We Liked Boris Yeltsin

Lileks confessed yesterday that he always had a soft spot for Boris Yeltsin; apparently, so did Michael Barone:

Gorbachev got up to speak in his mellow voice. In the course of his speech he mentioned Yeltsin. He said something about having fallen in the road. Yeltsin had recently been found in such a position after an accident; perhaps (OK, probably) he had been drinking.

Yeltsin's face turned red as Gorbachev was speaking. The members laughed loudly, and so did many—most, it seemed to me—in the press gallery. Yeltsin was being publicly humiliated in the most deliberate way. His political career was obviously a shambles....

As I watched him on television in August 1991, standing on the tank and defying the coup plotters, it seemed to me that one man was standing between freedom and dictatorship in a country of more than 200 million people. And I remembered how I had watched him being humiliated only 22 months before.

May he rest in peace.