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Boris Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life
 
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Boris Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (Paperback)

by Leon Aron (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 900 pages
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd; New Ed edition (2 Jan 2001)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0006530419
  • ISBN-13: 978-0006530411
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 385,763 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

History will be the final judge of Yeltsin's legacy and his complex personality. How will it understand the contradictions of the founding father of post-communist Russia: crusader for freedom who crushed political dissention; the man who climbed into a tank outside the Russian parliament in 1991 and changed history and who stumbles drunkenly in front of the world's media? Leon Aron's masterful biography fully realises the opportunity to write history through the tale of one man.

Born to a peasant family-his grandfather perished in Stalin's collectivisation and his father was once sentenced to a forced labour camp, Yeltsin is truly a man of the people. With great flair and insight into a nation often misunderstood in the West, Aron charts the rise, fall and resurrection of this most triumphant political opportunist, detailing his mighty victories and grievous failures in transforming Russia. By taking advantage of Yeltsin's unprecedented establishment of greater freedom of speech, Aron, an academic and journalistic expert on his country of birth, has expertly tracked the movement of history in a turbulent land through the biography of a single man. His exhaustive and well-indexed research never weighs down the energy of this story, but rather allows it to emerge against a rich and broadly textured background, enhanced with well- selected photographs.

The judgement of history will ultimately depend, according to Aron, upon the future direction of Russia. If it sinks into a corrupt oligarchy ruling a backward economy, Yeltsin will be judged as having missed a unique opportunity to change Russia's destiny; if a peaceful, free and increasingly wealthy Russia emerges, then Yeltsin may be held in the esteemed company of great figures who brought back their nations from the brink of catastrophe.

Whenever the final chapter is written on this extraordinary figure, Boris Yeltsin: An Extraordinary Life is to date the definitive chronicle and by far the best attempt yet to understand this complex figure and his remarkable times. --Fiona Buckland --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



Synopsis

The biography of a remarkable statesman. This book plots Yeltsin's commitment to fighting corruption and centralization and ending the grotesque hypocrisy that so bedevilled the Soviet Union, while at the same time remaining fully alive to his subject's faults.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent weighty biography, 13 May 2007
By John Hopper (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)      
A weighty and excellent biography, one of the best of its genre I've read, though out of date now as it covers events only up to 1998, i.e. the first half of his second term as President of Russia. The book is valuable as a reminder of the key role Yeltsin played in pushing forward democratisation in the last few years of the Soviet Union and then in continuing to push forward democratic rights and liberties, as well as controversial economic liberalisation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin comes across as a contradictory figure, often using heavy-handed tactics in pursuit of democratic ends, as when he opposed the bulk of the last Soviet-era elected Congress of People's Deputies in the famous stand-off of October 1993 when they opposed a new post-Soviet constitution. Whatever his failings as a man and leader, he strenuously supported multi-party democracy and the freedom of Communists and other oppositionists to challenge and oppose his own regime, even when some of the anti-Yeltsin campaigning was extremely bitter, nationalistic and even anti-Semitic during the 1996 Presidential election (see some of the election posters printed in the book, some of which chillingly resemble Nazi posters). Certainly one gains a more positive impression of this flawed but immensely courageous man than from the drunken and bullying caricature presented in the media in more recent years. It's a tragedy that since Putin took over, some of the democratic gains have been reversed, particularly freedom of the press. But the ever reducing votes of Communist candidates in both Parliamentary and Presidential elections seem to indicate that there will be no reversion to the Soviet era, though the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is by far the biggest political party and undoubtedly has the support of a significant minority of Russian voters.
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