Boris Yeltsin — "I want to apologize for our unfulfilled dreams. What we thought would be easy ha…"
I want to apologize for our unfulfilled dreams. What we thought would be easy has proved painfully difficult. I would like to apologize for having failed to justify the hopes of the people who believed that we would be able to make a leap from the gloomy and stagnant totalitarian past to a bright, prosperous and civilized future at just one go. I myself believed in this. We haven't managed to make this leap, and I was naive in thinking we could.
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First president of post-Soviet Russia (1991-1999), who climbed atop a tank to defy the August 1991 coup and oversaw the chaotic privatization of the 1990s.
Closely associated with
Mikhail Gorbachev (his predecessor and rival reformer).
For an intellectual contrast, see
Gennady Zyuganov, Russian Communist Party leader — Zyuganov came within 3 percentage points of beating the ailing Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential runoff — the closest free election Russia has had, and arguably the moment that decided whether Russia would reverse to communism or continue down the path that led to Putin.
