The Post's Lee Hockstader has clearly revealed himself to be, well, a nincompoop. To equate or even compare the actions and authority of Boris Yeltsin with the "corrupt and morally adrift" system prior to 1991 is ridiculous.  The USSR had been living under brutal, totalitarian rule since 1917--more than 70 years.  The Soviet Union was never "morally adrift," as Hockstader writes.  It was always clearly immoral and criminal and violent.  And it was hell-bent on creating the new "Soviet Man," and the new classless paradise on earth. It rejected the Natural Law and the laws of God, and it reaped the whirlwind. The first major concentration camp system of the 20 th century was established by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. An estimated 10 million people had been murdered (or died in prison) between 1917 and 1928/29, when Stalin took over. Afer that, another 20 million went through the Soviet gulags or straight to the prison of the Lubyanka where they were shot.  Historian Robert Conquest estimates that at the height of Stalin's terror in the 1930s, about 200 people a day were being shot at the Lubyanka----every single day---for political reasons.  The state-created famines in the Ukraine killed  an estimated 12 million people.  Life was so hard as a result of Soviet "agricultural policies" that people resorted to cannibalism. After Stalin died, the gulags did not close.  Many people were rehabiliatted, finally, but many of the prisons remained.  And the use of psychiatric hospitals to "re-educate" political prisoners was a common Soviet practice throughout the 1970s and 1980s.  And, of course, the Soviets supported Mao in his takeover of China in the late 1940s.  That pathetic thug instituted policies that led to the death of an estimated 60 million people.  The Soviets throughot the 60s, 70s and 80s also supported violent communist movements and/or governments in Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua----not to mention the USSR's enslavement of all of Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1987.  Boris Yeltsin was no saint, and the post-Soviet regime is no heaven, but it is far better than what was there before.  A country and a people brutalized for 70 years under a suicidal ideology/religion like communism suffer the consequences.  The Russian people are still recovering today and will be for decades.  Thank goodness that Yeltsin at least helped break the communist regime's back.   It's a long way home now.

Since 1991 I had been doing business with people from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Bulgaria. With each person I dealt with I was always intrigued in learning from their viewpoint about the fall of communism.

Based on their perspective, the fall came over a long period of time and primarily from within. The single most decisive event was détente by Nixon/Kissinger which from their view cracked open the wall to western values and business. From their view Reagan’s strategy of bankrupting the USSR government did accelerate the government’s demise.

Regarding Gorbachev, he was the lucky benefactor of reform but Yeltsin was the reformer. Gorbachev was more polished, but people within the old USSR regard Yeltsin as the real hero which has always been a source of anger for Gorbachev.

Gorbachev never had to deal with the incredible difficulty of placing Russia on the path of capitalism and democracy in an incredibly short time. So the conclusion this putz draws are reprehensible without understanding the context in which these events took place.

MSM has always preferred the image of a polished Gorbachev to the rough exterior of Yeltsin much the same way they liked Clinton.