Abstract

Yeltsin's summit, Russia's vale

It is informed that U.S. President Bill Clinton will be meeting his Russian counterpart on March 20, 1997 at Helsinki. Last July Clinton hailed Boris Yeltsin's election victory as a triumph of democracy. He would not dare to echo that boast today, if only because it's well known that the election was a fraud perpetrated on the Russian public: The Russians would not have voted for Yeltsin had they known he was such an invalid. Only extraordinarily tight government control over television enabled the stage managers to conceal his heart attack. But there is a deeper reason not to insist. The eight months of Russian "regency;" during which the Czar's exorbitant powers were carried out by proxy, revealed the working of the system, the mechanism through which money first buys power and then fully exercises it.