Yeltsin

“An epic book that captures all of the color, drama and contradiction of this elusive man. . . . This biography is solid, important and accessible.”

—Tucson Citizen

“[Yeltsin] will be of lasting importance to serious readers and is highly recommended for academic as well as large public libraries.”

—Library Journal

“Colton, a scholar of Russian studies at Harvard, has written the first comprehensive biography of Yeltsin. Aided by access to Yeltsin himself as well as to prominent Russian officials and close associates, Colton seeks insight by examining Yeltsin’s family background, childhood, and young manhood. . . . An important work.”

—Booklist

“A solid and sympathetic portrait of a leader misunderstood and underestimated in the West.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“While praising Yeltsin’s ability to keep Russia together and sow the seeds for later economic success, Colton criticizes his failure to establish constitutional safeguards that might have prevented Russia’s recent turn toward authoritarianism. Colton’s book offers a finely detailed portrait of a key international leader.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A knowledgeable and compelling account of an almost forgotten leader at a historic turning point in world history, and a must-read for serious students of the Soviet collapse.”

—James MacGregor Burns, author of Leadership and Running Alone: Presidential Leadership from JFK to Bush II

“Timothy Colton’s fascinating, thoroughly researched biography captures the contradictions in the life of the mercurial Russian president, yet gives Boris Yeltsin his due as an event-shaping statesman. While Yeltsin’s activities provided abundant material for the caricatures that dominated much journalism of the period, Professor Colton has probed beneath the sensational to give a rounded, balanced picture of the man who changed Russian history. For those who wish to understand what happened to Russia in the 1990s, there could be no better guide.”

—Jack F. Matlock, Jr., U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1987–1991, and author of Autopsy on an Empire and Reagan and Gorbachev

“Colorful and charismatic, grave-digger of the Soviet Union yet unable to set the successor regime he founded on a stable course, Boris Yeltsin is the perfect subject of Timothy Colton’s fine biography. Based on exhaustive research including interviews with Yeltsin, his family, and other Soviet and post-Soviet officials, balanced and judicious in its judgments, combining spirited storytelling with scholarly depth, Yeltsin is a wonderful achievement.”

—William Taubman, Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

“One of the transformative figures of the late 20th century has gotten the biography he deserves—a great story, brilliantly told, about a man as complex and consequential as the era in which he rose to the Kremlin and lowered the hammer-and-sickle forever. A monumental work of meticulous scholarship, fresh insight, astute judgment, and narrative skill, Tim Colton’s biography is a masterpiece.”

—Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institute and author of The Great Experiment

For Samuel P. Huntington

Introduction

Hero As Paradox

At twelve noon, Friday, December 31, 1999, Moscow time, on the cusp of the new year, the new century, and the new millennium, a surprise announcement from the president’s office was televised across Russia from the Baltic Sea, where the sun had crept above the horizon, to the Bering Strait, where it had just dipped below. Boris Yeltsin, attired in a charcoal-gray suit and silver tie, with a tinseled holiday tree in the background, had videotaped it that morning. He was retiring seven months before the expiration of his mandate, he said hoarsely, and was handing over power to the prime minister and now acting president, Vladimir Putin, pending confirmation by the electorate. As the terse clip rolled, the presidential suite, paraphernalia, and “nuclear briefcase” were already in Putin’s hands and Yeltsin was clinking glasses at a leave-taking luncheon.¹

Most viewers could not help recall a telecast from the Kremlin eight winters earlier, at seven P.M. on Western Christmas, December 25, 1991.² In that funereal tableau, Mikhail Gorbachev, the resolute liquidator of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain and the irresolute reformer of communism, declared his resignation from the presidency of the Soviet Union and, with utmost reluctance, his acquiescence in unraveling the once mighty union itself. He abdicated to the same human being who would star in the 1999 presentation.