By John Helmer in Moscow

For a brief moment, the death of Boris Yeltsin in April allowed his supporters and critics to reappear in full cry; particularly his supporters, whose attacks on the Putin administration have failed to attract an audience outside Embassy Row, and who are naturally nostalgic for the days when their bons mots drew better remuneration.

Since almost no Russian or western correspondent remains in Moscow today, who reported on the Gorbachev, the Yeltsin, and the Putin administrations, the Yeltsin obituary columns were largely an exercise in wishful retro-thinking -- and exhibitionism.

Alexei Pankin, a Russian veteran of all three periods, is one of the few to note that it was Gorbachev who introduced the freedom of the press, for which Yeltsin gets the credit.

Without putting a name, or pointing a finger at Alexei Venediktov, Yevgeny Kiselyov, and Mikhail Leontiev -- starlings of radio, television, and print in the Yeltsin period, who reemerged to celebrate the corpse -- Pankin writes that it was "Gorbachev [who] gave us glasnost, with its almost unlimited freedom of speech and the country's first post-1917 independent newspaper, radio and television stations. But Yeltsin's oligarchic regime exercised strict control over television broadcasting, turning it into an instrument of psychological warfare. He brought so much economic pressure on the print media that newspaper owners were forced sell column space to the highest bidder. I think he only put up with as much media criticism as he did because it was no threat to him."

It's the last line that carries the sting for the red-letter men of the Yeltsin period. Their subsequent disappearance, like their initial appearance, has been of no consequence.

But Pankin, editor of a media industry journal in Moscow, feels the professional obligation to balance his detestation for Yeltsin, and so Lenin's corpse is thrown in. "For me, Yeltsin and Lenin were cut from the same cloth. One spewed communist slogans and the other anti-communist jargon, but they deserve to lie beside each other on Red Square." It's a point worth arguing about.

In his favour, it was often said in the time Yeltsin ruled Russia that he eliminated the queues in front of shops that were a notorious feature of Soviet scarcity. Some of the laudatory obits for Yelstin recalled the well-known episode when for the Moscow television cameras, and as part of his campaign of vengeance against Gorbachev, Yeltsin staged a demand for meat in a Moscow shop in front of a line of customers, knowing in advance that there was no meat supply to be had. For Russian viewers, it looked like Yeltsin was exposing the corruption of the food supply chain.

It never occurred to any reporter at the time to come back a day later, interview the shop personnel, and find out that Yeltsin's men had arranged to buy up the shop's meat at the back-door, in advance; and thus to stage the climactic moment when the only corruption to be exposed was -- Yeltsin's himself.

What was not reported, then, or now that Yeltsin is dead, was that the waiting only seemed to disappear. For the shortage of consumer goods, which the waiting-lines indicated, was quickly replaced by the scarcity of money to buy goods; the freedom to wait, substituted by the freedom to go without. For Yeltsin imposed the most draconian tax ever known in Russia or Europe – a 100-percent tax for millions in the workforce, who were not paid wages at all; lost the value of their pensions and their cash savings in two massive devaluations; and virtually all their social welfare, when the state treasury was looted.

Yeltsin also introduced the thousand billion-dollar subsidy, the largest ever known, to a handful of his political supporters. Known today as the oligarchs, they took the entire natural resource stock and capital of the country for themselves, and banked it abroad.

According to police counts, about 25,000 people filed past Yeltsin's body during the public obsequies following his demise on April 23. But there has still been no comprehensive count of those whose deaths were invisible, and the responsibility for which is Yeltsin's. For it was Yeltsin whose grab for personal power ended up destroying at least 3 million lives, possibly 4 million. They were Russians, mostly middle-aged men and women, whose life expectancy was cut by ten years, when the health system of the country stopped functioning, the ambulances had no drivers or petrol, and the supply of medicines ran out. Statistically speaking, they would not have died if Yeltsin had not taken power from Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.

And if you are fond of animals, more cows, pigs and sheep died for lack of feed, fuel and heat, which Russia's farmers could no longer afford under Yeltsin, than were destroyed during Adolph Hitler's invasion. Bill Clinton was repaying a great many debts to Yeltsin, when he stood beside his bier last month. Not the least of them was the billions of dollars earned by the chicken exporters of Arkansas, Clinton's home state, during the time when Yeltsin destroyed Russia's capacity to put meat on the table. To this day, chicken remains the largest American export to Russia.

There is slaughter; and then there is murder, which took off with Yeltsin's arrival. The Russian homicide rate currently stands at over 20 per 1,000; that is ­three times higher than that of the US, and ten times greater that of Western and Eastern Europe, Canada, China and Japan. The freedom to carry automatic pistols which Americans cherish has led to deaths in a blaze of publicity. But the freedom to die invisibly – from knife, poison, bare hands, and automobiles driven by drunks – that's a credit Yeltsin has earned.

This leaves the lucky minority of Russians who actually received wages, and stayed alive during the Yeltsin period. For most of them, it was a time of unstoppable slide towards poverty. In a new book, The Anatomy of Russian Capitalism, published by EIR in Washington, DC, Stanislav Menshikov reports that in 1991 the average pension was above the measurable poverty line, and then sank to below the subsistence minimum by 1998. In 1992, the average Russian wage level was triple the poverty level; by 2001 it was just 2.2 times higher.

As Menshikov documents the redistributiuon of income and capital in the Yeltsin period, it is evident that the US economic plan for Russia, intended to slash military spending, succeeded. Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin's government chief, acknowledges in his memoirs that his first major act in taking over the state biuget was to cut in half government spending on weapons and military spending. Breaking the rouble link to the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union came next. Disconnecting the state from domestic resource industries -- privatization -- was third. No more effective attack on an enemy state's capability to wage war, or defend itself, has ever been carried out -- without a shot being fired. That was until October of 1993, when Yeltsin shelled the parliament into submission; 146 were killed.

The huge sums saved, plus the value not paid out of the Gross Domestic Product as labour income, were diverted on a grand scale to the tiny elite of beneficiaries of the privatization process. They in turn understood the pecking order of authority in the new Russia -- and they kowtowed correctly: first, the US Embassy, then Yeltsin.

In this disintegration of labour income, the four groups of wage-earners who were worst hit, according to Menshilov's compilation of the wage statistics, were doctors, teachers, artists, and farmers. The only sectors of light industry, producing for domestic consumption, which flourished were the two dominated by foreign capital and imports -- cigarettes and alcohol, the two great poisons.

Despite the resource export boom of the past five years, the position of Russians in the health care, education, culture and food production sectors has not improved during the Putin administration, if the average wage for their sectors is expressed as a ratio of the average wage for all industry. Those who are alive today were indubitably better off, statistically speaking, according to Menshikov, in 1970! and, of course, those who are dead are silent, quite untheatrically so.