s content dovetailed with Putin's broader promotion of a narrative in which Russia is a great power that recovered from the chaos and weakness of the Yeltsin era and overcame the hostility of deter- mined enemies, especially the United States. Accord- ing to the manual, Russia's dark chapters—its domi- nat

cally, fraught with failure. I remember similar logic in the summer of 1998, when the accepted mantra was that the US would bail out Russia and Boris Yeltsin, since President Clinton would not want to see a nuclear power like Russia slide back into Soviet rule, or anarchy (that view turned out to be wrong)

ontent dovetailed with Putin's broader promotion of a narrative in which Russia is a great power that recovered from the chaos and weakness of the Yeltsin era and overcame the hostility of deter- mined enemies, especially the United States. Accord- ing to the manual, Russia's dark chapters—its domi- nat

intelligence assistance that Syria couldn't do without. But Damascus isn't just a resurrected strategic ally following years of desuetude under the Yeltsin government; it is Putin's last-stand client in the region against what he sees as American hegemony. The Cheka's old hold on Damascus looms large i

country. When Vladimir Putin became president of Russia, he offered an even more extensive pardon to his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, as well as to Yeltsin's family, citing similar considerations. Perhaps an even more relevant example to the Egyptian case was the fate of South Africa's P.W. Botha, a fo

ns in Korea. "Was Bill Clinton's exp=nsion of NATO — after George H. W. Bush and [his Secretary of State] James Baker had assured Gorbachev and then Yeltsin that we wouldn't go an inch furt=er east — was this for Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, and Boeing, and other=, to increase their network of potentia

hastily written by Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first elected president. Between the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and 1993, Yeltsin faced a recalcitrant parliament (then called the Congress of People's Deputies), whose EFTA_R1_02047585 EFTA02695908 28 members resisted his at