Say what you want about Yeltsin – and you are probably right.

Who was Boris Yeltsin? Westerners see Yeltsin as the defiant reformer with the thick thatch of white hair and the growl for a voice who stood atop a tank in 1991 to help bring down the Soviet Union. Russians, however, remember the flaccid face of Yeltsin's second presidential term, the slurred speech, the extended absences and a tenure stained by bloodshed, corruption and widespread economic hardship.
Yeltsin was the first Russian politician whose legitimacy rested on the genuine popular support of the masses, and he brought public politics to a country where for centuries politics had been confined to the czars' court intrigues and Politburo fights behind the curtain. But many people feel that he oversaw the terrible economic crisis in Russia in the late 1990s and started a very unpopular war in Chechnya, a mistake that has been a failure for Putin.

Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, was correspondent in Moscow from 1986 to 1991 and remembers Yeltsin as a "talented politician" like Gorbachev. But Yeltsin understood that the party should be abandoned somehow, and Gorbi wanted to fix it. Hear the audio and the slideshow here.

He entered in the spotlight in 1991, when he climbed to the top a tank to rally Muscovites to put down a right-wing coup against Mr. Gorbachev, a heroic moment etched in the minds of the Russian people and television viewers around the world; it ended with his electrifying resignation speech on New Year’s Eve 1999.

His kedy-dates:

1. July 1990: Resigns from Communist Party
2. June 1991: Elected president of Russian republic (in USSR)
3. August 1991: Rallies citizens against anti-Gorbachev coup, bans Russian Communist party
4. December 1991: Takes over from Mikhail Gorbachev as head of state
5. 1992: Lifts price controls, launches privatisation
6. October 1993: Russia on brink of civil war, Yeltsin orders tanks to fire at parliament
7. December 1994: Sends tanks into Chechnya
8. June 1996: Re-elected as Russian president, suffers heart attack during campaign
9. 1998: Financial crisis, rouble loses 75% of its value
10. December 1999: Resigns, appoints Vladimir Putin successor

In office less than nine years, beginning with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and plagued by severe health problems and alcoholism, Yeltsin added a final chapter to his historical record when, in 1999, he stunned Russians and the world by announcing his resignation, becoming the first Russian leader to give up power on his own in accordance with constitutional processes.

For The New YorkTimes, his relationship with the United States was a complicated one. President Clinton seized on the fall of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to advance American interests, and he and Mr. Yeltsin maintained a strikingly good rapport. In his dealings with Mr. Yeltsin, Mr. Clinton was protective, careful not to tempt old-line Communists to try to turn the clock back to dictatorship. There was some success between the two countries on nuclear issues, the removal of Soviet troops from the Baltic states and Moscow’s cooperation with NATO as it expanded toward the borders of Russia itself.

Like Peter Rutland wrote in Transitions Online, say what you want about Yeltsin – and you’re probably right. The former president's legacy remains controversial in today's Russia.

A good source of documentation about his excinting existence is Midnight Diaries, by Boris Yeltsin. Public Affairs, 12 October 2000. 336 pages, in English. Translated from Russian. I bought it in St. Petersbourg in 2005, and even if it is too partial, stills useful to understand the character. For Elena Chinyaeva, he embodied Russia in its troubled years: large, imposing, unpredictable, thirsty for change, riddled with problems, highly temperamental, exhausted, and totally lacking of nicely measured, decent manners.

Boris Yeltsin is a man who once escaped his enemies within the Communist Party in a military airplane, hugging a cannon. He mounted a tank calling for the nation to embrace democracy. He fell off a bridge during a dubious night rendezvous. He slept at Shannon Airport, snoring, while the Irish prime minister stood by, waiting in vain. Drunk, and looking like a true Russian bear, he directed an orchestra in Berlin during a ceremony devoted to the Russian army leaving Germany. He started a bloody Chechen war. He danced, clumsily and enthusiastically, through his presidential campaign, despite two heart attacks.

Unlike his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor, Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin was able to overcome his Soviet background, writes Masha Lipman in The Washington Post.

After rising to a high-ranking position in the Communist Party, he reformed into a staunch anti-communist and associated himself with Russia's liberals and Westernizers, including prominent Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. Yeltsin was a statesman with a clear vision and a strong sense of purpose: he committed himself to ridding Russia of communism and attaining freedom for his country, whose people had always lived in fear of the state.

