Category: People Key figures: Boris Yeltsin; Vladimir Putin (hand-picked successor); Mikhail Gorbachev (Soviet president); Yegor Gaidar (economic reform architect); Ruslan Khasbulatov (parliamentary opponent); Alexander Lebed (1996 Chechen ceasefire broker)
Summary
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (February 1, 1931 – April 23, 2007) was the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999, and the dominant political figure of Russia’s post-Soviet transition. Born in the village of Butka in the Sverdlovsk Oblast of the Russian SFSR, Yeltsin rose through the Soviet Communist Party apparatus to become First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee before breaking decisively with the party establishment in 1987. His personal courage during the failed hardliner coup of August 1991 — he famously mounted a tank outside the Russian White House to rally democratic defenders — made him a global symbol of anti-communism and democratic resistance. In December 1991 he co-signed the Belavezha Accords that dissolved the Soviet Union, an act he would later describe as both inevitable and painful. His presidency from 1991 to 1999 was marked by radical economic liberalization (“shock therapy”), severe social dislocation, a constitutional showdown with parliament in 1993, and the catastrophic First Chechen War (1994–1996). He resigned on December 31, 1999, handing power to his hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin. He died in Moscow on April 23, 2007, at age 76, from congestive heart failure.
Rise to Power
Early Life and Communist Party Career
Yeltsin was born on February 1, 1931, in Butka, a small village in the Ural region of Russia. His family was subjected to Soviet collectivization during the 1930s; his grandfather was labeled a kulak and his family was dispossessed, experiences that Yeltsin later described as formative. He was educated at the Ural Polytechnic Institute (now Ural Federal University) in Sverdlovsk, graduating in 1955 with a degree in civil engineering. He worked as a construction engineer and foreman before joining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961.
Yeltsin rose rapidly in the Sverdlovsk regional party structure, becoming First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Oblast in 1976 — one of the largest and most industrially significant regions in the USSR. His tenure in Sverdlovsk was notable for a decisive act: in 1977, acting on orders from Moscow, he oversaw the demolition of the Ipatiev House, where Tsar Nicholas II and his family had been executed in 1918. The destruction was intended to prevent the site from becoming a focus of monarchist or anti-Soviet sentiment.
Break with the Soviet Establishment
Mikhail Gorbachev brought Yeltsin to Moscow in 1985, appointing him head of the Moscow City Party Committee. Yeltsin became known for riding public buses and showing up unannounced at food markets and hospitals to combat bureaucratic corruption — a populist style at odds with Soviet nomenklatura norms. In October 1987, in a speech to the Central Committee that shocked the Soviet establishment, Yeltsin criticized the pace of Gorbachev’s reforms and the resistance of senior party officials. He was stripped of his Moscow position, removed from the Politburo candidate list, and publicly humiliated in sessions designed to break him politically.
Instead of ending his career, the episode made Yeltsin a popular hero. In the first competitive Soviet elections in 1989, he won a seat in the Congress of People’s Deputies with 89 percent of the Moscow vote. In June 1991, in the first direct presidential election in Russian history, Yeltsin was elected President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) with 57 percent of the vote.
The August 1991 Coup and Soviet Dissolution
On August 19, 1991, hardline Communist Party officials and military officers launched a coup against Gorbachev, placing him under house arrest at his Crimean dacha and announcing an eight-member “State Committee for the State of Emergency” (GKCHP). The coup was intended to reverse perestroika and preserve the Soviet Union. Instead, it collapsed within 72 hours — largely because of Yeltsin’s defiance.
On the morning of August 19, Yeltsin traveled to the Russian White House (the parliament building in Moscow), climbed atop an armored personnel carrier, and delivered an impromptu speech denouncing the coup as unconstitutional and calling on Russian citizens and military units to resist. His image standing on the tank was broadcast worldwide and became a widely reproduced image of the coup’s failure. Army units began defecting to Yeltsin’s side; the plotters lost their nerve and surrendered on August 22.
The failed coup accelerated the dissolution of the Soviet Union. On December 8, 1991, Yeltsin met with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian Supreme Soviet Chairman Stanislav Shushkevich at a hunting lodge in the Belavezha Forest (in what is now Belarus) and signed the Belavezha Accords, formally declaring the Soviet Union dissolved and establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. Gorbachev formally resigned as Soviet president on December 25, 1991. The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time at midnight that night.
Presidency (1991–1999)
Shock Therapy and Economic Collapse
Yeltsin’s economic strategy was developed in close collaboration with Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and, with encouragement from Western advisers at the IMF and World Bank, pursued rapid liberalization rather than gradual reform. Beginning January 2, 1992, the government removed price controls that had been in place since Stalin. Prices immediately surged — inflation reached 2,520 percent in 1992. By 1994, Russia’s GDP had contracted by approximately 40 percent from its 1991 level, a peacetime economic contraction comparable in scale only to the Great Depression in the United States.
The privatization program (“voucher privatization”) of 1992–1994 was intended to distribute state assets broadly among the Russian public. In practice, a combination of insider dealing, lack of financial sophistication among ordinary citizens, and organized criminal pressure allowed a small number of well-connected individuals — the future “oligarchs” — to acquire dominant stakes in major industrial and energy enterprises for a fraction of their value. By 1996, Russia had one of the highest Gini coefficients (income inequality measures) in Europe.
