Аннотация

Praise for Timothy Colton’s YELTSIN

“Mr. Colton is not the first to undertake Yeltsin’s redemption. . . . But Mr. Colton has used the extra time to excellent effect. He has mined declassified Kremlin transcripts; fact-checked many memoirs; conducted extensive interviews with participants, including Yeltsin, shortly before his death last year; and synthesized a story that anyone curious about contemporary Russia will find illuminating.”
—New York Times

“Few Russian leaders have been stuck with such contradictory labels as Boris Yeltsin. Clown, hero, braggart and battering ram are just a handful of the commonest. Given his volatile personality and the fact that Russia’s first elected president played so dominant a role in his country’s path from communism, it is time he received more weighty treatment. Timothy Colton, professor of government and Russian studies at Harvard University, certainly has the credentials. His book is backed by a tremendous amount of research, including declassified material from the Soviet archives.”
—The Guardian (London)

“It’s fitting . . . that Yeltsin has sprung his last surprise by finding a biographer to rank him, justifiably, among the politicians with the greatest impact on the 20th century.”
—Time. com

“In this, the first published account of Yeltsin’s whole life, Timothy Colton casts the former Russian leader in a favourable new light. For Colton, Yeltsin—a loyal communist well into middle age—‘broke stride and linked his personal journey to larger trends,’ which saw him evolve from ‘knee-jerk populism’ to ending the Communist party’s monopoly of power and pursuing democracy. By staying ‘a half-step ahead of his rivals’ he won ‘the opportunity to preside over the birth of a nation and an attempt to construct a bold new future for it.’ These are big claims—and Colton makes them convincingly. . . . He has researched Yeltsin’s life with care and interviewed many key figures, including Yeltsin himself. . . . The Yeltsin years could have turned out a lot worse. . . . Yeltsin deserves credit. And he deserves a biography as good as Colton’s.”
—Financial Times

“A well-researched book with many interesting details drawn from [Colton’s] interviews with Yeltsin, his family, and a variety of other key players.”
—The Weekly Standard

“In this substantial biography, Professor Timothy Colton sets out to put Yeltsin back where he belongs: as a—even the—key political actor in late 20th-century Russia. To Colton, Yeltsin is a national leader and statesman of rare acumen and character who deserves a place right up there in the pantheon of great Russians. History, I have little doubt, will prove him right. There is much to admire in this account of Yeltsin. . . . [Colton] writes with insight on Yeltsin’s relations with communism and the Communist Party (not the same thing), suggesting that he was never really a believer, but no cynical careerist, either.”
—New Statesman (London)

“There have been excellent biographies of Yeltsin before, but none so thorough. . . . For the uninitiated, the book’s value is as a comprehensive portrait of one of the main figures of contemporary times—a portrait that is sympathetic but not uncritical. For the initiated, many of the most controversial but shrouded moments in Yeltsin’s career are, at last, clearly revealed.”
Affairs

“Quite readable and utterly absorbing.”
—Choice

“[A]n authoritative, impeccably researched and richly contextualized study of Yeltsin. . . . Colton is a masterful political historian; he weaves the story of Yeltsin’s life into the fabric of Soviet and Russian history, at every stage offering insightful descriptions of the time, the place and the people.”
—America

“Colton’s biography is the first major assessment to come along since Leon Aron’s Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, which went to press shortly before Yeltsin unexpectedly stepped down from Russia’s presidency in the final hours of 1999. It benefits from the passage of time and perspective afforded by Putin’s eight subsequent years as president.”
—Wilson Quarterly

“An epic book that captures all of the color, drama and contradiction of this elusive man. . . . This biography is solid, important and accessible.”
—Tucson Citizen

“[Yeltsin] will be of lasting importance to serious readers and is highly recommended for academic as well as large public libraries.”
—Library Journal

“Colton, a scholar of Russian studies at Harvard, has written the first comprehensive biography of Yeltsin. Aided by access to Yeltsin himself as well as to prominent Russian officials and close associates, Colton seeks insight by examining Yeltsin’s family background, childhood, and young manhood. . . . An important work.”
—Booklist

“A solid and sympathetic portrait of a leader misunderstood and underestimated in the West.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“While praising Yeltsin’s ability to keep Russia together and sow the seeds for later economic success, Colton criticizes his failure to establish constitutional safeguards that might have prevented Russia’s recent turn toward authoritarianism. Colton’s book offers a finely detailed portrait of a key international leader.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A knowledgeable and compelling account of an almost forgotten leader at a historic turning point in world history, and a must-read for serious students of the Soviet collapse.”
—James MacGregor Burns, author of Leadership and Running Alone: Presidential Leadership from JFK to Bush II

“Timothy Colton’s fascinating, thoroughly researched biography captures the contradictions in the life of the mercurial Russian president, yet gives Boris Yeltsin his due as an event-shaping statesman. While Yeltsin’s activities provided abundant material for the caricatures that dominated much journalism of the period, Professor Colton has probed beneath the sensational to give a rounded, balanced picture of the man who changed Russian history. For those who wish to understand what happened to Russia in the 1990s, there could be no better guide.”
—Jack F. Matlock, Jr., U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1987–1991, and author of Autopsy on an Empire and Reagan and Gorbachev

“Colorful and charismatic, grave-digger of the Soviet Union yet unable to set the successor regime he founded on a stable course, Boris Yeltsin is the perfect subject of Timothy Colton’s fine biography. Based on exhaustive research including interviews with Yeltsin, his family, and other Soviet and post-Soviet officials, balanced and judicious in its judgments, combining spirited storytelling with scholarly depth, Yeltsin is a wonderful achievement.”
—William Taubman, Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

“One of the transformative figures of the late 20th century has gotten the biography he deserves—a great story, brilliantly told, about a man as complex and consequential as the era in which he rose to the Kremlin and lowered the hammer-and-sickle forever. A monumental work of meticulous scholarship, fresh insight, astute judgment, and narrative skill, Tim Colton’s biography is a masterpiece.”
—Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institute and author of The Great Experiment

For Samuel P. Huntington