Yeltsin achieved both goals: He made his victory over communism irreversible, and he turned Russia into a free nation. The coup in 1991 was above all a revolution -- even if it proved short-lived -- of public attitudes. The Russian people overcame their fear, they came to believe in freedom and in themselves, and they united to change the country's direction.

Mistakes? Many. During the rule of his successor, the phrase "the chaos of the '90s" has been firmly tied to Yeltsin's tenure. But he was running against time: The and turmoil of the early post-communist years left the Russian people frustrated and disillusioned, and they came to hate him as fiercely as they had loved him only a few years earlier. His compatriots, having no experience with freedom, failed to use their newfound options to make their lives better; they expected him to be their benefactor, and when he failed to deliver they resented and condemned him.

He was a drunk, but after all a modernizer. Even in his death: Yeltsin's funeral was the first for a head of state sanctioned by the Church since Tsar Alexander III's in 1894, helping to restore the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the life of the country and its people. Al least that is what Church spokesman Metropolitan Kirill said. Read what russian newspapers said on his death in Sean's Russia Blog

Writing on RIA Novsoti, political commentator Vladimir Simonov claims that the Sinatra song My Way best described Yeltsin.

So, final courtain for him.

Do svidanja, Boris Yeltsin

He destroyed the Soviet framework that kept the satellite states of Eastern Europe under eroding, but determined, Kremlin control, effectively dismantling the geopolitical structure that had fueled the Cold War for four decades. It was perhaps the most significant political change in modern history.

But he also sent tanks into the Russian streets to ensure his own power when it was threatened by old-line Communists in 1993. He unleashed a futile, brutal and, many would argue, immoral war against separatists in Chechnya in 1994 that leveled towns and villages and killed noncombatants in the thousands.

As a popular Russian joke in the late '90s had it, “Mikhail Gorbachev took us to the edge of the abyss, and Yeltsin took us one step further.”

Chernobyl at home

A report published this week has suggested that air pollution in big cities ould be as damaging to our health as the radiation Chernobyl survivors were exposed to. But short of moving to the countryside, what can city dwellers do? Quite a lot, actually. Leo Hickman offers in The Guardian 10 tips on how to breathe more easily

"Take a deep breath. If you live in an urban environment, which four out of five of us now do, then you are exposing yourself to a cocktail of airborne pollutants that could be seriously damaging your health". And all becasue the air pollution you suck into your lungs each day could be shortening your life expectancy even more than the radiation exposure suffered by survivors of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Meanwhile the World Health Organisation reports that transport-related air pollution — which now causes the vast majority of urban air pollution — causes a wide range of health problems including "cancer, adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes, and lowering of male fertility". In 2004, a report said that a pedestrian walking down Marylebone Road in London would draw in the equivalent pollution of one cigarette in just 48 minutes. But other than moving to the countryside, what practical steps can city dwellers take to reduce their exposure to urban air pollution? Quite a lot, it turns out.

1 Watch where you walk

One of the best ways to reduce your exposure to air pollution, says Dr Roy Colvile, a senior lecturer in air-quality management at Imperial College London, is to avoid walking along busy streets and thoroughfares, instead choosing side streets and parks. Carefully choosing your route has a "dramatic" effect, he says, because pollution levels can fall by a factor of 10 just by moving a few metres away from the main source of the pollution — exhaust fumes. "Just by being one block away makes a massive difference as the high pollution levels are generally restricted to fairly small areas within a city," he says. Also, try to avoid walking down "street can yons" (where tall buildings hug tightly to the sides of streets, creating valleys in which pollutants build up), don't walk behind smokers, and walk on the windward side of the street where exposure to pollutants can be 50% less than on the leeward side.

2 Pavement sense

When you're crossing a road, stand well back from the kerb while you wait for the lights to change or for a gap in the traffic. Every metre really does count when you are in close proximity to traffic, according to Colvile. "Do all you can to avoid getting stuck for too long on a central reservation," he adds. As the traffic moves off from a standstill, the fumes can dissipate in just a few seconds, particularly if the wind is up, which means holding your breath during this momentary period can make a difference, silly as that might sound. Also, don't dawdle: cross the road as quickly as possible. And once you're over, continue along the pavement as far away from the kerb as possible.

