"YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS ARE AS DAZZLING AS YOUR SUBJECTS"

Sunday, August 21, 2011

YELTSIN THE HARD HAT AND THE COUP II


RUSSIAN STATE 
RUSSIAN ENERGY 
 

BORIS YELTSIN 
meets with 
Tyumen' Oblast oil rig workers 
August 1991 


The hardliner coup attempt dominates our collective memories of August 1991 in the USSR, but Boris Yeltsin had not been idle before he suddenly broke into the news by climbing on the tank in front of the Russian White House. 

Yeltsin had won his election as the first Russian president; gotten his proper American tour and two meetings with the U.S. president, one in the White House and one in the Kremlin; and cut a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev and the Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev on the future of the USSR. 

Now, in the first full week in August, as Gorbachev headed off for a vacation in the Crimea, Yeltsin took off on his first inspection tour of Russia as its president. His destination: the province (oblast') of Tyumen' in Western Siberia, home of the country's biggest oil-and-gas complex. 

Declarations of sovereignty were all very well and good; electing your own president even better.  But a sovereign Russia had to be able to fund itself; having oil and gas production plummeting was devastating to its chances of really making a go of it. 

The story in RUSSIA REDUX Chapter Five 
"On the Road Again on the Eve of the Coup: 
Tyumen' and Oil and Gas" 


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