Two Presidents and a ruined nation

Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the dismantling of the socialist system in the Soviet Union and the eventual disintegration of the multination state, paving the way for the rise of the United States as the policeman of a unipolar world. The last-ditch attempt by a section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in August 1991 to save the first socialist state in the world from Gorbachev's historical folly of throwing the baby out with the bathwater was thwarted by his one-time comrade Boris Yeltsin, who eventually led the country into the crudest form of capitalism and utter chaos.