Not really a tosser in the same sense as the others, I don’t think anyway.
Not so much an evil dictator or a bigoted shit, more of an incompetent twat.
He had a colourful life at the top of Russian politics, coming to power in 1991 as the first President of the Russian Federation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
As President of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin was committed to opening up the country and taking it from a centrally-planned communist system to a market economy.
Due to various power struggles, which included a coup, which Boris famously defied with a speech stood atop a tank, and another instance of unrest where Yeltsin ordered a the shelling of the Russian White House, the economy was in extremely bad shape as a fool-hardy strategy of market liberalisation called the Washington Consensus, otherwise known as ‘Shock Therapy’, was embarked upon, on the advise of The USA IMF, World bank and US treasury..
From Wikipedia:
In January 1992, Gaidar convinced Yeltsin to introduce a program of “shock therapy” in Russia. On January 2, Yeltsin, acting as his own prime minister, ordered the liberalization of foreign trade, prices, and currency. At the same time, Yeltsin followed a policy of ‘macroeconomic stabilization,’ a harsh austerity regime designed to control inflation. Under Yeltsin’s stabilization program, interest rates were raised to extremely high levels to tighten money and restrict credit. To bring state spending and revenues into balance, Yeltsin raised new taxes heavily, cut back sharply on government subsidies to industry and construction, and made steep cuts to state welfare spending.
In early 1992, prices skyrocketed throughout Russia, and deep credit crunch shut down many industries and brought about a protracted depression. Many state enterprises shut down as they found themselves without orders or financing. The living standards of much of the population were devastated. In the 1990s Russia suffered an economic downturn more severe than the United States or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression.
In 1992, Yeltsin began another round of privatisations and to give it a boost, issued every one with a 10,000 ruble voucher to spend on shares of select Russian enterprises, but with most people having nothing and needing to food, clothing and heating, most of these vouchers were sold immediately ending up in a few hands, rather than the many.
Again in 1995, more privatisations came as the mounting Russian debt forced Boris to exchange stock shares for bank loans, which also bought him support for the elections that were approaching in Spring 1996. This gave valuable state assets, telecoms, energy, finance etc, the Russian Oligarchs, became some of Yeltsins most major backers of the election.
Boris Yeltsin. Sold Russia down the Swanny.
Tosser.
Labels: Dead Tossers
Leave a Reply