Russian roller coaster

Russia | The first elected president in Russian history, Boris Yeltsin took his country from corrupt hard-line rule to euphoric freedom and back again | Edward E. Plowman

July 1991, Moscow: Billy Graham put on a five-day evangelism training conference for 5,000 pastors and church leaders from Russia and other Soviet republics. The time was opportune: Peaceful revolutions of 1989 had overthrown communism in Eastern Europe—the overthrow in Romania was marked by violence—and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself was on the brink.

On the last day of the conference Graham, then 72, had a private meeting with Boris Yeltsin that lasted more than an hour.

Yeltsin was not particularly religious himself but championed religious freedom. Among other things, the pair discussed the need for spiritual values in society. Such values brought down the Soviet government that year, but it turned out that Yeltsin needed more.