Aren't dead people so freakin' great?!

April 23^rd, 2007 – Boris Yeltsin, first and former president of the Russian republic (1991- 1999) has passed away at the age of 76. In our current age of media frenzies and competitions to see who can blow something out of proportion the fastest, the death of a well-known person spells out a party for all media. If all media is aimed at the distribution and sharing of knowledge, then overexposure is not necessarily a bad thing. What is definitely strange is the rehabilitation of a character after his death, no matter how controversial or despotic he or she may have been.

Without rehabilitating extremes such as Hitler in Germany or Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in the Philippines, certain despots are still venerated such as Mussolini in cities in southern Italy or Mao Zedong in China.

To a lesser extent but just as strange is the rehabilitation of public figures that acted like irresponsible children. For example, Anna Nicole Smith was known for substance abuse, rollercoaster weight and plastic surgery and, of course, professional gold digging. Am I the only one that sees a problem with dedicating half of every news service to her life and her accomplishments for the two weeks after her death? I certainly hope not. Otherwise, I have grossly misplaced my faith in humanity.

I am not insinuating that Yeltsin’s life is not worth analysing but the media inevitably spins it to show a kind and competent administrator that really wasn’t. Boris was a drunk and a rather sloppy administrator that did participate in the downfall of the USSR…but 5 years after Gorbatchev had started the capitalist and independence processes in the union (perestroika). Furthermore, he presided over the endemic spread of gouvernmental corruption, the exponential increase in mafia involvement and the economic collapse of the country. In history, it is not good to generalise, but this is my blog and I will gladly do so. In the 1990s, Russia effectively passed from a former superpower that was feared, to a nation in need of charity and pity. Apart from this unfortunate realisation, Yeltsin’s greatest accomplishment was to die of natural causes rather than from a suspicious assassination by external, or more probably, internal rivals. He is said to have left office with an approval rating under 5%.

I am all for ‘respecting the dead’ but a bad man dies as he has lived; lying and wishful thinking does not change Yeltsin’s track record as a recorded figure of history during a crucial turning point in the XX^th century. Former first chairman of the USSR communist party Mikhail Gorbatchev said it best this week by saying "I offer my deepest condolences to the family of a man on whose shoulders rested many great deeds for the good of the country and serious mistakes—a tragic fate" (BBC news service).

(Pictured: Boris getting on down - Boris telling Gorbatchev what's what)

End.