So farewell then, Boris Nikolaievich, you served your masters well; Washington, the World Bank, the kleptocracy. Now you will have a state funeral, but your friend Berezovsky won't be able to attend. The Western Media will sing your praises, with a few indulgent references to your "colourful" behaviour on the public stage. They'll forget that you were a Stalinist hack until the day it was possible to hold power without a party membership card. On that day - not one day before - did you tear up your party card before the world's cameras. Communist one day, anti-Communist the next, a truly Pauline conversion. From then on you changed hats frequently - dictator in the cause of democracy; bagman for the Mafiya; licenced clown of of global politics. Then the Russian people had had enough, and you were gone.

"Yeltsin has taken the opportunity to imprison & torture socialists who have a far longer record of opposing stalinism than he has, who were indeed imprisoned by the Communist regime when he was part of that regime, & who now profess the views in opposition to both stalinism and Yeltsin, that they always held." ("The Two O'Clock Knock Now Comes at Three", a Syndicalist Bulletin publication, October 1993). So old Borya was consistent in one thing, belonging to a ruling class that persecuted socialists.