alt Hacker NewsCalling Yeltsin a communist is bananas. He played a central role in collapsing the Soviet Union by pulling Russia out of the Union, without any democratic input from the people. He then privatized everything, sold it all to the oligarchs and outside American/European hedge funds, and gutted all of Russia's remaining social safety programs from the SU. Yeltsin would be considered the very definition of a neoliberal, and was considered a friend and ally of the United States, which is now something we try to whitewash.
The key thing for me here is that Yeltsin apparently falsified a lot of elections, including his own, to keep the right people in power. Economic liberalization (which had quite an effect) while holding the political reins tightly is very much like the Chinese communists acted during Deng Xiaoping's tenure. The Chinese managed to bring somehow wiser people to top though, it seems.
Yeltsin may have used Communists as a scare during his campaign. But today's Russia is in hands of a former Communist dictator, much like today's China is in the hands of a career-Communist dictator.