On 4 October 1993, Boris Yeltsin gave the order to blast the last of the old Soviet hardliners out of the Russian parliament building.

Former Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin has died, state media reported.

Rarely has a great nation's destiny been entrusted to one so young as Yegor Gaidar. He was only in his mid-thirties when he was economics minister and acting prime minister of Russia, and he served in those posts for little more than a year, between 1991 and 1992. But in that short period, Gaidar's "shock therapy" – the removal of price controls, massive public-spending cuts and a first wave of privatisation – forced his country to make the horrendously painful but historically vital transition from the backward, non-functioning Soviet system into the modern capitalist era.

Turning points in history...

LSO/DAVIS BARBICAN HALL LONDON

`Of course the big boys have nothing to worry about. They have the pernicious power of veto'

"I SHALL emigrate to America if the Reds come back," said Viktor, a small businessman anxious about the outcome of the presidential elections in Ukraine, where the incumbent, Leonid Kuchma, yesterday faced a challenge from Petro Symonenko, the leader of the Communist Party.

"MY BROTHER kept a pet sheep called Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin, but she was killed by shrapnel," said Ruslan Kurumov, a paramedic who had just escaped from Grozny, the Chechen capital. "Now he has given the same name to a pet turkey."

FOR A few years in the middle and late 1980s, Raisa Gorbachev was a global celebrity, her country's attempted transformation made flesh. From the moment she first appeared on the international stage during her husband's 1984 visit to Britain and was hailed as a Soviet version of the Princess of Wales, she was a figure of fascination.

FOR MUCH of his life - if his autobiographies are to believed - Boris Yeltsin has been an insomniac who spends the small hours of the night fretting about the fate of his huge and increasingly anarchic nation. But never before has he had better cause to lose sleep.

AT LEAST 10 gunmen died in a battle to free seven hostages, including four Japanese geologists, in the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan yesterday. The fate of the hostages is unclear. The gunmen are suspected to be Islamic militants from neighbouring Tajikistan.

VADIM LEVIN, the American-educated head of Uniex Direct, which uses junk mail to sell health products in Moscow, plans shortly to suspend all his commercial operations. Instead he will work full-time and without pay for Fatherland-All Russia, the new force on the Russian political scene.

IN THE biggest blow yet to Russia's new prime minister, Sergei Stepashin, one of his top two deputies resigned yesterday, less than a week after being appointed.

Boris Yeltsin has avoided impeachment but he is a spent force who has sacrificed his people's well-being to his own career