Boris Yeltsin, who died on Monday, played a crucial role in Russia's transition to a democracy, in part because he was willing to eliminate government censorship of the press, says a Duke University expert on Soviet and Russian media.
"Though he blustered if the press criticized him (and puppets every week made fun of him as a drunk), he always came down on the democratic side," said Ellen Mickiewicz, the director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke.
"If bills came to him from a conservative legislature wanting to control speech and its dissemination, he vetoed them. His years were among the best for the development of commercial television stations all over Russia."
In recent years, these television stations have either gone off the air or are now in the control of friends of current Russian president Vladimir Putin, said Mickiewicz, who has written extensively on Soviet and Russian media. "The old oligarchs who are out have been replaced by new favorites of the president and life in Russia is even more corrupt at all levels, top-down, than before," she said.
Yeltsin, too, will be associated with cronyism and corruption, said Mickiewicz, the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy Studies and Political Science at Duke. "But in comparison to Putin, Boris Yeltsin, with all his too human and undisciplined habits, in the end still supported the green shoots of democracy," she said.