Constitutional Crisis of 1993
By 1992, conflict between Yeltsin and the Russian parliament (the Supreme Soviet, dominated by former Communists and nationalists) had become irreconcilable. Parliament sought to limit Yeltsin’s executive powers; Yeltsin sought to dissolve parliament and hold new elections. On September 21, 1993, Yeltsin signed Decree No. 1400 dissolving parliament — a constitutionally questionable act. Parliament responded by impeaching Yeltsin and swearing in Vice President Alexander Rutskoy as acting president.
On October 3–4, 1993, the confrontation turned violent. Supporters of the parliament seized the Moscow mayor’s office and attempted to storm the Ostankino television center. Yeltsin declared a state of emergency and ordered the military to suppress the uprising. On the morning of October 4, army tanks fired on the Russian White House — the very building from which Yeltsin had defied the 1991 coup — killing between 147 and 187 people and wounding over 400. Rutskoy and parliamentary speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov were arrested. The violent resolution of the crisis gave Yeltsin the political space to push through a new constitution in a December 1993 referendum, significantly strengthening presidential powers. International reaction was muted; Western governments, preoccupied with keeping Russia on a democratic path, largely accepted Yeltsin’s version of events.
First Chechen War (1994–1996)
In December 1994, Yeltsin ordered Russian federal forces into the Republic of Chechnya after the Chechen government of Dzhokhar Dudayev declared independence. The campaign, which Russian military planners initially predicted would take weeks, became a catastrophic two-year war. The Russian army’s attempt to seize the Chechen capital Grozny in January 1995 resulted in the destruction of much of the city and the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers and Chechen civilians. Human rights organizations estimated Chechen civilian deaths at between 30,000 and 50,000 over the course of the war.
After Russian forces were repeatedly outmaneuvered by Chechen fighters, the war ended in a de facto Russian defeat: the Khasavyurt Accord of August 1996, brokered largely by General Alexander Lebed (whom Yeltsin had appointed as his National Security Adviser as a political move during the 1996 election), granted Chechnya effective independence pending a final political settlement. Russian federal forces withdrew; the question of Chechnya’s legal status was deferred to 2001.
1996 Presidential Election and Health Decline
Yeltsin’s approval rating in early 1996 stood at approximately 5 percent, the lowest of any sitting national leader in a major democracy. His main opponent in the June–July 1996 presidential election was Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, who led in polls heading into the first round. Yeltsin’s campaign team — with active assistance from Western political consultants and significant media support from oligarch-owned television — reframed the election as a binary choice between Yeltsin and a return to communism. In the July runoff, Yeltsin won 53.8 percent against Zyuganov’s 40.3 percent.
The election victory was shadowed by serious questions about Yeltsin’s health. He suffered his first confirmed heart attack in June 1995 and had two more in the summer of 1996. In November 1996, he underwent quintuple bypass surgery — a procedure whose risks were considered extraordinary for a 65-year-old with his medical history. His public appearances became increasingly erratic; Western leaders and Russian officials grew concerned about his capacity to govern, and his periods of incapacitation left a power vacuum increasingly filled by competing Kremlin factions.
Selection of Putin and Resignation
In August 1999, Yeltsin appointed the relatively unknown director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Vladimir Putin, as Prime Minister of Russia. Within weeks, apartment building bombings killed nearly 300 people in Moscow and other cities; the government attributed them to Chechen terrorists (a claim disputed by some investigators), and Putin ordered renewed military operations in Chechnya — a move that quickly raised his public approval rating from near zero to over 50 percent.
On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin made a surprise resignation announcement in a nationally televised address, describing himself as leaving not because of ill health but because “Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians, new faces, new people who are smart and strong and energetic.” He apologized to the Russian people for failing to deliver prosperity and stability. The resignation was also timed to give Putin the advantages of incumbency before the March 2000 presidential election. As his final official act, Yeltsin signed a decree granting Putin acting-president status and giving himself and his family immunity from criminal prosecution.
Death and Legacy (2007)
Yeltsin died of congestive heart failure in Moscow on April 23, 2007, at the age of 76. President Vladimir Putin declared a national day of mourning, and Yeltsin’s state funeral on April 25 at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow was attended by foreign heads of state and government including U.S. President George W. Bush, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Jacques Chirac, and numerous former Soviet-era leaders. It was the first Russian Orthodox state funeral for a head of state since the Tsarist era.
International tributes acknowledged the contradictions of his legacy. His decision to mount a tank in August 1991, his signing of the Belavezha Accords, and his willingness to subject Russia to a democratic election process were widely praised. His economic record, the Chechen war, and the consolidation of oligarchic power under his tenure were equally widely criticized. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who had maintained a close working relationship with Yeltsin through the 1990s, described him as a man “larger than life” who had “staked his career and his life on democracy.”
By 2007, the Russia Yeltsin had shaped was entering its third term under Putin, whose governing style — increased state control of media and energy, suppression of political opposition, and assertive foreign policy — represented a decisive departure from Yeltsin’s turbulent liberalism. Yeltsin’s own role in Putin’s rise to power thus gave his legacy an additional layer of historical complexity.
Sources
- Boris Yeltsin — Wikipedia
- Boris Yeltsin — Encyclopædia Britannica
- Belavezha Accords — Wikipedia
- Timothy Colton, Yeltsin: A Life (Basic Books, 2008) — the authoritative English-language biography.
- The Guardian — Boris Yeltsin obituary (April 23, 2007)