In June, the biggest republic of them all, the Russian, elected its own president. He was Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss and now Gorbachev's chief rival. The contrast could not be missed, because for all of his talk of democracy, Gorbachev had never subjected himself to a popular vote. Another contrast, less evident at the time, would soon become clear: Yeltsin, unlike Gorbachev, had a grand strategic objective. It was to abolish the Communist Party, dismantle the Soviet Union, and make Russia an independent democratic capitalist state. Yeltsin was not a popular figure in Washington. He had a reputation for heavy drinking, publicity seeking, and gratuitous attacks on Gorbachev at a time when Bush was trying to support him. He had even once picked a fight over protocol in the White House driveway with Condoleezza Rice, the president's young but formidable Soviet adviser—which he lost. By 1991, though, there was no denying Yeltsin's importance: in "reassert[ing] Russian political and economic control over the republic's own affairs," Scowcroft recalled, "he was attacking the very basis of the Soviet state." It was one thing for the Bush administration to watch Soviet influence in Eastern Europe disintegrate, and then to push German reunification. It was quite another to contemplate the complete breakup of the U.S.S.R. "My view is, you dance with who is on the dance floor," Bush noted in his diary. "[Y]ou especially don't . . . [encourage] destabilization. . . . I'm wondering, where do we go and how do we get there?"

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "In June, the biggest republic of them all, the Russian, elected its own president. He was Boris Yeltsin, a former Moscow party boss and now Gorbachev's chief rival. The contrast could not be missed, because for all of his talk of democracy, Gorbachev had never subjected himself to a popular vote. Another contrast, less evident at the time, would soon become clear: Yeltsin, unlike Gorbachev, had a grand strategic objective. It was to abolish the Communist Party, dismantle the Soviet Union, and make Russia an independent democratic capitalist state. Yeltsin was not a popular figure in Washington. He had a reputation for heavy drinking, publicity seeking, and gratuitous attacks on Gorbachev at a time when Bush was trying to support him. He had even once picked a fight over protocol in the White House driveway with Condoleezza Rice, the president's young but formidable Soviet adviser—which he lost. By 1991, though, there was no denying Yeltsin's importance: in "reassert[ing] Russian political and economic control over the republic's own affairs," Scowcroft recalled, "he was attacking the very basis of the Soviet state." It was one thing for the Bush administration to watch Soviet influence in Eastern Europe disintegrate, and then to push German reunification. It was quite another to contemplate the complete breakup of the U.S.S.R. "My view is, you dance with who is on the dance floor," Bush noted in his diary. "[Y]ou especially don't . . . [encourage] destabilization. . . . I'm wondering, where do we go and how do we get there?"" in the context of "John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New HIstory (2005), pp. 254-255" to mean that wisdom is timeless.