Word: sovietizers
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...Some of the soldiers, already doubtful of the coup's legality and loath to open fire on unarmed fellow citizens, trained their guns away from the building and joined in its defense. The coup collapsed, and within a year the Soviet Union was no more. That freed more than a dozen countries to chart their own future, offered the hope of democracy to the 150 million people of Russia, and eliminated the Cold War threat of nuclear holocaust. As Yeltsin put it in his 1994 book Struggle for Russia, "I believe that history will record the twentieth century essentially ended...
...tippling priest carelessly dropped him in a baptismal font and was too inebriated to pull him out. His parents had to rescue him. "It means," the priest murmured, "that he is a good, tough lad." That was a necessity for survival in western Siberia during that era of Soviet history. Yeltsin recalled that during the bitterly cold winters he and his family in their communal hut used a goat to keep warm. "The six of us slept together around her on the floor," he wrote. Another of his early memories was the arrest of his father and uncle on charges...
...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 forgotten...
TIME's Yuri Zarakhovich asked two Muscovites from opposite ends of the social scale and with very different fortunes as a result of the Yeltsin era to give their own politial epitaphs on Russia's first post-Soviet President. The prosperous business executive and the lowly janitor had remarkably similar conclusions about Boris Yeltsin and his legacy...
...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...