Yeltsin

"Yes, that is the fascinating angle of this account by Timothy Colton. He 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. I lived in Russia from 1990 to 1994 and I was there during the most exciting parts of the collapse of communism and the demise of the Soviet Union, the failed coup and the astonishing rise of unbridled democracy. It was amazing, it was a free for all, pretty much everything that could be said was said in the newspapers for several years. It was extremely exciting. For various reasons it all came unstuck, one of which was the terrible arrogance of Western advisers. I remember sitting at press conferences with the ministry of finance and the Russian ministers were just regarded as puppets, doing the bidding of the IMF types and others, who I think were well intentioned but totally insensitive to the pride of a great country. I don’t believe in great conspiracy theories. It did, though, obey the law of unintended consequence. At the same time, much of the infrastructure went down the tubes, including financial management. If you have huge numbers of public sector workers who are literally not being paid, particularly army, doctors, teachers, police, train drivers, you have a recipe for absolute disaster."