Yeltsin did not smoke, he never cursed, he always said only “you” to everyone at work. The son of a nugget inventor, who was repressed under Stalin, graduated from school with only two fours in his certificate (the rest were fives), traveled half the country during his student holidays — without a penny of money, on enthusiasm alone, and his thesis at the Ural Polytechnic University was the project of a television tower …
Yeltsin did not smoke, he never cursed, he always said only “you” to everyone at work. The son of a nugget inventor, repressed under Stalin, graduated from school with only two fours in his certificate (the rest were fives), traveled half the country during his student holidays — without a penny of money, on enthusiasm alone, and his thesis at the Ural Polytechnic University was a TV tower project … Such curious there are many details of the life of the first Russian president in his first national biography. The author, journalist and writer Boris Minaev, without claiming to be monumental, without abusing «artistic» and not hiding his sympathy for his hero, tries to make a big picture out of a motley mosaic of facts, consistently outline the events of Boris Yeltsin’s life and try to capture and convey the originality of his personality, understand the logic behind his actions. The biographer does not hide the miscalculations of his hero, the contradictions of his character, but does not forget for a moment the scale of what he did: the man who came to power «as a result of the direct expression of the people’s will» became the architect of the country in which we all have been living for two decades.
Young Guard, 752 p.