A number of colleagues were good enough to go over draft text. Elise Giuliano, Marshall Goldman, Thane Gustafson, Mark Kramer, Alena Ledeneva, Thomas Simons, and Gwendolyn Stewart were beady-eyed readers of an early version of the entire book. I was especially influenced by the close comments of Jonathan Sanders, for whom many years ago I wrote my first (quite awful) paper on Yeltsin, and who gave me dozens of valuable leads, and by William Taubman, who convinced me to take the time needed to bring the two halves of the volume into harmony. Nanci Adler, Elena Campbell, John Dunn, Yoshiko Herrera, Edward Keenan, Gijs Kessler, Eva Maeder, Terry Martin, Olga Nikonova, Sarah Oates, Thomas Remington, Roman Szporluk, and Lynne Viola guided me to published and unpublished sources. Stephen White let me use the interview with Yakov Ryabov that is part of his oral history project at the University of Glasgow. Leon Aron shared important printed material that I was unable to locate on my own. Mark Kramer has my gratitude for identifying and retrieving key documents from the Communist Party archives and related troves. Yevgenii Kiselëv and Irena Lesnevskaya made available unique videotapes from the 1990s, and Aleksandr Oslon did the same with previously confidential polling data from the 1996 presidential election campaign. In Yekaterinburg, Anatolii Kirillov and Galina Stepanova were generous with their time, contacts, and expertise. In Berezniki, Aleksandr Abramov, Aleksandr Kerimov, Oleg Kotelnikov, and Natalya Kuznetsova were hospitable and informative. Aleksei Litvin, Dane Ponte, and Artur Yusupov helped me obtain information about Yeltsin’s childhood years in Kazan.
Masha Hedberg was my research assistant at Harvard for the two make-or-break years of the project and could not have done a better job. She accompanied me to the Urals in 2005 for a journey made productive by her tenacity. At the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Maria Altamore, Sarah Failla, Melissa Griggs, Helen Grigoriev, Ann Sjostedt, Penelope Skalnik, Lisbeth Tarlow, and Patricia Vio gave me unflagging administrative support. Masha Tarasova in Moscow patched through dozens of communications and shored up logistics. The Davis Center, the Government Department, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies underwrote travel and other expenses.
My wife, Pat, kept the home fires burning and was the first to see and apply pencil to rough drafts.
Wesley Neff placed the project with Basic Books. At Basic, Lara Heimert was wise and patient in equal measure, and Norman MacAfee expertly edited the manuscript into shape on a tight schedule.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1 The lunch with a few ministers and aides began at 11:30. But the television in the dining room did not work, and so at noon the group briefly repaired to the nearby office of Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko to watch the speech. The legal transfer of powers to Putin as acting president took effect at that very minute.
2 The Russian Orthodox Church still uses the Julian calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. It currently lags thirteen days behind the more accurate Gregorian calendar in use in the West since 1582 A.D., and so Russian Christmas falls on January 7. The Soviet government introduced the Gregorian calendar for secular purposes in 1918.
3 This was the ruling party’s name as of 1952, before which it was the All-Russian Communist Party and the Bolshevik Party.
4 “Boris Yel’tsin: glavnoye delo svoyei zhizni ya sdelal” (Boris Yeltsin: I have done with the main business of my life),
5 Ibid.
