an-average-sized-person:

biff-donderglutes:

hootenannie:

nothing new but it bears remembering that the Clintons actually did meddle in Russia’s elections to prevent a communist from winning, directly leading to how rightist the Russian Federation state is today

I do wanna be better about criticality of stuff on websites like this. What’s the deal with what the Clintons did in Russia?

They rigged the 1996 election to keep Boris Yeltsin in power, Yeltsin being the one who would later choose Putin to be his successor. While Yeltsin initially came into power with high expectations and optimism from Russians and the West (he was considered an anti-establishment rebel for being the first person to willingly resigned from the Soviet Politburo, and widely called a hero for stopping a coup against Gorbachev) the initial high wore off very quickly after his extreme market liberalization policies led to tens of millions of Russians being plunged into poverty, widespread corruption and the rise of the “New Russians”, wealthy business oligarchs who made billions off of newly privatized businesses. These policies were so severe that economists dubbed it “economic shock therapy”.

To add insult to injury, he responded to criticism of this policy by the opposition parties by dissolving the parliament and sending in the Army to shell the parliamentary building, topped off by rewriting the constitution so that he could have more power (and abolish the position of Vice President because the parliament wanted to replace him with his VP).

That, topped off with the first invasion of Chechnya and frequent embarrasments abroad (he was a notorious drunk even by Russian standards and was obviously plastered during many public appearances–at one point Hillary woke up in the middle of the night to find Yeltsin standing on Pennsylvania Avenue drunk and wearing nothing but his underwear trying to hail a taxi) led to his approval rating dropping to 5% before the next election. But his biggest opponents in that election were the Communists and right-wing former Russian Army commander Alexander Lebed, neither of which were that friendly to either the oligarchs or the US. So after a peace agreement was signed with the Chechnyan seperatists, the CIA teamed up with the government and some oligarchs to start a propaganda campaign aimed at repairing Yeltsin’s image…and after Yeltsin won, some analysts noticed some strange patterns in some of Russia’s ethnic republics that were inconsistent with previous voting habits. Current Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev later commented “There is hardly any doubt who won in 1996, and it was not Yeltsin”.

After the start of his second term (which he spent mostly in the hospital recovering from an emergency quintuple bypass surgery), Russia received $40 billion from the IMF…which subsequently disappeared and has never been seen since, leading to widespread rumors that he gave it to his underlings. His economic policies continued to be disatrous, which eventually lead to the government defaulting on their debts, causing a financial crisis that sent shockwaves through Eastern Europe. This caused even more pressure on him to resign. In response, Yeltsin fired his Prime Minister and his entire cabinet. The new PM? A former KGB agent named Vladimir Putin.

Finally, after another attempted impeachment followed by investigations alleging that Yeltsin was being bribed a construction company in Switzerland, Yeltsin abruptly announced on New Year’s Eve 1999 that he would be resigining immediately and leaving power in the hands of the Prime Minister. In his last address to the nation, he practically begged them for forgiveness for his mistakes, and ended it by telling his people that they “deserve happiness and peace”

And that’s how we got Putin. Karma’s a bitch ain’t it?

(As an epilogue, Yeltsin spent his post-presidential years out of the public eye, occasionally popping back up to criticize his successor, before dying of heart failure in 2007. Some conspiracy theorists believe that he actualy drank himself to death in late 1999 and that the person who resigned and lived until 2007 was just a body double)