3 Avoid pollution spikes

Predictably, there are large spikes in pollution during times of high traffic congestion — ie, the morning and late-afternoon rush hours. Pollution levels generally fall during the night-time. The time of year can also make a big difference. Pollution levels tend to be at their lowest during the spring and autumn when winds are at their "freshest"; the trapping effect of extreme cold and hot spells tend to exacerbate the build-up of pollutants.

Venturing outside when there is less pollution obviously makes sense, but of course that's not always realistic. In fact, the hottest part of a summer's day — the time when most office workers go outside during their lunchbreak — is a particularly bad time to head out, according to Noel Nelson, one of the authors of the Royal Commission report. Walking in the rain, conversely, is a good way of avoiding the worse excesses of air pollution, he adds, as the rain "cleans" the air both by washing out the pollutants and bringing with it fresher air.

4 Wear a mask

Masks can be a good thing, but they only make a difference if they fit tightly and are cleaned regularly. Even the slightest gap to allow you to breathe more easily will cancel out any benefits. Worse, if you fail to clean or change the mask regularly there is a danger of allowing oily organic compounds to build up on the filter. Build-up can make the air you breathe dirtier rather than cleaner. As for looking like Michael Jackson while you go about your daily business . . . only you can decide how high a price you're willing to pay for clean lungs.

5 Pushchairs

According to the Royal Commission report, several recent studies indicate that "children living close to busy roads have an approximate 50% increased risk of experiencing respiratory illness, including asthma". Children are smaller than adults and therefore that much closer to the source of pollution when walking besides roads. They also have a faster metabolic rate and breathe more rapidly, and tend to inhale more pollution, proportionate to their size, than adults. One small step that can be taken is not to push them along in a buggy too close to traffic. Colvile advises positioning the buggy alongside you, instead of in front of you, when waiting to cross the road.

6 Beware of exercising in traffic

Cycling or jogging disproportionately expose you to air pollution — you inhale three times as much as if you were walking, according to Colvile — for the simple reason that your lungs are gasping for more air than the people you're speeding past on the pavement. The best times of day to exercise, thus avoiding the worst excesses of air pollution, are early morning or in the evening. Alternatively, exercise indoors or in a park. Cyclists — for whom the exhaust of a car should be seen as being as much of a hazard as the front bumper — should stick to side-roads where possible.

7 Where to sit on the bus

Buses are cleaner in terms of their emissions than even just a decade ago, particularly London's fleet, but they still emit pollutants worth avoiding. Intriguingly, Colvile says that his own research shows that sitting on the driver's side of a bus can increase your exposure by 10% compared with sitting on the side nearest to the pavement. And sitting upstairs on a double-decker can reduce your exposure too. He says it's difficult to say whether travelling on an undergound train, if you have that option, is better or worse than taking the buses, but he does say that the air pollution on underground trains tends to be less toxic by weight than that found at street level because the pollution is principally made up of minute iron particles thrown up by the wheels travelling along the rails as opposed to the mixture of pollutants found in diesel and petrol fumes.

8 Protect yourself indoors too

We spend about 90% of our time indoors, on average, and two-thirds of that time is spent at home; more perhaps for some of the most vulnerable groups such as the elderly and children. And indoor pollution can actually be more of an issue than that found outdoors, it seems: studies by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suggests that pollution levels can be two to five times higher indoors than out — and this can rapidly rise depending on what activity you are doing at home. It tends to be a different soup of chemical pollutants from the ones we encounter outside, and if anything, less is known about how they affect us. Our centrally-heated, carpeted, airtight homes only act to aggravate the situation.

Ventilating your home is therefore an important step to take in reducing risk — hopefully with air that's not full of air pollutants from the outside — as is using a good doormat to help prevent outdoor pollutants from the pavement being walked into your home. (The EPA has raised doubts about the claims made by some "ozone generating" indoor air purifiers, by the way.)

Feeling smug about the fact that you live high up in a flat away from outside air pollution? Well, unless you live in a penthouse at the top of a very tall skyscraper, then height doesn't seem to offer significant sanctuary. A study by Hong Kong's City University used laser measurements to show that pollution levels in the city remain constant up to heights of 700m. Living in the suburbs, away from major roads, seems the best way to avoid the worse excesses of urban air pollution. But that then means you are statistically far more likely to be a car owner and are therefore only exacerbating the situation.

