DOES YELTSIN DESERVE HIS AWARD?

August 26, 2012

Tomorrow, the late Boris Yeltsin, first president of the Russian Federation, will receive the Grand Cross of the Order of the Cross of Vytis, the highest possible decoration that is bestowed by Lithuania. The Grand Cross will be presented by President Dalia Grybauskaite to Mr Yeltsin's widow, Naina Yeltsina, at a grand ceremony at the Presidential Palace in the capital Vilnius.

Many would argue that when Mr Yeltsin took the helm from Mikhail Gorbachev, he steered the country rather recklessly. Indeed no one expected that the break-up of the Soviet Union and the consolidation of the Russian Federation would be plain sailing, but by the time Mr Yeltsin resigned in favour of Mr Vladimir Putin at the end of 1999, it was widely accepted that things could have been done a lot better. The privatisation programmes, for instance, were careless and they left the doors wide opened for the nation's wealth to be hijacked by a small group of oligarchs and Mafia-like operatives. His vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, denounced his reforms as "economic genocide", while Mr Gorbachev had this to say about his former ally, in his book On My Country and the World:

"By no means was it accidental that at a summit of the CIS, held in Kishinev in the fall of 1997, all the participants critizised Russia and its leadership for the Commonwealth's state of paralysis. President Yeltsin even acknowledged that the criticism was justified: after all, for years he had been chairman of the Council of Heads of State, but during that time nothing ever moved from dead centre."

It would be unfair, however, to deny Mr Yeltsin his due. "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones" (Shakespeare). Mr Yeltsin certainly did help Lithuania and the other Baltic countries towards their new statehood after the fall of the Soviet Union and his support was not without risks to his career. So this honour is not out of place and it is a just as much a credit to the Lithuanian people as it is to the late President Yeltsin.