Leadership Quote by Boris Yeltsin

It lands like a verbal shrug that’s doing heavy political work. Yeltsin isn’t delivering poetry here; he’s laying a paper trail. The repetition - “declared,” “approved,” “Declaration” - is the point: legitimacy doesn’t come from romance or history, it comes from procedure. By invoking the Supreme Soviet, he’s anchoring Russia’s break not in street upheaval but in institutional authorization, as if to say: whatever you feel about the Soviet collapse, the receipt is filed and stamped.

The second-person tug - “you know and remember” - is a classic leader’s move when the ground is contested. It pressures the listener into complicity: if you “remember,” you’re already halfway to accepting the premise. It also implies a fight over memory is underway. Yeltsin is not merely recounting an event; he’s policing the narrative of 1990-91, when “independence” inside the USSR carried a destabilizing irony. Russia wasn’t a colony breaking free; it was the core republic prying itself out of the union it dominated. Calling that “independence” rebrands a power shift as liberation.

Context sharpens the edge. Yeltsin’s authority depended on transferring sovereignty away from Soviet structures and toward a Russian state he could lead. This kind of phrasing aims to make that transfer feel settled, even inevitable, while quietly warning that any attempt to reverse it is not just political opposition but amnesia - a refusal to accept documented reality. The language is clunky because the argument is legalistic: history, in this telling, is what got ratified.