9 Don't drive

The best thing you can do, both for yourself and for your fellow citizens, is to get out of the car. Fuel choice is also important: diesel may produce less carbon dioxide compared with petrol, which is good news in terms of climate change, but it produces more ground-level pollutants. While urban air-pollution levels today, compared with the "pea-soupers" of the mid-20th century, could be said to be vastly improved — healthy young men don't tend to drop down dead in the street now from air pollution as they did then, says Colvile — we are now exposed to a form of pollution that can much more readily enter our bloodstream. A particle of pollution today tends to be 100 times smaller than a particle of coal soot and therefore it can pass into the blood stream via the lungs as opposed to being caught in the bronchial passage. The full health implications of this shift in pollution type have yet to become fully apparent.

10 Get out of town!

As long as you go by public transport so as not to create yet more pollution, lifting yourself up and out of the urban mire offers at least a temporary escape. But don't head to the south-east corner of England. Colvile speaks of a "sheet of pollution from Europe", thick with sulphates, nitrates and ozone, that now regularly reaches across the Channel and can affect the counties south of London. For example, the air over the idyllically rural South Downs is only two to three times cleaner compared with the air over central London. Better instead to head to the nation's extremities, preferably facing into the winds blowing off the Atlantic

So breath normaly and leave forever.

Kasparov versus Deep Putin

This weekend russian opposition activist Garry Kasparov was among about 170 people arrested as police moved against a banned anti-Kremlin rally in Moscow. The former chess champion was freed several hours later after being fined for public order offences. Kasparov's passion for politics is so strong that in 2005 he retired from chess to focus his efforts on defeating President Vladimir Putin. Fron the very first moment, when he first appeared on the world stage in the 1980s, he quickly became known for his defiance of the Soviet authorities and - while dominating at the chess board - has been a leading figure in Russia's reformist movement since the collapse of the USSR.

Garry Kimovich Kasparov (Га́рри Ки́мович Каспа́ров; born April in 1963, in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR) political life started in the 1980s. He joined the CPSU in 1984, was elected to the Central Committee of Komsomol, the youg communists. In 1990 he parted from CPSU. In May 1990 Kasparov took part in the creation of the Democratic Party of Russia.
In June 1993 he participated in the creation of the bloc of parties called Choice of Russia. And many people dont know that in 1996 Kasparov took part in the election campaign of Boris Yeltsin! Which, by the way, took Putin to power....

His first duel was against Karpov. But between Karpov and Putin there was a machine. In May 1997, an updated version of Deep Blue , a computer made by IBM, defeated Kasparov in Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1997, Game 6, in a highly publicised six-game match. This was the first time a computer had ever defeated a world champion in match play. A documentary film was made about this famous match-up entitled Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine. IBM keeps a web site of the event.

Kasparov claimed that several factors weighed against him in this match. In particular, he was denied access to Deep Blue's recent games, in contrast to the computer's team that could study hundreds of Kasparov's.After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, suggesting that during the second game, human chess players, in contravention of the rules, intervened. IBM denied that it cheated, saying the only human intervention occurred between games. The rules provided for the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they said they used to shore up weaknesses in the computer's play revealed during the course of the match.

His frustrations with world chess were a major factor in his retirement two years ago, when he admitted he no longer had the same passion for the game, says the BBC. But his decision was also influenced by events in Russia, which he believed had been creeping towards authoritarianism since Putin took charge, and in Ukraine, which had just undergone the Orange Revolution:

The Other Russia combines elements of the now weakened and fragmented democratic movement with some of their bitterest former enemies - like the National Bolshevik Party, famous for its audacious anti-government stunts and quasi-Nazi symbols, or the far-left Workers' Russia, led by old-style communist firebrand Viktor Anpilov.

Now is Kasparov against Deep Putin. Looks like a bitter combat.

