Word: tanks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years will define his legacy in Russia: economic chaos, the first war in Chechnya, episodes of alcoholic boorishness, worsening health and plummeting popularity, even as his country's global status declined precipitously. Even the White House legislature itself became a symbol of another kind two years after Yeltsin's tank-top speech, when troops acting on his orders shelled the building, turning its upper half into a charred hulk, while putting down a rebellion by legislators against his reforms. And the following year he ordered his troops into Chechnya in what became a disastrous and bloody war to suppress that...
...Yeltsin's political instincts were still sharp, and he raced to the scene outside of Russia's White House. He memorably climbed atop a rebel tank and urged defiance. Troops involved in the attempted power grab defected, and the putsch failed. Gorbachev returned to Moscow and, remarkably, declared that he still believed in communism. Russia was suddenly Yeltsin's. The Soviet system crumbled and by Christmas day of that year, the Soviet Union itself was finished. The era of reform had begun...
...more fondly remembered, as the man who turned the menacing Russian bear of Cold War fear-mongering into a warm and cuddly creature, supine, pitiable and willing to perform in exchange for scraps. And for one glorious moment in the hot summer of 1991, when he stood atop a tank in front of the Russian White House and faced down a coup...
...Yeltsin: Hero or Opportunist? Boris Yeltsin: The Man Atop the Tank Yeltsin's Promise and Failure Russia's Maverick Boris Bounces Back Remembering Yeltsin Why Yeltsin Declared Himself Y2K Incompatible Who Should Be the Person of the Century? Boris Bribery Scandal? What Else Is New? Russia's Puppet Master Yeltsin's Fast-Break Generals Survival Of The Fittest Yeltsin Plays Roulette With Russia's Economy But Yeltsin Only Purges After He Drinks Free Fall: Russia in Crisis Surviving Yeltsin's 'Cold' Rescuing Boris The People Choose TIME Covers
...Yeltsin's whole life seemed to be preparation for the kind of impulsive courage that was required to put him atop the tank that day in 1991. At the very moment of his 1931 baptism in the remote Ural Mountains village of Butko, some 900 miles east of Moscow, a 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...