“Of course, I voted for Yeltsin,” says 44-year-old hairdresser Elena Starkova, which in the day has arrived to Ekaterinburg from a small town Lysva. “Then his coming meant freedom for us and most of the new.”
Starkov has gone through the 1990s, which were the decade of President Boris Yeltsin. Starkov visited the permanent exhibition at the Yeltsin Centre” “Seven days that changed the country.”
The first of those seven — day, when Yeltsin made a speech before the Politburo in 1987. Seventh — last day of 1999, when Yeltsin announced his resignation. Most attention at the exhibition is paid to the failed August coup in 1991.
The bloody storming of the White house in 1993, presented at the exhibition in the section “the Birth of the Constitution”.
The exposition devoted to the First Chechen war, was set there, which tells about the election of 1996, and guilty at the beginning of this war, almost uniquely named the first President of Chechnya Dzhokhar Dudayev.
Opened in winter “Yeltsin Centre” — the new that can offer a gleaming steel and glass the center of Yekaterinburg. The exhibition is skillfully done. Initially it is proposed to see an animated film telling the story of Russia since Alexander Nevsky to Boris Yeltsin.
The exhibition spaces have received much attention. The last room contains the original furnishings from the office, which was the Yeltsin statement about his departure from the post of President.
The names of the sponsors depicted on the wall at the entrance. There you can find the names of the allies of Yeltsin, Anatoly Chubais, who is known as “the king of privatization”, as well as a large group of those who amassed, thanks to the privatization of the state.
Here are names of President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. In their speeches, the 1990s brought a decade of anarchy, from which Putin was able to save the country.
On the wall, “Yeltsin Centre” emblazoned quote Putin, according to which Yeltsin demonstrated the strength, doing the necessary”. That is, overthrowing the Communist regime.
To make Yeltsin the villain hard enough, although in the 1990s many Russians were openly ashamed of the patient and commit insane acts of the President. The reason is explained at the exhibition in Yekaterinburg: here are the German Ironing Board, vacuum cleaner and a German VCR — all this appeared in Russia right after the Soviet Union collapsed.
According to Elena Starkova, life after Yeltsin was not like in the movies.
“Maybe Putin has succeeded in foreign policy, but domestic policy… don’t want to use big words. Probably, in the big cities things are good, but small in a real mess, it only gets worse.”
The exhibition presents also two armoured ZIL”, which were used by Yeltsin. However, he quickly abandoned those Soviet limousines and sat in the back seat of the Mercedes.
According to the stories, the late opposition leader Boris Nemtsov as Deputy Prime Minister, decided to transplant the representatives of state administration on domestic cars. The Germans began their journey in Nizhny Novgorod, and the interests of the automotive industry were important to him.
Yeltsin dutifully drove two days from her home in Barvikha in the Kremlin at “ZIL”, while on the third day the car won’t stop in the middle of Tver street in Central Moscow. Yeltsin brought the Mercedes garage and in his own cabin left work on the 31st of December 1999.
In his memoirs, “Presidential marathon” Boris Yeltsin told me that the Mercedes he was connected by telephone with U.S. President bill Clinton, who was as stunned by his departure, as the rest of the world. According to the memoirs of Boris Yeltsin, he was really tired.
“Call me later, somewhere after five,” he said.