Another turn! German-Russian Gas Pipeline Heads for Estonia

A controversial pipeline to carry Russian gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany could run through Estonian waters, an official from the consortium behind the project said on Friday, DPA reports. The pipeline has been the subject of bitter dispute in the Baltic region ever since it was first proposed in 2005. Many of the states bordering the Baltic have argued that it could disturb stores of chemical weapons dumped in the sea after World War Two.
But the planned pipeline could equally meet with political opposition. If completed, it would create separate routes for Russia to supply gas to Eastern and Western Europe.
As a result, the EU's Eastern European member states have complained that it would allow Russia to cut off their gas supplies - as it did to Ukraine in January 2006 - without affecting supplies to its richer Western clients.
The fact that the project - owned by Russian gas giant Gazprom and German firms E.ON and BASF - was negotiated by the two states without consulting the countries between them created great ill-will in former Soviet satellites such as Poland and the Baltics.
The Ukrainian gas crisis heightened fears that Moscow would be willing to use its energy resources to exert political pressure in any disputes with its former satellites.

Русская жизнь - в исламской НОРМE / Russian life with islamic RULES

Muslims emerged on Russia's territory far earlier than Christianity did. And now the muslim population of Russia is rising even as the country's overall population falls. A Muslim power? It sounds bizarre. But Russia has more Muslims than any other European state (bar Turkey); and the Muslim share of the population is rising fast. The 2002 census found that Russia's Muslims numbered 14.5m, 10% of its total of 145m. In 2005 the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, put the number of Muslims at 20m.

Demographers predict that by 2020 one out of five Russians will be Muslim. But the question is: How Muslim will they be?

The country's Muslim community is extremely diverse. A large part Muslims in Russia adhere to the Sunni branch of Islam. About 10% are Shi'a Muslims. In a few areas, notably Chechnya, there is a tradition of Sufism, a mystical variety of Islam that stresses the individual's search for union with God.

For The Economist, Russia's fastest-growing religious group is not like their counterparts in other countries. Is clear the emergence within Russia of an active but ultimately loyal Muslim community. Muslims want a fair deal and growing influence to match their rising numbers.

Aside from the Caucasus, there are now two concentrations of Muslims in Russia. One is in Moscow, swollen by labour migration, where they may number 2m. The other is in the faith's old bastions: Bashkortostan and, above all, Tatarstan, where a revival of the faith has been overseen successfully by regional president, Mintimer Shaimiev.

Since no political force in Russia has much hope if it stands in open opposition to Mr Putin, these Muscovite Muslims tend to flex their muscles by being (even) more critical of the West than the Russian norm. Shamil Sultanov, a Muslim legislator who is close to the new movement, praises Mr Putin for “standing up to America” and its nefarious plans. Such talk meshes easily with a strand of Russian nationalism that looks to Islam as an anti-Western ally.

The Kremlin saw the political potentiality of Russian Islam a long time ago. Can be United States the only super power in the world, even when including China and Russia, Islam alliance?

70 years of communism have bulldozed most religious and ethnic traditions in Russia, so do not be surprised when you hear imans saying it is all right that most Muslims do not even attend the mosque. "It is not obligatory," Mr Alyautdinov, the then 31-year-old imam of the Moscow Memorial mosque, said to BBC in 2005. "Life is very fast these days, so people don't have time to go to mosque." In other words: Русская жизнь - в исламской НОРМE: (Russian life with islamic rules).

"If people wear tight jeans or skirts and speak slang, it does not mean they have veered from the path of true Islam."

Russian Islam goes its own way.

Kadyrov, Kadyrov and more Kadyrov

Here he is. The widely feared strongman Ramzan A. Kadyrov was inaugurated as the new president of Chechnya with a blessing from the Kremlin, which has relied on him to stabilize the region after more than a decade of separatist fighting. Human rights groups say that security forces under Mr. Kadyrov’s control abduct and torture civilians suspected of ties to Chechnya’s separatist rebels. Some suggest that he was tied to the murder last year of the journalist Anna Politkovskay who made her name as a critic of the Kremlin and its policies in Chechnya. But Kadyrov, only 30, is credited with a reconstruction boom that he administered as the region’s prime minister, under which the capital, Grozny, is being transformed from a moonscape of rubble and shattered buildings, as Rodrigo Fernández writes in El País from the zone. “My main goal is to make Chechnya prosperous and peaceful,” he said at the inauguration ceremony in Gudermes, east of Grozny. But the cult of personality and deification of one man will not do anything good for the republic or its society.