Prelude to Putin: Russia and the West in the 1990s
At the end of the Cold War, Russia and the West seemed set on a path towards cooperation. Why did it veer into renewed animosity?
In August 1991 images of the Russian president Boris Yeltsin standing defiantly on a tank in central Moscow were broadcast around the world. In June that year Yeltsin had been elected as the first president of the Russian Federation – the largest of the 15 republics that made up the Soviet Union – a win that gave him a power base to continue to challenge the authority of the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The two had clashed before, most publicly when Yeltsin announced his resignation from the Communist Party a year earlier. Now, though, he and Gorbachev found themselves – albeit briefly, and in a time of national emergency – on the same side.
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