It was the August coup of 1991, and the USSR was on its knees, inexplicably crippled by stalwart communists — a golden opportunity for a Russian politician to forward an agenda that would lead to the empire's downfall.
Climbing aboard a tank outside the Russian parliament, a champion arrived. Boris Yeltsin, who had been crusading to pull Russia out of the USSR and transform it into a free market democracy in the mold of the United States, delivered a blistering speech eviscerating the coup and calling for the rightful president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, to be released from house arrest in Crimea.
Just two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Yeltsin visited the United States. At one point, following a tour of a NASA facility, he took a pit stop at a grocery store in Texas to get a sense of how everyday Americans live. He was shaken to his core by what he witnessed. The U.S. system produced a level of prosperity far beyond what a layperson in the USSR had.
“When they began to talk, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Yeltsin had phenomenal success above all because Gorbachev’s reforms were failing, so people grew angry because of a bad economy, chaos, violence, nationalist violence — they all turned to Yeltsin who, like Trump today, said, ‘If I’m in power, everything will be great,’” Zubok said. “It was a two-big-bears-in-one-cage phenomenon.”
Following the collapse of the USSR in December 1991, Yeltsin became the president of the newly independent Russia. He believed an independent Russia could develop close ties with the West and attain similar levels of prosperity. While this vision came to fruition in several former Soviet republics — such as Estonia, East Germany, and Poland, which established vibrant free market economies — Russia was not so fortunate.
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