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The courageous leader of a flawed, fragile yet at last open-for-suggestions Soviet country. Succeeding Gorbachev wasn't an easy thing. Thanks, Boris, for your everlasting contributions toward East-West unity. WC1
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/obit_yeltsin ... Fs.V6s0NUE

Boris really shaped the new Russia...
Your words , as always covered it 'Cat.
RIP Boris

R.I.P. Boris.

I was announcing at MIR during the failed coup attempt as the Communists tried one last gasp to kidnap Boris and stop the inevitable... I made the announcement that the "good Russians beat the bad Russians." (Gee, what a grasp I had of the complex situation!) bp

I remember that, BP...I didn't know you yet at that time, but I did know a little more about it than some US citizens because the insurgents that kidnapped him took him to a place in Russia where Unocal had a lot of business going on. They took him to a village near Baku, Azerbaijan in the Republic of Georgia, which at that time had not yet been officially named as a Soviet state. It made sense to take him there...it was one of the remaining strongholds of Stalinist greed, communist force-tactics and brutality. "Revolutions" were regularly staged there every time we made a payment, and the "new government" would take the money...I held my breath...The Caspian Sea is an outpost of undeveloped (completely, anyway) oil that is probably the biggest subsea oil field in the world. The Caspian, Aral and Black Seas are, along with the Gulf of Mexico near Yucatan, the sites of extinction-level asteroid collisions with our planet during the fullest proliferation of the dinosaur population on earth...they probably happened within a few days of each other...at one time, there were as many dinosaurs on earth as there are people now or will be in 500 years...in 65 million years, we will make up the hydrocarbons that become oil...then: WHAMMO...here came the Ice Age...(I made a billboard-sized map of the Black Sea, and it was one of the most interesting (to me and a few other folks) maps I ever made...I was working with a Unocal guy who had been there and collected a lot of data on it...the Black Sea has the largest land-locked abyssal area on earth. It's a bottomless pit that they haven't explored...) Unfortunately, the Caspian Sea itself at that time and probably now,was (is) a polluted poison-pit because of the dilapidated wooden oil rigs that were once connected by a kaleidoscope of dilapidated wooden bridges. Raw crude oil spews from the hundreds of underwater open valves...it's just horrible. From a distance, it looks impressive as all get-out, but up-close in smuggled photographs and videos, it was the most incredibly messed-up place on earth. Anyway, that's where they took Yeltzin. The KGB, interpol and probably some of our guys got involved and they got him out of there. There's really no place you can hide the president of a country like that. Nice try, but it was time to move on...Boris Yeltzen just shrugged it off, smiled and waved when he got back to Moscow...he was a very cool guy. He knew what he was up against because he'd been in it all his life, but he just stayed the course and perservered. I admire people who withstood sometimes seemingly overwhelming opposition to their cause and ultimately are proven to be champions. Boris Yeltzen was a largely uncredited modern-day hero of our planet in my opinion. Many of his reforms are now being rolled back by the Putin regime...Vlad's a hard-liner...they need law and order, but corruption is still king over there...however, I will always remember Boris as the man who reached out and welcomed us, and everyone, with open arms, and he asked us to help fix it over there. He was a man just like anyybody else in real life, but it took a mighty big man to do a lot of what Boris Yeltzin did...WC1

Fascinating reading, John. Thanks. bp