Boris N Yeltsin

The snow fell softly all day in Moscow. It fell on Boris Yeltsin as he left the Kremlin as an ordinary citizen. It fell on shoppers slipping through the slushy streets searching for last-minute holiday gifts. And it fell on 10-year-old Katya Keymakh as she twirled boldly if unevenly on the ice at a central Moscow skating pond, watched proudly by her videotaping father, Vladimir. "It was time for Yeltsin to go," the 36-year-old said, brushing the snow from his lens.

Praising Boris N. Yeltsin for helping to steer his country from communism to democracy, foreign leaders also expressed hope Friday that a new leader may improve Russia's ailing economy and its strained relations with the West. "Boris Yeltsin has played a crucial role in the history of Russia," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a statement released through his Downing Street office. "He has steered his country through a most difficult and painful transition. . . .

Apologizing for his failure to lead Russia into a prosperous future, President Boris N. Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned Friday and handed power to Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, who immediately took over as acting president. Yeltsin, 68, Russia's first democratically elected president and its leader throughout the post-Soviet era, told the nation that the time had come for a younger generation to tackle Russia's formidable economic and social problems.

Sick and tired of this country's leadership, Russian voters cast their ballots this weekend in protest--and handed a powerful victory to the same leadership they were protesting. The contradiction demonstrates the extraordinary cunning of the clique of insiders who run President Boris N. Yeltsin's Kremlin. Just four months ago, their influence was under threat by growing popular support for a rival alliance led by former Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov.

Buoyed by popular support for the war in Chechnya, three political parties allied with the Kremlin made a strong showing in national legislative elections Sunday, capturing 40% of the party slate vote. With 57% of the vote counted, President Boris N. Yeltsin had scored a major political victory by neutralizing former Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov and other rivals while securing the tamest Duma, or lower house of parliament, of his presidency.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin bluntly reminded President Clinton on Thursday that Moscow has a vast nuclear arsenal and railed at the U.S. leader for trying to meddle in Russia's internal affairs. "Yesterday, Clinton took the liberty of putting pressure on Russia," Yeltsin said during a visit to Beijing. "He obviously must have forgotten for a few seconds, a minute or half a minute, what Russia is and that Russia possesses a full arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Further distancing himself from the West as pivotal elections approach, President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia signed a pact Wednesday with Belarus that calls for heightened military cooperation and eventually a merger of the two countries. An unsteady Yeltsin, who at one point didn't realize that he had finished his speech and who needed help from an aide to reorient himself, reached the agreement with Alexander G.

Faced with mounting criticism from the West over the war in Chechnya, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin will head to Beijing today for talks with Chinese leaders aimed at balancing what both countries see as global domination by the United States. As Moscow's brutal campaign in the separatist southern republic increasingly alienates Yeltsin's Western friends, the Russian president is scheduled to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Jiang Zemin, on Thursday and Friday before returning home.

For the third time in three years, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin was rushed to the hospital Monday with pneumonia--a serious illness that set in during a period of serious political uncertainty. The illness, announced by presidential spokesman Dmitri D. Yakushkin, apparently was triggered in part by Yeltsin's trip earlier this month to a summit with world leaders in Istanbul, Turkey, where he was roundly criticized for Russia's military campaign in Chechnya.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin will need at least a week to recuperate from a viral infection and acute bronchitis, the Kremlin said Thursday after announcing the leader's 10th illness since his 1996 reelection. The president went to the Central Clinical Hospital after a morning meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin. He received brief treatment, after which he left for Gorky-9, his residence in the woods west of Moscow, spokesman Dmitri D. Yakushkin said.