Thanks to Scott for allowing me to “guest blog”.

I’d like to note and comment on the passing of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, the first President of the Russian Federation, and a key architect in the destruction of Communism and the ending of the Cold War.

Mr. Yeltsin was as responsible or more than Mikhail Gorbachev for the dismantling of the Soviet Union. In 1991, it was Yeltsin who, as the President of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, gathered the leadership of the Ukrainian S.S.R. and the Byelorussian S.S.R. and formally dissolved the Soviet Union from within. Gorbachev only resigned about three weeks later when he no longer had a country to preside over.

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