Timothy Colton: Yeltsin

“While praising Yeltsin’s ability to keep Russia together and sow the seeds for later economic success, Colton criticizes his failure to establish constitutional safeguards that might have prevented Russia’s recent turn toward authoritarianism. Colton’s book offers a finely detailed portrait of a key international leader.”

“A knowledgeable and compelling account of an almost forgotten leader at a historic turning point in world history, and a must-read for serious students of the Soviet collapse.”

“Timothy Colton’s fascinating, thoroughly researched biography captures the contradictions in the life of the mercurial Russian president, yet gives Boris Yeltsin his due as an event-shaping statesman. While Yeltsin’s activities provided abundant material for the caricatures that dominated much journalism of the period, Professor Colton has probed beneath the sensational to give a rounded, balanced picture of the man who changed Russian history. For those who wish to understand what happened to Russia in the 1990s, there could be no better guide.”

“Colorful and charismatic, grave-digger of the Soviet Union yet unable to set the successor regime he founded on a stable course, Boris Yeltsin is the perfect subject of Timothy Colton’s fine biography. Based on exhaustive research including interviews with Yeltsin, his family, and other Soviet and post-Soviet officials, balanced and judicious in its judgments, combining spirited storytelling with scholarly depth, Yeltsin is a wonderful achievement.”

“One of the transformative figures of the late 20th century has gotten the biography he deserves—a great story, brilliantly told, about a man as complex and consequential as the era in which he rose to the Kremlin and lowered the hammer-and-sickle forever. A monumental work of meticulous scholarship, fresh insight, astute judgment, and narrative skill, Tim Colton’s biography is a masterpiece.”

Copyright © 2008 by Timothy J. Colton

All rights reserved.

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Colton, Timothy J., 1947–

Yeltsin : a life / Timothy J. Colton.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN: 978-0-786-73212-8

1. Yeltsin, Boris Nikolayevich, 1931–2007. 2. Presidents—Russia (Federation)—Biography. I. Title.

DK290.3.Y45C65 2008

947.086092—dc22

[B]

2007051367