Sparkling Shrine to Vilified Leader
YEKATERINBURG, Russia — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has reviled those years as a period of chaos, crime and “total poverty.”
Kremlin- controlled news outlets lambast what they call “the wild ’90s” as a time of personal humiliation and shameful national weakness.
All the abuse, however, has been an unexpected boon to the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, a shimmering shrine on the edge of Siberia to Mr. Putin’s reviled predecessor and his turbulent years in power, from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to the end of 1999.
“I am glad they are constantly criticizing the ’90s,” said Alexandr Drozdov, the executive director of a private foundation that oversees the Yeltsin center, a museum and archive complex dedicated to Russia’s first elected and, at least according to opinion polls, widely loathed late president. “I tell them, ‘Keep criticizing, please don’t stop.’ ”
The scorn poured on Yeltsin and his era have given the complex an edgy appeal, helping it attract more than 700,000 visitors since it opened three winters ago.
It has become perhaps Russia’s most popular and certainly its most lavishly equipped outpost of alternative history.
The complex — set next to a lake in Yekaterinburg, the industrial city where Yeltsin lived for much of his life and where Czar Nicholas II and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks — is a showcase for how Russia has changed for the better under Mr. Putin.
At its core, the complex is a mournful requiem for the many things lost since Yeltsin stepped down on December 31, 1999, and handed power to his chosen successor, Mr. Putin, with the words: “Take care of Russia.”
Yeltsin, Mr. Drozdov said, “would be very disappointed” had he lived to see where Mr. Putin has taken the country. “He would cry.”
One exhibit features puppets from a satirical television show that, in the 1990s, skewered Yeltsin and his officials. The show was canceled by Mr. Putin, who was offended by an ugly, dwarfish puppet that portrayed him.
The once private television station that broadcast the weekly show, NTV, is now controlled by the state.
Western- oriented liberals mostly view Yeltsin as a brave, if deeply flawed, hero who rallied resistance to an August 1991 putsch by Communist Party hard-liners, broke the back of the Soviet Union, introduced capitalism and gave birth to Russia as a free and democratic nation.
But nationalists and leftists remember him as at best a vodka-soaked buffoon and at worst a traitor working for the West. They want the complex shut down, or at least altered to create what Ilya Belous, a critic, thinks should be “a museum of Yeltsin’s crimes.”
“Putin’s P.R. team has reduced everything to the contrast between images of a young, dynamic Putin and an old, alcoholic Yeltsin,” said Yevgeny V. Roizman, a critic who resigned last summer as the mayor of Yekaterinburg in protest at the abolition of mayoral elections in the city.
“Many people don’t really know what happened in the 1990s,” the former mayor said. “They blame Yeltsin for destroying the Soviet Union, but nobody destroyed it. The Soviet Union fell apart of its own accord because it could not support itself ideologically or economically. It simply collapsed.” The center’s goal, said Dina Sorokina, the museum director, is not to whitewash Yeltsin, though it does ignore some of the more odious features of his rule, notably the emergence of so- called oligarchs through corrupt privatization deals.
The silence about Russia’s oligarchs is explained by a list of donors at the entrance. It includes billionaire tycoons like Oleg Deripaska and Roman Abramovich, both of whom made their fortunes in the 1990s.
In a stiff speech at the opening of the museum, Mr. Putin said the museum told “the honest story of what was done in a difficult time.”
Mr. Drozdov recalled that the president strolled through exhibit halls celebrating lost freedoms “without a hint of emotion on his face.”
Yeltsin, who governed Yekaterinburg as Communist Party boss in the 1970s, died in 2007 at age 76.
But he still looms large in Russia, and many ordinary Russians blame him for the demise of the Soviet empire and for plunging the country into poverty and disorder.
Andrei Pirashkov, a 23-year- old communist who was elected last year to the City Council in Yekaterinburg, said he was no fan of Yeltsin but often visited the center for its seminars and public debates.
“I am against making a personality cult around Yeltsin,” Mr. Pirashkov said, “But the real issue now is Putin.”