"Colorful and charismatic, grave-digger of the Soviet Union yet unable to set the successor regime he founded on a stable course, Boris Yeltsin is the perfect subject of Timothy Colton's fine biography. Based on exhaustive research including interviews with Yeltsin, his family, and other Soviet and post-Soviet officials, balanced and judicious in its judgments, combining spirited story-telling with scholarly depth, Yeltsin is a wonderful achievement."--(William Taubman, Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science at Amherst College and author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era)

"Timothy Colton's fascinating, thoroughly researched biography captures the contradictions in the life of the mercurial Russian president, yet gives Boris Yeltsin his due as an event-shaping statesman. While Yeltsin's activities provided abundant material for the caricatures that dominated much journalism of the period, Professor Colton has probed beneath the sensational to give a rounded, balanced picture of the man who changed Russian history. For those who wish to understand what happened to Russia in the 1990s, there could be no better guide."--(Jack F. Matlock, Jr., U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1987-1991, and author of Autopsy on an Empire and Reagan and Gorbachev)

"A knowledgeable and compelling account of an almost forgotten leader at a historic turning point in world history, and a must-read for serious students of the Soviet collapse."--(James MacGregor Burns, author of Leadership and Running Alone: Presidential Leadership from JFK to Bush II)

"One of the transformative figures of the late 20th century has gotten the biography he deserves-a great story, brilliantly told, about a man as complex and consequential as the era in which he rose to the Kremlin and lowered the hammer-and-sickle forever. A monumental work of meticulous scholarship, fresh insight, astute judgment, and narrative skill, Tim Colton's biography is a masterpiece."--(Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institute and author of The Great Experiment)