Yeltsin Departure Elicits Mostly Relief in Russia

The snow fell softly all day in Moscow. It fell on Boris Yeltsin as he left the Kremlin as an ordinary citizen. It fell on shoppers slipping through the slushy streets searching for last-minute holiday gifts.

And it fell on 10-year-old Katya Keymakh as she twirled boldly if unevenly on the ice at a central Moscow skating pond, watched proudly by her videotaping father, Vladimir.

“It was time for Yeltsin to go,” the 36-year-old said, brushing the snow from his lens. “We’ve been prepared for this for a long time--that’s why we react to it calmly. The fact that we are replacing the president with the prime minister is not going to change our lives at all.”

During his eight years as president, Yeltsin repeatedly turned his country upside down and his countrymen’s lives inside out. Which may be one reason why so many Russians responded to his abrupt New Year’s Eve resignation with far more relief than surprise.

“By now, we’re immune to these shocks,” Keymakh said.

Outside the Kremlin in the afternoon, even as Russia’s Security Council was handing over the nuclear codes to acting President Vladimir V. Putin, workers were nonchalantly constructing a sound stage for the night’s New Year’s revelry. A few teens were getting a head start on the festivities, setting off fireworks and rockets when police weren’t looking.

In the GUM shopping arcade on Red Square, families strolled through the glass-ceilinged corridors, nibbling ice cream cones and soaking in the holiday atmosphere--and seemingly oblivious to the political drama underway a few hundred yards away in the Kremlin.

Goga Shkitin, 36, surrounded by shopping bags, snatched a few moments of rest by sitting on a wooden fire equipment box. He said he doesn’t doubt that the 68-year-old Yeltsin resigned in order to ensure an easier victory for Putin in the presidential election in March. And he said he is certain that Yeltsin deliberately chose New Year’s Eve to make as big an impact as possible on the rest of the world.

“But in Russia,” Shkitin said, “our holiday will continue. We’re used to all this. We don’t frighten easily.”

While the timing of Yeltsin’s resignation ensured that he would capture the world’s attention on the last day of 1999, in Russia it seemed to have the opposite effect. New Year’s is the biggest holiday of the year, a private time of family gift-giving, and many people seemed too wrapped up in their own festivities to spare much reflection for the departing president and the end of his era.

“It’s all the same to me, whether Yeltsin stays or goes,” said Katya Nicholayeva, 19, wheeling her 8-month-old daughter through a park in a baby buggy. “I suppose he did do a lot for the country. You can’t deny him that. But it was time for him to go, I think.”

In his address to the nation, Yeltsin boasted that his greatest achievement was burying the Communist legacy and assuring a democratic transfer of power to a new president for the first time in Russia’s history.

But Alexei Nikolayev, a 42-year-old unemployed accountant, said that, as far as he’s concerned, all Yeltsin brought to Russia was poverty and bandit capitalism.

“Maybe he did some good in the beginning,” he said, “but it was outweighed in the end by the bad.”

Indeed, at least in Moscow, Yeltsin’s resignation felt strangely anticlimactic. It was almost as if he had played so long on the political stage that Russians not only got bored by his antics, they also left the auditorium. So when he made his final bow Friday, there was no one left to clap.

“In the last few years, he hasn’t been much of a leader,” said Tatyana Khasanyan, a 32-year-old salesclerk in a cosmetics store. “His public appearances had become so embarrassing--he spoke no better than a little child.”

After Yeltsin’s recurrent illnesses and bouts of public feeblemindedness, there was palpable relief that the country’s new leader is at least healthy and young.

“It was time for Yeltsin to go a long time ago. He’s been a very sick man,” said Irina Biryukova, selling hothouse carnations in a metro station. “It’s almost like he decided to give us a New Year’s gift” by resigning.

“I like Putin. He’s strong, energetic,” she said of Yeltsin’s 47-year-old successor. “Things have to get better now. We’ve suffered long enough.”

Almost no one, in fact, expressed regret at Yeltsin’s departure. An unlikely exception was Vera Kalagina, 85, who stood quietly in a corner near the edge of Red Square, her eyes watering under a hand-knit head scarf. She steadied herself with one hand while she held out the other to passersby, hoping to collect a few spare kopecks.

“From my point of view, things aren’t any worse now than they were during the war,” Kalagina, despite her evident destitution, said softly. “He wasn’t, in the end, a bad president. We were used to him. I would have preferred that he stay.”