Pretty hard not to when there is only one name on the ballot paper :hmmm:

Exactly, I think "choice" here is a stretch - and who else would they choose? Everybody seems to praise Yeltsin and Gorbachev as heroes that took down the Soviet system, but Russians hate them (quite rightly, but not entirely for the right reasons). Gorbachev may have had little choice in the position he was in and with time being against him, however Yeltsin did much a) set up the current imbalance in favour of the executive office, now gladly occupied by Putin; b) systematically destroy both old-school socialist and Western-style democratic opposition; and c) discredit the notion that Russia could be cooperative with the West with its own interests (like not having a massive economic disaster) also being served. The chaos of the 1990s in Russia, which I had the "pleasure" of living through, is why Russians today "chose" Putin.

While the West was busy celebrating the end of the Cold War and gloating over Russia's defeat, putting little effort into helping with the massive socioeconomic disaster that was happening in the country, the Yeltsin that they seemed to praise for being such a "democrat" was busy destroying all viable opposition and setting the stage for someone like Putin. When the time came, there was noone else left to choose.
Rather than act all shocked, perhaps Western politicians and the people who chose them should ask themselves why they treated the post-Soviet Russians as a defeated enemy who deserved punishment and suffering rather than meaningful assistance. I thought we learned something from Germany and Japan?


On a lighter note...

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-f...where-26882664

Do they?
From the get go Yeltsin was widely viewed as a very dangerous fool.
As things developed he became viewed as a very dangerous fool who was really just a puppet worked by Putin.

People, when mentioning Yeltsin, keep forgetting to add the word 'drunken'.

We're sorry that the USSR imploded. Not our fault.
Unfortunately, we in the US are still running down the same dead end track. We're next.

Putin is your new Tsar and you folks are just letting it happen to you all over again.
I wish you great luck.
Perestroika bby.:sunny:

:haha:

To say that he was Putin's puppet in any way is exaggarating. Nobody knew Putin back then, and Putin was largely a nobody and an opportunist who took up reins as the head of a power structure that was already there. Yeltsin created a constitutional presidency that gave the office extraordinary power (it helps that he forced the constitution through by shooting up the parliament with tanks when they refused to sign it). All that was needed was simply someone less drunk to occupy the office. All of the powers that Putin has today were already there for him to use. Although it's tempting to think of Putin as an autocrat and great manipulator, he's not. He's just the "right man for the job". It was only 3 or 4 years before he came into the spotlight that he was a mid-level crony in the St. Petersburg city government - his boss mayor Sobchak (later assassinated) had a sort of mixed relationship with him (he was his benefactor in some ways, didn't like him in others), and he was stuck doing jobs like signing small business licenses. Including one for my dad's and my grandma's business. Fate just dealt him a good hand and, like many unlikely Russian leaders, he's used it to his advantage. He would have remained a nobody without people like Sobchak and Yeltsin - and although he eventually outmaneuvered both, he really did not have much on them at the start.