ABSTRACT
The Chechen crisis which began in early December 1994 prompted such reformers as Egor Gaider and Grigori Yavlinsky to distance themselves from the Yeltsin government. The Russian media portrayed Yeltsin as closeted with his Soviet era advisors and associates. Such isolation of Yeltsin from the reformist democratic forces was perceived by many as somehow a more recent development and his government's aggressive posturing towards the near abroad as an ominous new phenomenon. Some Russian observers even called Russia's behaviour towards the newly independent countries 'frivolous.' The image of Yeltsin as the 'new authoritarian' or Yeltsin the 'helpless, isolated Tsar' manipulated by officials from the Communist elite of the Soviet Union was the result of our relative ignorance of the Russian state and its burgeoning elite's behaviour in the period when Russia was trying to define itself as a separate state.
