Leadership Quote by Boris Yeltsin

Yeltsin’s line works because it performs a neat political magic trick: it shrinks an entire lived system into a harmless abstraction. “Let’s not talk about Communism” isn’t just impatience; it’s agenda-setting. He’s trying to close the book on the Soviet past, not by arguing it down point by point, but by declaring the topic obsolete. That opening “let’s” sounds collegial, even reasonable, while it quietly demands amnesia.

The phrasing that follows is deliberately deflationary. “Just an idea” and “pie in the sky” reframe Communism as a naive daydream rather than a state project that organized jobs, fear, status, shortages, and meaning for millions. It’s rhetoric designed to sever nostalgia from legitimacy: if Communism was merely a fantasy, then the hardships of the 1990s can’t be charged against an abandoned “better” reality, because that reality never existed. The maneuver also protects Yeltsin’s reforms. If the alternative is recast as childish illusion, shock therapy and abrupt privatization become the only grown-up options on the table, however brutal their results.

Context matters: Yeltsin governed amid collapsing institutions, nationalist backlash, oligarchic plunder, and a public tempted to romanticize the stability of the USSR. His dismissiveness is defensive as much as triumphant. By trivializing Communism, he’s not only rejecting an ideology; he’s trying to delegitimize the very vocabulary his opponents could use to indict his era.