On New Year’s Eve, 1999, Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation, resigns after eight years in office. The presidency passes to the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, a former intelligence officer who will quickly become the central figure in Russian politics and play a major role in global affairs in the new century.
Putin spent 15 years as an intelligence officer in the KGB and its post-Soviet successor, the FSB, retiring in 1990. He moved to St. Petersburg and entered politics, becoming deputy mayor just four years later. Yeltsin made him director of the FSB in 1998 and, presumably very impressed, appointed him prime minister the following year. Yeltsin, suffering numerous health issues after years of heavy drinking, resigned his post just four months later, completing Putin’s six-year rise from political newcomer to president of one of the largest countries in the world.
On June 6, 1944, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the go-ahead for the largest amphibious military operation in history: Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of northern France, commonly known as D-Day. By daybreak, […]
More than 22 million South Africans turn out to cast ballots in the country’s first multiracial parliamentary elections. An overwhelming majority chose anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela to head a new coalition government that included his […]
In what later became known as Victory Day, an official announcement of Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allies is made public to the world on August 14, 1945. Even though Japan’s War Council, urged by […]
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