It supplies an account of the former Politburo member, Boris Yeltsin-his rise to the presidency and the rifts with his parliamentary opponents, which led to the attack on the Russian White House on October 1993. There are portraits of Gavril Popov, the former mayor of Moscow and Vladimir Zhironovsky, the ultra-nationalist demagogue. The book provides analysis of the new Russia and its attempts to develop modern capitalism.
Boris Kagarlitsky is the author of The Thinking Reed, The Dialectic of Hope, and The Mirage of Modernisation. He has been arrested twice for his activism, once in 1982 under Brezhnev, and in 1993 under Yeltsin.