Freedom of Speech in Russia by Daphne Skillen

Freedom of Speech in Russia by Daphne Skillen

Author:Daphne Skillen [Skillen, Daphne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317659884
Google: VN6VDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-25T04:30:51+00:00


7 The Yeltsin era: free speech

Don’t fall into temptation, don’t exchange it for economic gain … Remember, freedom comes from a free press; that’s not an exaggeration, the freedom of our society depends on it.

(Yeltsin, 12 June 1993)

I Transition to democracy

In the eight years Boris Yeltsin was president, the country enjoyed a degree of free speech unprecedented in scope and duration. Yet to talk of Yeltsin’s legacy invariably provokes strong emotions about the extent of his commitment to freedom and democracy. His huge and controversial impact in changing almost every aspect of Russians’ lives as they moved through seismic economic, political, cultural and imperialist changes has laid him vulnerable to all sorts of criticism. Some are well deserved: he was a colossal but flawed figure, while the task before him was Herculean. His goal, as he saw it, was clear: to bury communism and take Russia along the road to democracy. If he was not a pinup democratic leader all of the time, he was the most democratic the country has ever had. His motivating principle, and one he often expressed with anguish, was to create what he said Russians deserved after so many years of suffering: a prosperous and democratic society out of the debris of the Soviet system. It did not go smoothly. ‘People expected paradise on earth’, he writes in his memoirs, ‘but they got inflation, unemployment, economic shock and a political crisis’.1 Yet, despite the constant turbulence of these years, Yeltsin was presiding over and facilitating the most dynamic and liberated period of Russian history.

If there is disagreement about Yeltsin’s legacy, even his opponents agree that the free rein Yeltsin allowed the media and political opposition during these years was his greatest achievement. By promoting free speech Yeltsin did what seemed impossible: he freed society from fear. Archives were opening up, books were being published, public records were becoming available. The daily Nezavisimaya gazeta said of him in an obituary (though notably not during his lifetime when events were too frenetic and hopes vied with ignorance about what could be done) that it was precisely because he had ‘removed fear from people’s hearts’ that people took out their frustrations on him. ‘Citizens interpreted their own difficulties in adapting to a new way of life as the blunders of the country’s leader. And as people no longer had fear, the head of state was ostracised by just about everyone’.2 By raising the sluice gate on speech, it is probably true to say that Yeltsin became the most trashed leader in Russian history. The free flow of speech was not only of the respectable kind, but a cacophony of noises, pushing the boundaries of convention, sometimes inflammatory and odious, expressing a need not always to learn so much as to vent feelings, to speak and give voice. The arsenal of criticism against Yeltsin was large because the range of possibilities that opened up was even larger.

Yeltsin’s contribution to freedom and democracy has to be measured not against the



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