians probably would be a lot happier today about what happened in the ninety's and and probably not even be wealthier today just to go back to a point about the man outside which i agree with which is whether he was a man motivated by any ology i think in many ways he was motivated by instinct to sit around moscow and say well he was a democrat he's a democrat but he doesn't really know what it means and we watched this tremendous churning in society and it was very difficult to understand sometimes what you got

some did or worse not thought he was doing particularly after ninety one when when you had to build a state and this this weakness of institutions as we saw in the rule of law i think is something where i've thought him very serious and i'll tell you thing about eggs that's very interesting is because in the two thousand the argument was made that the state had to restructure the government had to restructure the state because if yeltsin had allowed to do deteriorate so badly and have the so much of the economy captured into private hands i mean it this is one of the things that went wrong and maybe will not intentionally but i mean this is the russian state was no longer serving the purposes of what it was supposed to do and this is the legacy of that that that follows the also to this day. right i mean i think two things come out of that one is that yeltsin came out of a heavily state apparatus dominated system the communist system he reacted against that wanted to give people the freedom the liberty to be creative and make society

themselves but i disagree a bit with the thing to be true but no ideology no explicit ideology but a culture of seeking panaceas believing that there are solutions out there which will fix things within maybe five or ten years and that's part of a sort of russian cultural heritage seeking marxism combining it with russian characteristics then yields in seeking broad based capitalism giving people like gaidar for your rule reign getting chewed by is handing out and believing it's a belief that if you allow people the opportunity to be entrepreneurs to grab the assets to make things work that everything somehow will be positive sum game and that wasn't the case and therefore you don't need the state you don't need to regularize redistribute manage in the old command system so it was a typical spindle and swing from over come on over stated occasions or under siege occasion if you want and an undermining of institutions and a free for all and liberty as we know has enormous costs for most people who

haven't got the energy to fight for their rights let me ask him a little i mean that's a nother. accusation made against you also as he was such a pendulum person he would go to such extremes if it was for the democrat our democracy issue the economy issue defense security i mean first he braced the west by the end when you look at the cost of zero experience yeltsin felt that he had been betrayed by the west but that you know was that pendulum i don't agree with this because it was not yeltsin it was the west they changed it to russia. in one thousand nine hundred one the west was applauding russia and unfortunately the country was collapsing. and then in the end of the ninety s. when russia tried to say something the west suddenly became very critical so it was not yeltsin which changed it was there to put all that on the west exchanged asked for it here my i think there were again cool very distinct process. yeltsin was a democrat in the early ninety's by the end of the ninety s.

he was a different person talking about their political system it were it became very difficult to access him and i can be difficult then to accept gorbachev in the end of weakness there were all kinds of weird people around him who had absolutely no legitimacy including an authority to place was never elected by anyone. so all basically people are when they made demonstrations in support of yeltsin one thousand nine hundred one what they wanted was kind of their social democrat you were going to this point out of the browser and regular continue our discussion of the legacy of boris like the old song do. you. still. want to. wealthy british style to sign. on to the to. the.

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can still. listen to the thing to the i welcome back to talk about to mind you were talking about russia's first president boris yeltsin played can still live the way. but first here's a brief report on yeltsin's contentious legacy. in recent russian history few personalities remain a spoiler rising as boris yeltsin twenty years after the fall of the soviet union yeltsin is still seen in the west as the politician who ends up communism and i'm sure there a new area of personal freedoms and western style capitalism but sure anything you learn just they're perceived from a distance especially in history i think we still need more time for the emotions in trouble so. to give way to serious analysis that would take tannic here you'll

see really once in a moment that leader became one of russia's most iconic yeltsin with genuine popular support helped to stare down an attempted coup in one thousand nine hundred one first we declare a legal the crease and decisions by the state emergency committee in the us and in the western world yeltsin was seen as a reformer and a leader who could compromise he was embrace as a friend and told he was treated as a peer and when he died in two thousand and seven some of the warmest eulogies came from western leaders he stood up for freedom and democracy and openness he really believed that russia couldn't go back to communism or back further to extreme rationalism praise from abroad yes. but yeltsin sharpest critics were in the new country that he hoped to bring into being russia in theory yeltsin supported a market economy but the reality was western inspired shock therapy and crony capitalism russia's economy went to freefall and the russian ruble had to be devalued choice during his time in office for millions of russians this was yet

another time of troubles. yeltsin played a critical role in ending communist rule the us president he ordered the army to attack and you can aspire moment. given grandpa constitutional reforms that extended his powers as president of the expense of parliament and if you can forget the brutality of the first chechen conflict by the end of his presidency yeltsin like so many russians at the time became wary of the west i told me to the americans the germans don't push us toward military action otherwise there will be a european war for sure and possibly world war. there's no doubt that boris yeltsin is an outstanding historical figure and that would may take decades for the russians themselves to find a consensus about a name that changed russian and world history forever. crosstalk.

