Leadership Quote by Boris Yeltsin

Yeltsin’s line reads like an attempt to turn raw upheaval into managed inevitability: yes, it’s hard, but don’t feel it too loudly. The key move is the pivot from “everyone” to “one cannot.” He starts with a nod to collective suffering, then immediately disciplines that suffering into a rule. That’s not empathy so much as containment. In a crisis, “emotions” become a political threat: grief can become protest, anger can become organization, panic can become a run on whatever institutions still function. So he reframes the proper civic posture as stoic compliance.

The phrasing is revealingly bureaucratic. “Draw lessons,” “work on overcoming it” are verbs of process, not accountability. They imply a technocratic after-action report rather than a reckoning with who caused what, who benefited, and who pays. It’s the language of a state trying to look like a state even when it’s improvising.

Context matters: Yeltsin governed through the shock of post-Soviet transition, economic freefall, and constitutional confrontation. Public life was saturated with trauma and uncertainty, and his legitimacy depended on projecting forward motion - reform as destiny - even when the costs were brutal and unevenly distributed. The subtext is a demand for patience without a guarantee: endure now, we’ll narrate meaning later. In that sense, the quote functions less as comfort than as a bid for authority over interpretation, insisting that history will redeem the present if people stop reacting to it.