In this book, for the first time, a complete political biography of Russia’s first president, B. N. Yeltsin, is presented, and the stages of the rise of V. V. Putin—the man who accepted power from Yeltsin’s hands—into the political elite are traced. At the same time, it is a chronicle of more than ten years of fierce power struggle in the Kremlin, filled with details and specifics usually hidden from the eyes of an outside observer. In the concluding part of his study, the author—who has rare, information-rich materials—analyzes what was done in the first years of Vladimir Putin’s presidency.