Word: russianize
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...Yeltsin, 1931-2007 --> Yeltsin's decision, that day, to defy an attempt by old-line Communist Party officials to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev came at a moment as crucial as any in Russia's long and violent history. The leaders had failed to gain control of the White House, the Russian Federation's parliamentary building and the main rallying point for pro-democracy Muscovites. When army tanks rolled up to the building on the morning of Aug. 19, Yeltsin, then the recently elected President of Russia, seized the moment. He strode outside, leapt atop an armored vehicle and delivered a speech...
...coup attempt. In typical truculent fashion, he ran for parliament in Moscow instead of his old Sverdlovsk home base, taking on the party establishment directly, and winning a seat in 1989. With that as a political base, he fought successful campaigns for the chairmanship in 1990 of the Russian Supreme Soviet, the former parliament, and then the newly created presidency in June 1991. Once in office as Russia's first freely elected President, he faced the overpowering task of more or less instantly bringing democracy and capitalism to a country that had never truly known the former and had practically...
...ties his Kremlin into vast economic empires. His tenure coincided with a precipitous decline in Russia' s GNP and in the living standards of the majority of its citizens - unlike Putin, who has been blessed by rising world oil and natural gas prices, Yeltsin ruled in an era when Russian exports did little to raise the country's strained currency reserves...
...Yeltsin oversaw the diminution of the Russian empire created by the czars and the Communists to the point that he ruled over less than half the territory governed by Peter the Great. And that imperial contraction was achieved largely without bloodshed. Yeltsin's era, then, marked the end of the Cold War and the very idea of Moscow as a strategic threat to the West. But the Russia he created proved vulnerable to a reversion to authoritarian nationalism and a cooler relationship with the West. In the end, Yeltsin will be better remembered for that dramatic moment when he jumped...
...Yeltsin was one of those few Russian leaders who became figures of world history. He was very Russian in everything, in his controversies in particular. He was also a true, born leader, capable of going against the tide of public opinion. He did so when he quarreled with Gorbachev in the Soviet Politburo. He did go against the tide, when he presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He did so when he hired Yegor Gaidar and his team to launch his reform...