Boris Yeltsin

I thought I should say something about Yeltsin. A guy I work with gave me a bio on him as he found it cheap at a book store. A hard covered 800 page book. Not exactly an easy read for me. The author would throw in a Russian word once and then expect you to remember it and keep using it. So I started a notepad of these words. Then I decided that that it was kind of silly as it wasn't in cyrillic, so I started to work on that.

Anyway, back to Yeltsin. You can find out a lot about his life now online and in the news now because of his death so I won't go into it. He had his ups and downs. All I have to add, is that I came to the realization from this bio that he earned or worked hard for everything he got. And he worked his way up through the ranks. That is the way those guys got into power. They didn't just come into power out of nowhere or because they spent the most on advertising or they came from a rich family. First he was a prorab, supervior, then a nachalnik, boss, and then a pervyi, regional manager. And the strange thing is that he was a Moscow outsider. But a lot of the soviet industrial power was east of the Urals, so that gave him a certian political clout, and he got into the politburo.

The other thing about Yeltsin that I came away with, was that I think he must have been a good guy to hang out with. A gung ho sort of fellow that could rally people behind him. Liked to play volleyball and would organize games. I can relate to that.

I think he would have been a good guy to know.