This book is a revelation. The Boris Yeltsin that emerges from its pages is a leader of exceptional quality: determined, stubborn, brilliantly intelligent, direct and, perhaps above all, brave. Aron skilfully plots Yeltsin's commitment to fighting corruption and centralisation and ending the grotesque hypocrisy that so bedevilled the Soviet Union, while at the same time remaining fully alive to his subject's faults. In doing so, he has written a magnificent history of Russia's last sixty years, and makes a series of highly illuminating comparisons with previous revolutions.
