Two People Who Tried to Change the Same Country — Gorbachev and Yeltsin —

This paper examines Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin as two political figures who tried to change the same country in different ways. Gorbachev sought to reform the Soviet Union, while Yeltsin sought to create a new Russia. The paper considers the difference between political intentions and the experiences of ordinary people, including the economic hardship and social turmoil of the early 1990s. Rather than assigning the collapse of the Soviet Union to a single individual, it asks how the intentions of political leaders and the experiences of the people who lived through the transformation can be understood together.