The bear who came in from the cold
April 23rd, 2007 by le ideoblogue
Today I was bidding my time in a warehouse in Luxembourg, wa iting alongside a hundred other bored journalists for EU’s foreign ministers to chew their lunch and deign us with a press conference. Bored, most of my colleagues were loitering around, munching tasteless sandwiches, reading papers, gossiping, calling their girlfriends in Slovenia, smoking in the sun and gazing vacantly in big tv screens. This is where it came from - no trigger went off, nobody gasped. But from one second to another, all eyes were nailed to the silver screens, all jabbering was cut. In silence we heard that one of recent history’s iconic figures had unexpectedly died.
And then, as if an electric spark went through the press crowd, the usual creative chaos ensued - phones were ringing, there was manic typing, cameramen dragging trioids were tripping over laptop cables. History had struck, now we had to tell the world about it without too much wavering, pondering and procrastination.
But Boris Yeltsin was not a person one can write about with a light hand and on the spur of the moment. He was a complex man, with a complex role in the history of the 1990s. I will not repeat what others will write elsewhere much better. I just want to tell you what an saintly-looking and alcohol-stinking old Russian once told me about him: “In Russia under Yeltsin, there was destruction, poverty, immorality everywhere - but we have never breathed so freely before or after that”.
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