Yeltsin

by Timothy J Colton

Colton had amazing access as a journalist and academic to Yeltsin and his entourage, his daughter and his daughter’s husband. In the years before Yeltsin stood down, they ran the Kremlin like this tsarist fiefdom. If you give people private freedoms, they matter a lot. You can have lunch with someone and take the mickey out of some prominent man and you are not going to be denounced, Stalin-style. It takes an active effort to enter into a public role, and it’s at that point that the state then seeks its redress.