ok alex and i think go back to you in london. in the studio brought up a very interesting point about how russia look at the west and the west looked at russia during yeltsin's tenure how do you assess that i mean was there a pendulum there were there misperceptions on one side or both sides. i think the misperceptions on both sides russia expected the west to applaud to the end of communism the introduction of a post communist purportedly democratic regime and it's. expected the west to give lots of money to support a regime in to stabilize the transition to market democracy but the west responded to russia's soft liberation by appearing to be fairly mean it wasn't the best of economic conditions the big marshall plea marshall plan number two as it were didn't come about and russia became more and more disillusioned about real partnership with the west but the trouble with russian foreign policy we were back

before the discussion is that rhetorical there was a lot of protest about nato expansion and nato militarism and european like friend innes but in actual fact the actions were pro western until the late one nine hundred ninety s. it was the combination of the bombing of course of war and preceding that the economic crisis the banking crisis and the crash that brought about a real disillusionment not just with the with the west among the leaders of russia but also among the new liberal middle classes and i don't know what years you were a diplomat in the one nine hundred ninety s. in russia but what did you see i mean were the russians expecting too much from the west or the west just well that you know but the cold war is over we won i mean you know they'll find their way the i.m.f. you know does it have a liberal economic system and everything will just be destroyed and dandy but we know it wasn't i mean what were the perceptions and misperceptions during your tenure here. well there were

a lot of misperceptions i want to say that first that i agree with alex that that yeltsin change of the west changed but i would also say that that russia changed i think the west expected a kind of a breakthrough to a larger version of maybe what polar the czech republic is today and that simply was never in retrospect going to be the case second to the west i think it's important to recall the rest championed the nine hundred ninety three constitutional reforms that gave a much stronger presidency to yeltsin than have existed before and as a consequence to some extent we are better than what we now criticize as a super super presidential regime but i want to go back to ninety one i think that there was a lot of misperception about what happened in ninety one were as i and many others thought it was a democratic breakthrough i think there were a lot of impulses there populism anti soviet system and frankly russian nationalism that in

a moderate form which which blended together with the pro so-called pro democratic forces so ninety one i think was misinterpreted and once that was misinterpreted a lot of what we saw go on that in the following decade was i think underestimated in misinterpreted as well even you know it's very interesting is because you think in retrospect that the way that the west wanted russia to disagree invented self and it's in a western image because that's what it sounds like when you go back and look at it because it's it's the triumph into some of winning the cold war and russia looks at it in a very different way it collapsed the soviet union itself it want to do it wanted something different it wasn't a defeat but russia is still in even the mainstream media still treated as a defeated power although i think that's the problem russia was treated as a defeated bowl and in that sense the west has shown a little fent thinking i would say i think it characterizes the whole period of the ninety's the level fantasy of the west i would not think would not invent a new russia and. allied state or even

a neutral city it returned to the old ways of treating russia with that suspicion we just as usual you know this was nothing new i asked for one thousand nine hundred one i can tell your. july in one thousand nine hundred one american government delegation keen to russia and they came to what was their head of the government and they said we stay when you we don't believe these democrats will think you're a serious person a few people remember that i don't know if you are and i think it shows you all the level of fantasy about ok i want to go ahead jump in here as like a friend is a year but it's very difficult to get this. sense of this russia want to be treated in the early one nine hundred ninety s. both as a coup victor a victor against communism sort of self imposed big tree and therefore be treated as a partner and also to be given this kind of economic aid which would be expected of

a defeated pearl that is heated perfectly in a virtual war so if one of the same time they wanted to be treated as equal victors and also to be bailed out and helped to recover as defeated powers and that was a very difficult pair of conceptions to get people's minds around in the west can we think about that that's a very interesting theories i'm very interested her and i'm going to get off first and i should i should tell dimitri that i did not write those comments. cynical times. i think i am very much agree with what alex and frankly i know the person perception in russia is being treated like a defeated power certainly i think in policymaking circles in washington that was in our case even if it may be appearing that way to people in russia they basically thought that russia would end up relatively quickly i think being like us and that with us a lot of the trouble that happened in the following was for some people in washington what the summit. a surprise the second point i would make is that russia itself.

was ambivalent about the soviet past about its own past and that made it much more difficult to craft a policy. and one way or the other politically or economically with russia and the way we try we want it to go and the fact that because the russians themselves were uncertain about which way they want to go let me tell you i mean in when we look at it in retrospect now. after his presidency was that a missed opportunity i mean was really wanting to be. a partner of the west and it was just wasn't simply embraced i think he wanted to be a part of the west and i think it's very unfortunate what happened there was a lot of nice to put uniqueness you know moment and sort of moving in russia. and america and the europeans just didn't trigger ignite that moment and summer movie they didn't believe it and when they finally believe that the russians started to

set in you know the moment and still do you know but i don't really seriously i acknowledge i mean look at the one thousand nine hundred six presidential election i mean it was amazingly fraudulent that everybody in the west wanted to ignore all of the fraud he won he won reelection ok we don't know exactly i mean i haven't gone back on the empirical evidence myself but i mean just supporting him and not what he was trying to do the democratization of this country its economic reforms they just wanted to base everything on yeltsin hoping that he would do the right thing what do you think about that alex not a systemic change you get on a person. yeah well first of all leaders of states always wants to build a team first and foremost because stability equals security for them so yeltsin was a symbol of son degree of stabilization and stability that's why they backed him but they did like in the early ninety's i imagine nation we mentioned lack of imagination of before but the biggest lack of imagination was on the international stage had there been an imaginative sitting down with russia at that time said

listen we draw the european security system let's end an expansion of nato for inertial bureaucratic safety first reasons and let's look at the ways in which we construct a russia in an equal founding basis russia always wanted to be a founder member of something new rather than an adjunct junior member of something old that was an opportunity missed them by nine hundred ninety five ninety six they're almost gone because they started expanding so russia was let down in a way from a lack of imagination the same time russia let itself down by not having a unified strategy and any kind of voices coming out of moscow yeltsin said one thing one when we went to warsaw poland could join in later if he's wanted then the arena go on that second time around there were several voices and the most important voices among them were the corporate voices who were pro western pro western economic long. as it has been here gentlemen we've got run out of time and we certainly can all agree beyond's and lead

a revolutionary life many thanks to my guests today in the studio here with me in london and in washington thanks to our viewers for watching as you darkie see you next time remember crossed party lines. to take.

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