20070425 On Boris Yeltsin

On Boris Yeltsin

April 25^th, 2007

The photo above is credited to: Alexander Zemlianichenko / AP file

“Then Russian President Boris Yeltsin dances at a rock concert in Rostov, Russia, in June 1996. View related photos ("Never one for protocol, Yeltsin was entertaining.")

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5FIoocja4k

My Wednesday, April 25, 2007 Tentacle column is on Boris Yeltsin, Dead at 76

Best known for standing on a tank in the middle of Moscow and almost single-handedly defying a coup in 1991, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin is the same person who just two years earlier had fished himself out of a river clad only in his underwear.

It was in 1989 that the man history may reflect upon as one of the most significant players in dismantling the U.S.S.R somehow ended up in a police station outside Moscow dripping wet.

According to a Reuters' account, Mr. Yeltsin claimed that he "had been attacked, his head covered with a sack and dumped off a bridge into a river. Top communists said he had been drunk while on his way to a tryst with a lover."

On Monday, in Moscow's Central Clinical Hospital, he died of heart failure. A walking-talking contradiction, history has yet to fathom his legacy.

Read the rest of the column here: Boris Yeltsin, Dead at 76.

This may be one of my many favorite Yeltsin moments – which I remember seeing, really time…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQULzrgC3dg

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