Yeltsin has gone mad

R.W. Davies

• Midnight Diaries by Boris Yeltsin, translated by Catherine Fitzpatrick
  Phoenix, 409 pp, £8.99, April 2001, ISBN 0 7538 1134 0
• Post-Soviet Russia: A Journey through the Yeltsin Era by Roy Medvedev, translated by George Shriver
  Columbia, 394 pp, £24.00, November 2000, ISBN 0 231 10606 8
• Zagadka Putina by Roy Medvedev
  Prava cheloveka, 93 pp, US $8.00, March 2000, ISBN 5 7712 0126 X

Yeltsin’s first volume of autobiography, Against the Grain (1990), showed how he emerged from obscurity as a defender of democracy and social justice. In March 1989, against the wishes of Gorbachev and the Party bosses, he was elected Mayor of Moscow with nearly 90 per cent of the vote. In his second volume, The View from the Kremlin (1994), Yeltsin described how in June 1991 he became the first elected President of Russia. In August of that year – his greatest moment – he stood triumphantly on a tank outside the White House in defence of Gorbachev and democracy against the coup plotters. But over the next two years the struggle between President and Supreme Soviet culminated in his use of the military to suppress the members of the Soviet holed up in the White House in October 1993.