Boris Yeltsin

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born on February 1, 1931, in the village of Butka in the Sverdlovsk region of the Urals, into a peasant family that suffered under Stalin's collectivization drive. His father, Nikolai, was arrested during the purges of the 1930s and spent time in a labor camp before working on construction sites. The family lived for years in a single room of a communal barracks in the town of Berezniki, where Boris grew up in genuine poverty ^[1].

As a schoolboy he was bold to the point of recklessness. He lost the thumb and index finger of his left hand when a grenade he and friends had stolen from an army depot exploded as he tried to open it. Despite the injury he remained a keen sportsman, especially in volleyball, which he played and coached at a high level through his student years ^[2].

Yeltsin studied civil engineering at the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), graduating in 1955. He then worked his way up through the regional construction industry, first as a foreman and eventually as head of a large house-building combine, gaining a reputation as a demanding and energetic manager ^[1].

Yeltsin joined the Communist Party in 1961, relatively late for an ambitious Soviet manager, and moved into full-time party work in 1968. In 1976 he was appointed first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional party committee, making him the effective governor of one of the Soviet Union's most important industrial regions, a post he held for nearly a decade ^[3].

His energy caught the attention of Mikhail Gorbachev, who brought him to Moscow in 1985, shortly after becoming general secretary. Yeltsin was soon put in charge of the Moscow city party organization, where he attacked corruption, sacked entrenched officials, and cultivated a populist image by riding public transport and making surprise inspections of shops ^[3].

The alliance with Gorbachev collapsed in October 1987, when Yeltsin stunned a Central Committee plenum by criticizing the slow pace of perestroika and the conduct of senior figures. He was removed from his Moscow post and publicly humiliated, an episode that might have ended a conventional Soviet career. Instead it made him a symbol of opposition. In 1989 voters in Moscow returned him to the new Congress of People's Deputies with about ninety percent of the vote, and in 1990 he was elected chairman of the Russian republic's Supreme Soviet, resigning from the Communist Party the same year ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Boris Yeltsin usually starts with June 12, 1991, when he won the first direct presidential election in Russian history, taking about 57 percent of the vote in a multi-candidate race. It was the first time Russians had chosen their own head of state at the ballot box ^[5].

Two months later came the defining image of his life. When Communist hardliners attempted a coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, Yeltsin climbed onto a tank outside the Russian parliament building in Moscow and called for resistance. The coup crumbled within days, and with it the authority of the Soviet center. In December 1991 Yeltsin joined the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus in signing the Belovezha Accords, which declared that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and created the Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev resigned on December 25, and the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin ^[5].

Among Boris Yeltsin achievements as president were the dismantling of the planned economy and the state's monopoly on political life. His government freed most prices in January 1992 and launched a mass privatization program that transferred thousands of enterprises out of state hands. He signed arms reduction agreements with the United States, secured the removal of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, and in 1993 won approval of a new constitution that still defines the Russian state ^[6].

The record was deeply mixed. Price liberalization wiped out savings and sent inflation soaring, while privatization, especially the loans-for-shares deals of 1995, concentrated vast assets in the hands of a small circle of financiers later known as the oligarchs. In October 1993 his standoff with a hostile parliament ended when he ordered tanks to shell the White House, the same building he had defended two years earlier. In December 1994 he sent troops into the breakaway republic of Chechnya, beginning a war that killed tens of thousands and ended in a humiliating 1996 truce ^[6].

Yeltsin met Naina Iosifovna Girina when both were students at the Ural Polytechnic Institute, and they married in 1956. The marriage lasted more than half a century, until his death. They had two daughters, Yelena and Tatyana; Tatyana Dyachenko became an official adviser to her father during his second term and a central figure in the Kremlin inner circle that journalists called "the Family" ^[7].

His private habits became a matter of public record in a way unusual for a Russian leader. He was a passionate tennis player and hunter, and his fondness for alcohol produced episodes of international embarrassment, including a 1994 incident in which he failed to leave his plane for a scheduled meeting with the Irish prime minister at Shannon Airport ^[7].

His health deteriorated sharply in office. He suffered several heart attacks, and between the two rounds of the 1996 election his condition was concealed from voters. In November 1996 he underwent quintuple bypass surgery, and for long stretches of his second term he governed intermittently, often from hospitals and residences outside Moscow ^[2].

The 1996 election was the last great fight of his career. Beginning the year with approval ratings in single digits amid economic misery and the Chechen war, Yeltsin ran a lavishly funded campaign backed by the new business elite and major television channels, defeating Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov in a July runoff ^[4].

His second term brought little relief. In August 1998 Russia defaulted on its domestic debt and devalued the ruble, wrecking what remained of public confidence in the reform project. Yeltsin cycled through prime ministers at a dizzying pace, dismissing four governments in under two years, before settling in August 1999 on a little-known former intelligence officer, Vladimir Putin ^[6].

On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin appeared on television and announced his resignation, asking Russians to forgive him for hopes that had not come true. Putin became acting president and, as one of his first acts, signed a decree shielding the former president from prosecution. In retirement Yeltsin stayed largely out of politics, though he occasionally voiced unease at the rollback of some freedoms of his era. He died of heart failure in Moscow on April 23, 2007, at the age of 76, and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery after the first church funeral for a Russian head of state since the tsars ^[8].

Any honest Boris Yeltsin biography has to hold two stories in tension. In one, he is the man who buried Soviet communism, gave Russians free elections, a free press, open borders, and a constitution, and twice, in 1991 and 1996, kept the Communist Party from returning to power. In the other, he presided over economic collapse, a violent constitutional crisis, a brutal war in Chechnya, and the rise of an oligarchy that captured the state he was trying to build ^[6].

Within Russia his reputation sank during the hardships of the 1990s and has never fully recovered; polls have consistently shown that many Russians associate his decade with chaos and national humiliation. Abroad, assessments tend to be warmer, crediting him with a largely peaceful dismantling of a nuclear empire, an outcome that was far from guaranteed ^[1].

His memory is preserved most visibly at the Yeltsin Center, a museum and archive opened in Yekaterinburg in 2015 with the support of his family and the Russian state. Sverdlovsk region's main university also bears his name. Historians continue to argue over whether the authoritarian turn that followed him grew out of his own choices, including the superpresidential constitution of 1993 and his selection of Putin, or represented a repudiation of what he stood for ^[8].