Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The first freely elected head of state in Russia's 1000-year history, Boris Yeltsin ended Soviet military occupation of Eastern Europe, introduced the free market economy and, most importantly, forged and presided over the most open and tolerant regime Russia has ever known. He can rightly be called the founding father of post-Communist Russia. In this definitive and magisterial biography -- the result of seven years of research -- Leon Aron charts the triumphant rise of Boris Yeltsin against a richly textured account of Russia's movement from a communist state toward free democratic nationhood. Much of Aron's research is based on original material culled from the archives of the former Soviet Union, Russian newspapers, documentaries, and dozens of interviews with key witnesses in Moscow and in Yeltsin's hometown of Sverdlovsk. While fully alive to his subject's faults, Aron shows Boris Yeltsin to be a leader of exceptional quality: determined, stubborn, brilliantly intelligent, direct and, perhaps above all, brave.
Legvold et al. (Sat,) studied this question.