Yeltsin -- A Life by Timothy J. Colton, Basic Books '08, $35, 616 pages, ISBN #046501271X. Index, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images, no bibliography.
Quixotic leader indeed. "The same politico who at incandescent moments, especially of risk and crisis, could move mountains," writes author Timothy J. Colton, "could on other days be maddeningly indecisive or self-indulgent." The Harvard Russian studies authority bases his conclusion on prodigious research, including nearly 150 interviews, some of them unprecedented ones with Yeltsin himself and his family.
"It is anything but self-evident how the virtuoso product and agent of a dictatorship could end up as its hangman," concludes Colton. As anyone who lived through the '80s and '90s will recall, Yeltsin seemed loyal to the Soviet state, although lukewarm on communism because of treatment his family allegedly received under Stalin. The author challenges conventional wisdom in his assertion that Yeltsin and Gorbachev, originally his mentor, warred continually from the beginning of their relationship.
So what's your bottom line, Timothy Colton? "As against those who would shrug him off as an oddball or an antihero, or who cannot get beyond his welter of contradictions to come to a summary judgment, my net assessment of Yeltsin is as a hero in history -- enigmatic and flawed, to be sure, yet worthy of our respect and sympathy."
