I want to apologize for our unfulfilled dreams. What we thought would be easy has proved painfully difficult. I would like to apologize for having failed to justify the hopes of the people who believed that we would be able to make a leap from the gloomy and stagnant totalitarian past to a bright, prosperous and civilized future at just one go. I myself believed in this. We haven't managed to make this leap, and I was naive in thinking we could.
— Boris Yeltsin
Contemporary
First Russian Federation president