Yeltsin полностью

My favorite composition was not in the final group, and so I was not able to cast a ballot for it when I dropped by the gallery in September. It was by Mikhail Leikin and Mariya Miturich-Khlebnikova, who collaborate under the name MishMash Project, and was titled Boris Yeltsin: The Man Who Broke Through the Wall. It features a stainless steel wall painted bright red. On one side a runner carpet, also in red, leads to a gap in the wall. The gap traces a life-size figure of Yeltsin, including hairdo and misshapen left hand. Yeltsin here is not a prisoner of the wall: He has punched right through it and left the scene. But attendees at the exhibit are to have a choice, rather as Yeltsin’s real-life legacy has given them a choice. “The viewer himself can go through the breach and feel its real human dimensions, compare them with his own and feel the toughness of the wall’s metal. He can return to the past along the carpeted path. . . . [Alternatively] the exit of the viewer out of the red zone is the path that Yeltsin traveled.”²⁴ No future is foreclosed. The citizen can go through the wall either way, forward or backward.

Acknowledgments

The spark for this book was struck in a multi-sided conversation I had with several Russian friends and acquaintances toward the end of 1999. The idea was that a group of scholars and public-policy analysts would meet with Boris Yeltsin, who was still president of the country, and, after his expected retirement, possibly organize a collective study of his presidency. The participants in that discussion were Sergei Grigoriev, Mikhail Shvydkoi, Dmitrii Yakushkin, and Valentin Yumashev. No sooner had we had our chat than Yeltsin had quit office, and, for a variety of reasons, the original impulse to begin the study was lost. My conversation mates, however, proved willing to cooperate with my launching a one-man project, which came to encompass the full course of Yeltsin’s life. In researching and writing the book, I amassed all manner of debts to informants and information brokers. I trust they will not need to be reminded, however, that all responsibility for its line of argument and its flaws lies with me.

Interviews with players in, and close observers of, the story were key sources from the beginning. Individuals who provided specific bits of evidence used in the text are cited in the endnotes. I also had benefit of the knowledge and insights of Yevgeniya Al’bats, Anders Åslund, Pilar Bonet, Maksim Boiko, Vladimir Bykodorov, Dmitrii Donskoi, Mikhail Fedotov, Chrystia Freeland, Leonid Gozman, Kirill Ignat’ev, Irina Il’ina, Andrei Illarionov, Sergei Karaganov, Sergei Khrushchev, Yurii Kir’yakov, Paul Klebnikov, Al’fred Kokh, Pavel Kuznetsov, Yurii Levada, Viktor Manyukhin, Vladimir Mau, Garri Minkh, Vyacheslav Nikonov, Pavel Palazchenko, Nikolai Petrov, Oleg Rumyantsev, Vladimir Semënov, Lilia Shevtsova, Andrei Shleifer, Aleksandr Shokhin, Andrei Shtorkh, Vladimir Shumeiko, Nadezhda Smirnova, Boris Smolenitskii, Dmitrii Trenin, Dmitrii Vasil’ev, Aleksei Venediktov, Vladimir Vlasov, and Grace Kennan Warnecke.

I am particularly grateful to those individuals, mostly Russians, who opened other people’s doors to me—this in a climate in which imparting sensitive information to foreign specialists is not always welcomed by the authorities. Valentin Yumashev and Tatyana Yumasheva arranged for me to see Boris Yeltsin and Naina Yeltsina. They also made themselves available for interviews and follow-up exchanges on numerous points of fact and interpretation, and Tatyana located and shared revealing photographs from the family’s private collection. Sergei Grigoriev in particular put himself out to facilitate meetings in Moscow, especially in the first two years. Yevgeniya Al’bats, plying her very different network, also spared no effort. Thanks in this regard go also to Dmitrii Bakatin, Vladimir Bokser, Valerii Bortsov, James Collins, Leonid Dobrokhotov, Mikhail Fedotov, Leonid Gozman, Sergei Kolesnikov, Mikhail Margelov, Michael McFaul, Vitalii Nasedkin, Aleksandr Popov, Vladimir Shevchenko, Olga Sidorovich, and Vladimir Voronkov. When midway through the project I ran into certain travel difficulties, crucial interventions were made by several Russians and Americans whose names will go unmentioned for now.