Boris Yeltsin: The maverick leader in the Kremlin

Boris Yeltsin was recruited to the Moscow leadership by Mikhail Gorbachev. As the communist party boss ruling the capital, Yeltsin quickly contrasted his predecessor Viktor Grishin by his critical outspokenness. "I sack more people in one day than Grishin did in ten years!" Yeltsin said. In October 1987, he demanded a break with the dogmatic part of the CPSU white the Cent ral Committee formally assembled to approve Gorbachev's speech commemoratin g the 70th Anniversary of the October Revolution. Instantly, Yeltsin was th rown out of the Polit Bureau and into political darkness. Thus, the disside nt intelligentsia found the person they needed: A famous and popular person , disgraced by the communist establishment. Boris Yeltsin became the Troyan Horse that were to take the intelligentsia past the authoritarian walls of the Kremlin. This article deals with the years 1989-1991, in particular. A fter the coup attempt in August 1991, Yeltsin emerged as the sole powerhold er of the Kremlin. But "the bureaucratization" of the Yeltsin phenomenon st arted immediately. Firstly, old apparatchiks reconquered Yeltsin only to be overcaught by the "novoriches", the few who stole the freedom of the many. This is the conclusion of the second stage of the Yelstin years. The autho r was present in 1990 when Yeltsin promised students in Leningrad that he w ould dissolve the KGB as a secret police if he ever became Russia's preside nt. His last act in office was to pass the power his people had given him t o a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin.