Word: yeltsin
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...Yeltsin Visits Japan President Boris Yeltsin made an uneventful visit to Tokyo for two days and met with Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa. By leaving Russia just one week after he suppressed the coup by retrograde parliamentarians, he flaunted his confidence that he was in control...
...first to recognize the link between smoking and lung cancer, and he performed the first successful coronary bypass. An adamant perfectionist, DeBakey also provided medical advice to some of the most influential leaders of the 20th century, including President John F. Kennedy and Russian leader Boris Yeltsin...
...Gorbachev still needed him in the background to frighten the communist conservatives. This gave Yeltsin the chance to develop policies hostile to the entire communist order. How Gorbachev must have regretted rejecting advice to make him Soviet ambassador to a faraway place like Mongolia...
...Colton, Yeltsin was a man with a matchless capacity to reinvent himself, and an almost superhuman resilience that enabled him to see off his enemies. He felt uncomfortable with any fixed ideological position, relying instead on intuition. Critics put it about that he lacked intellectual inquisitiveness; in fact, he made a constant effort to refresh his thinking and was no ignoramus. He particularly liked Chekhov's short stories. When not bingeing on vodka, he was a bit of a puritan in social relations. He abhorred unpunctuality: his favorite gift to anyone was a wristwatch. Aides who made lewd comments quickly...
Colton's account sticks closely to the biographical mode and largely avoids big, historical controversies. Sometimes, perhaps, he underplays the man's animal exuberance. Yeltsin, after all, played the spoons on the heads of his ministers - hardly the behavior of an average statesman. But Colton's research is thorough and his chronicle lively and measured. It's fitting, too, 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...