A Reversal of Fortunes

A tidbit from the Washington Post editorial on Yeltsin:

But in the following seven years Mr. Putin has extinguished most of the liberal reforms his predecessor battled for. Once again elections in Russia are a Potemkin fraud, almost all the media follow government orders and dissidents are beaten in the streets, or worse. Moscow again has imperial pretensions: Mr. Putin has tried to annex Belarus and force other neighbors to become Kremlin satellites.