In some ways Boris Yeltsin exemplified a typical Russian: burly in stature and often short-tempered, with an excessive fondness for alcohol. In some ways he was a visionary of a kind that never held power before in Russia, and under his reign the country came the closest it ever would to western-style freedoms. Censorship was abrogated, fundamentals of a free market were instilled. Where his predecessor Mikhail Gorbachev sought to preserve the Communist Party, Yeltsin tried to transcend it. His tragedy was he was wholly unprepared for the job.

On this day. August 9, in 1999, citing continuing economic uncertainty, Boris Yeltsin fired his Prime Minister Sergi Stepashin, whom he had brought on board just months earlier to replace fired Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, himself only on the job for eight months.

Yeltsin held power for the better part of the 1990s, and under his watch the country defaulted on communist-era loans (causing a minor financial panic in the Western markets), and embarked on a ruinously expensive war in Chechnya. At the same time, in the true style of a monarch, he once ordered tanks to fire in the Moscow parliament house during a meeting of his openly hostile political enemies.