In the end, it looked like it would be Yeltsin against the Communists and he would lose. But the country’s newly rich rallied behind the president, as did the politicians he had patronized—including, in the end, the majority of the antiwar bureaucrats—and as did the newly free press. But most of all, it was Yeltsin himself who rallied. After a couple of years when he seemed to oscillate between depression and binge-drinking, the president mobilized to campaign.
