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“... to the rule of law and civil liberties.A day after Adani showed up in Haifa, Jo Johnson – Boris Johnson’s brother and a former Financial Times journalist, who was elevated to the House of Lords in 2020 after a decade in the Commons – abruptly resigned from Elara Capital, a UK investment firm that according to Hindenburg Research is complicit in ...”

“... to have been replaced by a Palace of the Soviets, for which a design by the Stalinist architect Boris Iofan was approved after a competition. It was to be 416 metres high, making it the tallest building in the world, taller than the Empire State Building, with a 90-metre statue of Lenin atop a terraced and colonnaded turret rising from a huge plinth in ...”

“... to have sufficient support and force of character to establish the rudiments of a new order was Boris Yeltsin, acting in concert with Gorbachev. They may yet decide to implement the measures of reform they have promised – Mr Yeltsin’s speech of 28 October was the most serious of these promises but, as this is ...”

“... mounting to deal with long-deferred domestic priorities. Neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton nor Boris Yeltsin could claim the authority in foreign affairs that Reagan and Gorbachev had commanded during the mid-Eighties – or, for that matter, their ability to think ahead, however superficially, about where they would like the world to go and how they ...”

“... one of the coup leaders, to urge him to withdraw his tanks from the Russian parliament, where Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s rival, was holding out. Yazov did so. Once the coup collapsed, it soon became obvious that Yeltsin was determined to weaken Soviet institutions to the point where they would exist only on ...”

“... He wants to know what makes you tick, whoever you are and wherever you come from. Why does Boris Yeltsin drink so much? (During one memorable visit to the White House, Yeltsin ends up in his underpants on Pennsylvania Avenue trying to hail a cab to find him a pizza.) Clinton contemplates calling Mrs ...”

“... criminal privatisation of former Soviet state-owned enterprises in the early 1990s. They backed Boris Yeltsin in his desperate bid for re-election in 1996, and gained untold dividends from his victory. Not all welcomed Putin’s election in 2000, but most eventually accepted the deal he offered: their wealth would be left alone so long as they ...”

“... of office, managed 13 votes against him out of a total of more than five hundred. More important, Boris Yeltsin, who has just won in the first round the first ever popular vote for the presidency of Russia, made an agreement with Gorbachev and eight other republican presidents to sign an anti-crisis plan which would devolve a great deal of power to the ...”

“... He still keeps himself in good diplomatic trim, having retained, amazingly, the aura of someone Boris Yeltsin thinks worth seeing and Saddam Hussein will negotiate with. This aura, however, is not that of a man who has shaken off the compromises of office to develop a more detached, even principled, vision of the world. Such might be our expectation of ...”

“... tens of millions would have died by then, and why, and how. 8 September. The news from Russia, as Boris Yeltsin lurches incoherently from one crisis to another, reminds me of the last conversation I had with Ernest Gellner before his untimely death. I may not believe that sociology is or could ever be a predictive science, but Ernest has been proved spot ...”

“... of small change), but the dirty trade in immunities. Putin got the Russian presidency by promising Boris Yeltsin that he would push through an act of amnesty for Yeltsin and his family despite their colossal thefts of public money. Nobody is going to send Edward Shevardnadze to jail in Georgia, though some of his greedy ...”

“... It has to be said that many, even most Soviet families in the post-war period lived that way. Boris Yeltsin, for example, or Ruslan Khasbulatov, a Chechen who also grew up in Kazakhstan, lived through similar conditions or worse. Zhirinovsky notes with contempt, however, that Mikhail Gorbachev, son of the chairman of a collective farm in the rich ...”

“... conditions of development? I suppose the worst single incident of that phase was the day Boris Yeltsin turned up at the Strasbourg Parliament in 1991, and found himself (as he put it at the time) being harangued like a backward school-kid by socialist MEPs. Why couldn’t he be more like Mikhail Gorbachev, they indignantly demanded, what did he ...”

“... about which Russia had been given prior notification – triggered alarm-bells in the Kremlin. Boris Yeltsin, Schlosser notes, ‘retrieved his launch codes, and prepared to retaliate’, and it was some minutes before a false alarm was declared. In the ICBM era, what counted as a nuclear accident could be a lot more serious than the fate of the ...”

“... that all this represents a sharp break with what came before: as the standard story has it, the Yeltsin years saw the installation of a turbulent, flawed democracy; Putin has presided over an anti-democratic turn – even, for some, a regression towards state socialism. The tone was set early on by Putin’s frequent mentions of the ‘vertical of ...”