Word: yeltsin
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...Although the episode did not, as it turned out, end his career, it marked the beginning of rumors about his drinking problem that dogged him to his final days. Propaganda officials were instructed at the time to hint that Yeltsin had been dismissed for delivering a drunken diatribe - an accusation that may have been true, judging by subsequent lapses in his public behavior. The CIA reported during the 1990s that Yeltsin was an alcoholic, subject to occasional binges that kept him out of action for days at a time and led to sudden cancellations of meetings with key foreign visitors...
...whom had parlayed their close 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...
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...
...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...