Boris Yeltsin

August 14, 2007

Last week I did a cartoon showing Vladimir Putin atop Lenin’s tomb reminiscent of photos we’d see of Soviet leaders during the cold war years. I was inspired to draw it following renewed interest by the Russians in the Arctic from the North Pole to the Mediterranean via the Caucasus. It made me think back, before Boris Yeltsin, to the last time I drew Lenin’s tomb back when Mikhail Gorbachev was in power, as he warming up to the west with Glasnost, and implementing political and economic reforms otherwise known as Perestroika. The year was 1989, democracy was spreading throughout Eastern Europe, the Berlin Wall had just come down, and I was a student at the University of Ottawa. I was just starting out getting my worked published in the student press, through the campus newspaper called The Fulcrum. I had a cartoon strip called:

It was modern day (mostly Canadian) political news placed in a medieval setting. Brian Mulroney was the King of Canadaland, Gorbachev was the Russian Tsar, they rode around in horses, they spoke in Monty Pythonesque olde englishe. For most of the time it existed between September 1989, and April 1991, I collaborated with my friend, Paul Nichols, who was a fellow history student. He helped write it, and I drew it. It was published for each weekly edition of the Fulcrum.


Click here to see a larger version.

In retrospect, they were a bit wordy. The jokes were corny. The drawings were a bit crude, but keep in mind that we were twenty year olds. At the time home computers were still very basic word processors, there was no Internet, and early versions of Photoshop were still half a decade away. The inking of Alas & Alack had to be configured with exacto knives and glue stick. Tones were done using Chartpak shading film, and some special text was incorporated using Letraset transferrable lettering. It was all very time consuming work to put together a single Alas & Alack cartoon. A perfect excuse to keep me from reading textbooks, writing essays and studying for exams.


Click here to see a larger version.

Throughout the series I portrayed former Canadian Prime Ministers Clark and Turner, who were still active in politics at the time, as “erstwhile kings” who would show up every now and then carrying the crowns they once wore when they were in charge. Pierre Trudeau would show up portrayed as some sort of God-like character who lived in an acropolis type of temple on Mount Royal.

More Alas & Alack in the days to come….

FEEDBACK

I remember Alas and Alack quite well, Mr. Mackay. I started studying at U of O in 1990 and I remember seeing it and a whole bunch of other cartoons of yours in the newspaper. Looks like you’ve done pretty well in cartooning eversince. Not surprising! Glad I can keep enjoying your work.

Marc LeBlanc (August 16, 2007)

April 23, 2007

Boris Yeltsin is dead. Many, I think, were surprised he was still alive. Perhaps he was pickled by the constant flow of alcohol he evidently consumed midway through his Presidency of Russia towards the end of his retirement. Who knows? The fact is after he handed the Kremlin keys over to Vladimir Putin in 2000 he never really resurfaced in the public limelight again, becoming largely forgotten.

It’s only on reflection that I realize he was a character that shaped many editorial cartoons. Here are just a few I drew as he neared the end of his reign in a drunken stupor:

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Of course there must be credit given to the man who began his rise to stardom by toppling a Communist coup designed to reverse the democratic reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev.

While he will undoubtedly go down in history for liberating Soviet citizens, he may be better remembered in the old “free world” for his trashing the old USSR, and thereby ending any remnants left from the cold war years. He oversaw the disintegration of the old Soviet Union and became Russia’s first democratically elected leader. Then he tried to bring in goofy economic policies which only empowered corrupt oligarchs and angered legislators, and when things didn’t go his way he brought back old style Soviet tactics to deal with dissent and ethnic unrest. Blasting the Parliament buildings with cannon fire isn’t exactly the most democratic way to debate things with opponents, although Yeltsin seemed to think it was, and he got away with it. He also got away with pinching the bums of women politicians and bureaucrats; hamming for the cameras while visiting Berlin and by grabbing a conductors baton and leading an orchestra; playing the spoons on the head of Askar Akayev, the president of Kyrgyzstan; and staggering around in his underpants shouting for pizza in the hotel room during his first summit meeting with Bill Clinton.

Upon further reflection I connect the Yeltsin years with the Clinton years… and can’t help associating those figures, as much the buffoons they were, to that relatively harmonious period of time in the pre-9/11 world. No wonder Bill Clinton loved to bear hug Yeltsin. But once Boris was gone, the good old days of close relations clearly started to wane. Seven years on Vladimir Putin continues to rule Russia at a far sobering and utilitarian pace. What freedom Yeltsin brought in, much has been clamped down upon by his successor. Here’s one I drew shortly after Putin came to power in Russia: