Leadership Quote by Boris Yeltsin

Numbers are doing two jobs here: mourning and governing. Yeltsin’s “A total of 1,580 people” opens like a ledger entry, not a lament, and that’s the point. In a crisis, a head of state has to convert horror into something the state can hold, count, and therefore respond to. The precision signals control at the very moment control is in doubt.

Then comes the phrase “the civilian population,” a clarifying apposition that quietly builds a moral case. He’s not just describing casualties; he’s drawing a bright line between innocents and the people who claim to fight in their name. It’s also a nudge to the public: whatever grievances exist, terror has forfeited legitimacy by targeting ordinary life. “Suffered as a result” keeps agency slightly offstage, a bureaucratic construction that nonetheless primes listeners for the agency the next clause delivers.

“The bloody wave” is cinematic, collective, almost weather-like. A “wave” suggests something sweeping, contagious, hard to contain. That metaphor expands the threat beyond any single bombing into a national condition, justifying extraordinary measures as defense against an ongoing force, not a discrete crime. He widens the map, too: “Moscow and other towns and villages of our country” stitches capital and periphery into one wounded body politic, a classic unifier in a federation strained by post-Soviet fragmentation.

Context matters: Yeltsin governed amid economic shock therapy, collapsing trust, and violent conflict tied to Chechnya and separatist insurgency. The subtext is an appeal for consent: accept the center’s authority, accept the security state’s reach, because the alternative is a “wave” that reaches everywhere. Counting the dead becomes a claim to be the only actor capable of stopping the count from rising.