Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE - Self-Reliance
CHAPTER TWO - Scripts
CHAPTER THREE - Only Forward
CHAPTER FOUR - A Boss with a Difference
CHAPTER FIVE - Megalopolis
CHAPTER SIX - The Mutineer
CHAPTER SEVEN - The Yeltsin Phenomenon
CHAPTER EIGHT - Birth of a Nation
CHAPTER NINE - A Great Leap Outward
CHAPTER TEN - Resistances
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Falling Apart, Holding Together
CHAPTER TWELVE - Boris Agonistes
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Governing the State
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Reconnecting
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Autumn of a President
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Endgame
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Aftermath
Coda - Legacies of an Event-Shaping Man
Praise for Timothy Colton’s
“Mr. Colton is not the first to undertake Yeltsin’s redemption. . . . But Mr. Colton has used the extra time to excellent effect. He has mined declassified Kremlin transcripts; fact-checked many memoirs; conducted extensive interviews with participants, including Yeltsin, shortly before his death last year; and synthesized a story that anyone curious about contemporary Russia will find illuminating.”
“Few Russian leaders have been stuck with such contradictory labels as Boris Yeltsin. Clown, hero, braggart and battering ram are just a handful of the commonest. Given his volatile personality and the fact that Russia’s first elected president played so dominant a role in his country’s path from communism, it is time he received more weighty treatment. Timothy Colton, professor of government and Russian studies at Harvard University, certainly has the credentials. His book is backed by a tremendous amount of research, including declassified material from the Soviet archives.”
“It’s fitting . . . that Yeltsin has sprung his last surprise by finding a biographer to rank him, justifiably, among the politicians with the greatest impact on the 20th century.”
“In this, the first published account of Yeltsin’s whole life, Timothy Colton casts the former Russian leader in a favourable new light. For Colton, Yeltsin—a loyal communist well into middle age—‘broke stride and linked his personal journey to larger trends,’ which saw him evolve from ‘knee-jerk populism’ to ending the Communist party’s monopoly of power and pursuing democracy. By staying ‘a half-step ahead of his rivals’ he won ‘the opportunity to preside over the birth of a nation and an attempt to construct a bold new future for it.’ These are big claims—and Colton makes them convincingly. . . . He has researched Yeltsin’s life with care and interviewed many key figures, including Yeltsin himself. . . . The Yeltsin years could have turned out a lot worse. . . . Yeltsin deserves credit. And he deserves a biography as good as Colton’s.”
“A well-researched book with many interesting details drawn from [Colton’s] interviews with Yeltsin, his family, and a variety of other key players.”
“In this substantial biography, Professor Timothy Colton sets out to put Yeltsin back where he belongs: as a—even
“There have been excellent biographies of Yeltsin before, but none so thorough. . . . For the uninitiated, the book’s value is as a comprehensive portrait of one of the main figures of contemporary times—a portrait that is sympathetic but not uncritical. For the initiated, many of the most controversial but shrouded moments in Yeltsin’s career are, at last, clearly revealed.”
“Quite readable and utterly absorbing.”
“[A]n authoritative, impeccably researched and richly contextualized study of Yeltsin. . . . Colton is a masterful political historian; he weaves the story of Yeltsin’s life into the fabric of Soviet and Russian history, at every stage offering insightful descriptions of the time, the place and the people.”
“Colton’s biography is the first major assessment to come along since Leon Aron’s
