Heroes are outsized personalities who are not always easy to appreciate. Yeltsin stormed into our conference room in the White House in Moscow. He was like a bull, beaming with self-confidence, energy and happiness, outright manic. One of his advisers told me that they came from the ministry of defence. He had given a speech to the Soviet general command and convinced them to join Russia.
That day, 11 December 1991, Yeltsin salvaged the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. The previous day, the then Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had tried to persuade the generals to stand up for the Soviet Union, but he failed.
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