Loathe around the museum
President Vladimir Putin of Russia has reviled those years as a period of chaos, crime and “total poverty” that “nobody wants to ever see return.”
Kremlin-controlled media outlets regularly lambaste what they call “the wild ’90s” as a time of personal humiliation and national weakness.
All the abuse has been an unexpected boon to the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, a shimmering shrine on the edge of Siberia to Putin’s reviled predecessor and his turbulent years in power, from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to the end of 1999.
“I am glad they are constantly criticizing the ’90s,” said Alexandr Drozdov, the executive director of a private foundation that oversees the Yeltsin centre, a museum and archive complex dedicated to Russia’s first elected and, at least according to opinion polls, widely loathed late president. “I tell them, ‘Keep criticizing, please don’t stop.’ ”
The torrents of scorn poured on Yeltsin and his era by the Kremlin’s cheerleaders have given the complex an edgy appeal, helping it attract more than 700,000 visitors since it opened three winters ago.
It has become perhaps Russia’s most popular and certainly its most lavishly equipped outpost of alternative history and against-the-grain thinking.
On the surface, the complex — set next to a lake in the centre of Yekaterinburg, the industrial city where Yeltsin lived for much of his life — is a showcase for how Russia has changed for the better under Putin. It is shiny and modern, efficiently run and brimming with high-tech flourishes.
One exhibit features puppets from a satirical television show that, in the 1990s, skewered Yeltsin and his officials mercilessly. The show was cancelled by Putin, who took umbrage at his representation by an ugly, dwarfish puppet.
The once station that broadcast the weekly show is now controlled by the state and serves as a bullhorn for Kremlin propaganda.
Western-oriented liberals mostly view Yeltsin as a brave, if deeply flawed, hero who rallied resistance to an August 1991 putsch by Communist Party hardliners, broke the back of the Soviet Union, introduced capitalism and gave birth to Russia as a free and democratic nation.
Nationalists and leftists, though, remember him as at best a vodka-soaked buffoon and at worst a traitor working for the West.
“Putin’s PR team has reduced everything to the contrast between images of a young, dynamic Putin and an old, alcoholic Yeltsin,” said Yevgeny Roizman, a Kremlin critic who resigned last summer as the elected mayor of Yekaterinburg in protest at the abolition of mayoral elections in the city.
The Kremlin’s blessing for the project, said Roizman, flowed from a contradiction at the heart of Putin’s rule. While he has undone much of Yeltsin’s legacy, particularly in politics, he came to power thanks to Yeltsin.
“Putin owes Yeltsin everything,” Roizman said.