Media inquiries: Véronique Rodman
vrodman@aei.org (202.862.4871)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 23, 2007

Today, Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected leader in Russia's thousand-year history, died.

As AEI resident scholar Leon Aron explains in his book, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, Yeltsin oversaw the transformation of the Russian political system from stark totalitarianism to free market-based democracy. He institutionalized the vital liberties that Gorbachev had granted only provisionally and often by default, including freedom of speech and free and multicandidate elections. His eight and a half years as president were by far the freest, most tolerant, and open period Russia had ever known.

The Russia that Yeltsin left behind reflected the contradictions of its founding father. It was a hybrid: a polity still semiauthoritarian, corrupt, and mistrusted by the society, but also one that was governable, in which the elites' competition for power was arbitrated by popular vote, and in which most of the tools of authoritarian mobilization and coercion appeared to have been significantly dulled.

Leon Aron is also the author of the just-published Russia's Revolution: 1989-2006 (AEI Press, 2007), in which he brings together, in a collection of twenty-one important essays, his observations of the last great revolution of the twentieth century, which began in the 1980s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and which continues today with Putin’s Russia.

Leon Aron is available for comment and can be contacted at laron@aei.org or through his assistant, Igor Khrestin, at 202.828.6025 or ikhrestin@aei.org.

For additional media inquiries, please contact Veronique Rodman at 202.862.4870 or vrodman@aei.org.