Word: yeltsin
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...that was the high point in Yeltsin's career, and much of what followed in the interceding 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...
...Boris 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...
...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 Aug. 19 through...
...Communist challenge in the 1996 election, he presided over a series of financial and economic crises and eventually, in 1999, installed former KGB officer Vladimir Putin as his anointed heir. (Putin inaugurated his own term by launching a second brutal war in Chechnya to reverse the concessions Yeltsin had made to end the first one.) He passed quickly from the political scene into relative obscurity as Putin launched an aggressive nationalist drive to reverse Russia's decline by reemphasizing a central role for the state in economic affairs and establishing a harsh, authoritarian regime that brooked little opposition...
...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...