Time & Perspective Quote by Boris Yeltsin

Revisionist confidence is doing a lot of work here. Yeltsin is essentially declaring history immune to indictment: no strategic mistakes, only minor “tactical errors,” and anyway the country “embarked on a correct path.” It’s a political maneuver masquerading as a sober postmortem. By drawing a hard line between strategy and tactics, he reserves the big decisions for the realm of destiny, while shunting the pain of the 1990s into the category of regrettable but incidental friction.

The phrasing gives away the stakes. The double denial (“there were no... No, there were no”) reads less like clarification than self-defense, the kind of insistence you use when you suspect the audience has already formed its verdict. “Could affect Russia’s history” is another tell: it’s not claiming mistakes didn’t happen, but that none were consequential enough to stain the grand narrative. That’s not analysis; it’s an attempt to control the moral accounting.

Context matters. Yeltsin’s presidency is inseparable from shock therapy, mass privatization, oligarchic consolidation, collapsing living standards, and the humiliations of a post-Soviet state trying to reinvent itself at speed. By the time he’s offering this verdict, his legitimacy is contested and his legacy precarious. The subtext is a request for amnesty: judge me by the arc, not the wreckage. “And it changed” is the final pivot, implying that transformation itself is the proof of correctness, even if the method was brutal. It’s history written as inevitability - because inevitability is harder to prosecute.