Critical Book Review of Boris Yeltsin`s “Midnight Diaries”

Boris Yeltsin was the first freely elected President of Russia. He was President during the first turbulent decade of Post-Communist Russia. In his third memoirs Boris Yeltsin talks about his last years in presidential office: the presidential election campaign in 1996 and the role of his daughter Tatiana; the special relationship between Germany, France and Russia, which had developed after 1997; the inclusion of Russia into the G8-summits in 1998 and his attempts to maintain Russians position as a global power; the economic decline after the financial crisis of 1998 and his efforts to reform the economy; the wars in Chechnya and in the Kosovo in 1999 and the crisis of the military; his last public appearance to an international audience - the OSCE summit in Istanbul in 1999. Yeltsin talks not less frankly about his clashes with the Duma and his maneuvers with the new domestic political forces; the qualities of his five Prime Ministers and the transfer of power to Vladimir Putin; the eastward enlargement of NATO and the EU and his attempts to include Russia in the political and economic institutions of the West; his relationships with the Western leaders (Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder) and his health problems that prevented him repeatedly from performing his duties.
Boris Yeltsin’s career reflects the changes in Russia throughout the 20th century. He was a communist apparatchik who supervised the destruction of the house in which the last Tsar and his family were executed in 1918 as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution. Yeltsin was initially an enthusiastic supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev and later one of his sharpest critics, as Gorbachev tried to go back behind his reforms. The failed coup of August 1991 and the decomposition of the Soviet Empire started Yeltsin`s eight-year term as