Boris Yeltsin, the apparachik turned outsider, turned democrat, turned – some would say – despot, proved unpredictable to the last.
Even former aides in Russia didn’t expect the ailing and enigmatic President’s step off the political scene. Yeltsin’s presidency was always marked by contradiction and controversy. He picked up and put down Prime Ministers and cabinet members the way a gin player rejiggers his hand – sometimes picking up an old card only to discard it again, always playing to the politics of the moment.
In the end, he ran through seven prime ministers, and even more cabinet members, survived and sometimes thrived through six national elections, withstood quintuple by-pass surgery and countless questions about his health, bluffed and bargained his way through four IMF loans and three ruble crises, sent troops to Chechnya twice and stood up to Communist tanks once.
He left behind one of the most befuddling nations on earth. Boris Nikolayevich’s Russia, in this hour of the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
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