di Marc Bennetts*
Boris Yeltsin had a reputation for the sensational and the unpredictable, from ordering tanks to shell a rebellious Russian parliament to drunkenly hunting for pizza in Washington in his underwear. But he saved arguably his biggest surprise for last.
Twenty years ago this New Year’s Eve, with six months to go until the end of his final term, an ailing Yeltsin addressed Russia in a special noontime broadcast. “I am leaving. I have done all I could,” he said, his words slurred by ill health and alcohol abuse. “A new generation is coming. They can do more, and better.”
Later that night, as the Kremlin clock ticked down the final minutes of the 1990s, a dour-faced representative of that “new generation” appeared before the nation as Russia’s acting president.
“Like you, I intended this evening to listen to the New Year greetings of President Boris Yeltsin,” said Vladimir Putin, the former state security service chief who had been named prime minister just four months earlier. “But things turned out otherwise.”
Life under Boris Yeltsin had been a mixture of the surreal and the grotesque
I was in Britain that dramatic New Year’s Eve, but I’d been living in Russia since 1997, catching the tail end of Yeltsin’s chaotic presidency. There were of course no Twitter storms or YouTube videos of the handover of power. Instead, I found out about Yeltsin’s decision to anoint Putin as Russia’s new leader hours after it had happened, via Ceefax, a now-defunct teletext information service.
I flew back to Moscow later that week: If someone had possessed a crystal ball, I’m not sure what I would have been more surprised to discover — that I would still be living in the Russian capital two decades on, or that Putin would still be in the Kremlin.
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*Marc Bennetts is a Moscow-based journalist and author of “I’m Going to Ruin Their Lives: Inside Putin’s War on Russia’s Opposition” (Oneworld, 2016)
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