The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center opened in Yekaterinburg on November 25. More than 30,000 exhibits and 13,000 photos are on display. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev took part in the formal opening ceremony.
The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center opened in Yekaterinburg on November 25. More than 30,000 exhibits and 13,000 photos are on display. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev took part in the formal opening ceremony.
As TASS reports the Yeltsin Center was founded in accordance with the federal law "On the Centers of the Historical Legacy of the Russian Presidents Who Have Stopped Exercising their Powers" passed in 2008. According to Deputy Executive Director of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center Lyudmila Telen, the government allocated 5 billion rubles ($76 million) from the federal budget for the setting up of the center.
It is also said that the center has nearly 50 sponsors: well-known politicians, large companies, Russian business people.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called the museum a “tribute to the memory of Russia’s first president” and the radical change the country went through in the 1990s, The Guardian writes.
“I remember the words of Boris Nikolaevich that the whole country now knows: ‘Take care of Russia,’” Putin said at the ceremony. “They were addressed to all of us, the current and future generations. Boris Nikolaevich wanted our country to be strong, prosperous and happy. We have already done a lot to achieve those goals.”
But nobody said about Yeltsin’s responsibility for the collapse of the USSR.
Deutsche Welle reminds: a one-time Mikhail Gorbachev supporter turned critic, Yeltsin became the first Politburo member to resign in protest of the government's policies in 1987, leading to his reputation as an anti-establishment politician and a great rise in popularity.
He went on to become the first president of the Russian Federation after the fall of the Soviet Union, and led the country from 1991-1999 before stepping down and nominating his protégé, an unknown spy boss named Vladimir Putin, to succeed him.
