Evaluate Boris Yeltsin's leadership in the years immediately following the fall of Communism.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary. At first, Yeltsin, who had stood up to Gorbachev as a reformer, was enormously popular in the days of the August 1991 coup. Standing atop a tank, he asked the Russian people to protect him and the reformers from reprisals by the communist leadership. He sounded and looked like a man of the people; the population responded. With Yeltsin quickly rose to become the most outspoken and trusted reformist of the communist elite, in 1990 creating a Democratic Platform group that demanded radical change in the party's leading role, as well as decentralization of the state structure.In 1991, after conservatives failed in their attempted coup, Yeltsin became the popularly elected president of Russia. He dissolved the Communist Party in Russia and dismissed party appointees, a huge gamble that seemed to pay off at first. By early 1992, Yeltsin commanded the admiration of the entire world: the amazingly sudden and peaceful transformation of the Soviet Union from the "evil empire" of U.S. President Ronald Reagan's rhetoric into a multiparty democracy. Politicians in the West celebrated the victory of the United States over the Soviet Union, as did the former Soviet people themselves. But these celebrations were short-lived. Within months, political and social collapse began.