After listening to speaker after speaker deliver withering denunciations of his performance as head of the Moscow Communist Party, starting with a personal attack by his mentor Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin was clearly stunned. "At this plenum I have heard many things, things such as I had never heard in my entire life," he said when it was his turn to speak. But Yeltsin knew better than to quarrel; instead he responded with a rambling self- criticism that echoed nothing so much as the Stalin-era show trials of the 1930s. "One of my most characteristic personal traits, ambition, has manifested itself...
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