Hello, welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Robert Nicholson.

In this edition, I'm taking you back to 1998 when Boris Yeltsin made a surprise

speech at the rebarial of the Romanovs, members of the Royal Family who'd been murdered during the Russian

Revolution.

It's July 17, 1998.

The President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin, visibly exhausted and ill,

disembarks off his flight from Moscow. He's on his way to St Petersburg's Peter and Paul

Cathedral to give one of the most significant and closely watched speeches of a long political

career.

There were a lot of people standing along the route of the motorcade and expressing themselves.

Lillia Dubovaya was there as a reporter for the Russian State News Service and later went on to become the press secretary

for Yeltsin's deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov after he left government.

And there was a huge amount of people in the church and they were waiting for Yeltsin.

Yeltsin was the first president of post-Soviet Russia and had been a key figure in the end of the Soviet Union,

the communist dictatorship that had been established after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

It replaced a monarchy whose last Tsaa or King Nikolai Romanov had been executed, along with his wife and children, the youngest of whom was his 13-year-old son.

But the Soviet Union began to collapse in the early 1990s and in

1991 Russia held new elections. Boris Yeltsin, a former Soviet official and

provincial party chief, was elected president.

It was a time of rapid change and political chaos as Yeltsin's nascent government had to fight

off a coup attempt that sought to restore the Soviet regime.

The day that will rank as historic as the moment the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917.

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