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“... the ‘anti-terrorism’ summit in Cairo last March, Clinton had a private meeting with Boris Yeltsin. An undertaking was given to provide American support for Mr Yeltsin’s re-election, and to accept his repeatedly-broken word that the filthy war in Chechnya was being brought to a close. This aspect of ...”

“... history of post-Soviet Russia, his actions in 2014 had precursors in the era of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, in the 1990s. It was under Yeltsin that Russia carried out decisive military interventions in Moldova and Georgia, also independent states, to set up and defend the unrecognised Russia-friendly mini-states ...”

“... Duma itself has been seen, in Russia and outside it, as essentially a rubber-stamp body ever since Yeltsin bombed it into submission in October 1993 and rewrote the constitution on hyper-presidentialist lines. In the aftermath of the 2011 elections, the KPRF leadership alternated incoherently between crying foul at the fraud and boasting about the number of ...”

“... in the Evening Standard points out the growing facial resemblance between Anna Kournikova and Boris Yeltsin. 26 June. Impossible to imagine a more different 1-0 result than Brazil’s win over Turkey. It’s a thriller – not quite the ‘masterpiece’ which David Lacey in the Guardian says this tournament has lacked, but still a very good ...”

“... the dock – it’s inevitable, Harding is told by Stanislav Belkovsky, a former speechwriter for Boris Berezovsky. That, Belkovsky said, is when he’ll face the question of how to legalise his funds, and all his friends’ funds and assets in the West. Yeltsin, too, might have prolonged his presidency had it not been for ...”

“... the costs. Putin, after all, inherited the Russian presidency in 2000 on the back of the war. Yeltsin made him prime minister the day after a group of Chechen insurgents, led by Shamil Basaev (who claimed responsibility for what happened at Beslan), seized two villages in neighbouring Dagestan. In response, Putin ordered Russian troops back into ...”

“... in the first place, from the contrast with the ruler who made him. From a Western standpoint, Yeltsin’s regime was by no means a failure. By ramming through a more sweeping privatisation of industry than any carried out in Eastern Europe, and maintaining a façade of competitive elections, it laid the foundations of a Russian capitalism for the new ...”

“... of state visits at which he was present (Truscott was an MEP, with excellent Russian connections). Boris Berezovsky figures as ‘the swarthy tycoon’, while Putin holds ‘wall-to-wall meetings’. But Truscott can be very acute in spite of these weaknesses. His book is almost entirely a cuttings job, sourced from newspaper stories, which at least gives his ...”

“... a curiously vivid representation of their mood. When small, faintly-printed stickers containing Yeltsin’s decrees of resistance as Russian President (one of the first upbraiding the Patriarch for his silence) appeared on the dimly-lit marble walls, a continuous visual equivalent of an opinion poll could be seen. Little knots of six or seven would cluster ...”

“... pop stars, Hitler and Gorbachev (in the guise of an Indian woman); he turned up at parties as Yeltsin, Tutunkhamun or Karl Lagerfeld. It might be hard for non-Russians to understand why his work was felt to be so important, but in the post-Soviet world, where all the old roles and archetypes had disappeared, where no one knew how to behave and everyone ...”

“... Her husband’s career seems to have reached a turning-point of sorts in 1993: after opposing Yeltsin’s bombardment of the parliament building that October, Politkovsky was, according to his own account, ‘no longer allowed to broadcast’. In March 1995, his sometime colleague Vladislav Listev was gunned down on the stairs of his apartment ...”

“... one of the circle of neo-liberal economists who have provided the general staff for the present Yeltsin government, I was told that GosPlan, where Naishul worked for ten years, was by the late Seventies a demoralised and bewildered institution. Its senior people knew they could not do their job: they could not calculate the necessary inputs and outputs of ...”

“... The small dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow where Boris Pasternak lived for several years and where in 1960 he died is now a museum. It was there that the Writer’s Union representative took us – a group of jet-lagged American journal editors – on the first afternoon of our recent visit. The books and the furniture and the grand piano and the drawings by his father Leonid, all of which had been carted off after Pasternak’s death, when the dacha was unceremoniously assigned to another writer, have been brought back, and the poet who had been expelled by the Writer’s Union in the wake of the publication of Doctor Zhivago, is now given culture’s highest tribute – museumification ...”

“... a roll-neck sweater. More important, he kept his ties to power: for a while he served in the first Yeltsin administration as a deputy minister of fuel and energy. But soon he returned to the business world. There were many opportunities during those years for someone who knew where to look, though the real action for a Russian bank in the early 1990s was to ...”

“... those who were holding them. This triggered a steep devaluation and a consequent rise in debt. Boris Fyodorov, the acting Deputy Prime Minister, brought Domingo Cavallo, the architect of Argentina’s currency board, to Moscow to assess the suitability of such a device for Russia. Fyodorov will have known that its implementation would lead to high rates of ...”