Boris Yeltsin

• 1. Introduction

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  Boris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank outside the Russian parliament on a sweltering August day in 1991 and delivered a speech that would echo across the twentieth century. Below him, a crowd had gathered to defy a coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The military units sent to crush the protest defected instead. Within days, the plotters had fled Moscow, and Yeltsin emerged as the most powerful man in a country that was dissolving beneath his feet.

  Yeltsin was born on the 1st of February 1931 in the village of Butka, Ural Oblast, and died on the 23rd of April 2007. In between, he rose from a construction foreman in the Urals to the first popularly elected head of state in Russian history. He presided over the formal end of the Soviet Union, launched the most radical economic transformation any major country had attempted in peacetime, and left office with approval ratings that had fallen to as low as 2-4 percent.

  How does a man once celebrated as a democratic hero become one of the most polarizing leaders of the modern era? What drove him from loyal Communist Party apparatchik to the man who disbanded the Soviet state he had served for three decades? And what did Russia become under his watch? Those questions run through every chapter of his life.

• 2. Urals Childhood, Iron Discipline

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  Yeltsin's paternal grandfather, Ignatii, was classified as a kulak in 1930, his farm in Basmanovo confiscated, and he and his wife Anna were exiled to Nadezhdinsk, where he died two years later. That dispossession shadowed the family's early years and set a pattern of survival under state power that Yeltsin would spend decades later dismantling.

  Growing up in Berezniki and Kazan, Yeltsin attended Railway School Number 95 and later Pushkin High School, where he became captain of the volleyball squad. He was academically strong, repeatedly elected class monitor, and drawn to physical risk. A prank involving a grenade blew off the thumb and index finger of his left hand, a wound he carried for the rest of his life. During summer breaks, he and friends walked for weeks through the taiga.

  At the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk, which he entered in September 1949, Yeltsin studied industrial and civil engineering, supplemented his stipend by unloading railway trucks, and fell seriously ill with tonsillitis and rheumatic fever in 1952, temporarily leaving his studies. He also began a relationship with fellow student Naina Iosifovna Girina, whom he married in September 1956. Their daughter Yelena was born in August 1957; a second daughter, Tatyana, followed in January 1960.

  After graduating in June 1955, he was assigned to the Lower Iset Construction Directorate in Sverdlovsk. He spent his first year learning every building trade from the ground up. By January 1960 he was head engineer of Construction Directorate Number 13, overseeing, at one point, a workforce of 1,000 on a textile factory project. His reputation was for punctuality, hard targets, and zero tolerance for theft or absenteeism. A five-story building collapsed in March 1966 during his later career; an official inquiry cleared him, though it cost him a planned Order of Lenin.

• 3. Rising Through the Party

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  In March 1961, Yeltsin became a full member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He later gave two different explanations for that choice: in his autobiography he cited sincere socialist belief, while in other interviews he said membership was simply necessary for advancement. Both things may have been true at once.

  His patron within the local party was Yakov Ryabov, who became first secretary of the party gorkom in 1963 and recruited Yeltsin into the regional apparatus in April 1968. By 1975, Yeltsin was one of five obkom secretaries in Sverdlovsk Oblast, responsible not only for construction but for the region's forest and pulp-and-paper industries. When Ryabov was promoted to Moscow in October 1976, he recommended Yeltsin as his replacement. Leonid Brezhnev interviewed Yeltsin personally before agreeing. The Sverdlovsk obkom unanimously voted to appoint him, making him one of the youngest provincial first secretaries in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

  As First Secretary, Yeltsin oversaw the construction of a subway system for Sverdlovsk, new theaters, a circus, the refurbishment of its 1912 opera house, and youth housing projects. In September 1977, he carried out orders to demolish the Ipatiev House, where the Romanov royal family had been killed in 1918, following government concerns that it was attracting growing attention at home and abroad. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet in 1978 without opposition and, in February 1981, was selected to join the Central Committee after addressing its 26th Congress.

  During these years, his worldview was shifting. He read widely, including samizdat publications, and claimed to have read an illegally printed copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. His concerns about the Soviet system were less ideological than practical: he believed the system was losing effectiveness and beginning to decay. By 1980, he had begun appearing unannounced at factories, shops, and public transport to observe Soviet life directly, a habit that troubled more orthodox party figures but impressed no one enough to stop it.

• 4. The Resignation That Changed Everything

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  On the 10th of September 1987, after hard-liner Yegor Ligachyov lectured him at the Politburo for permitting two small unsanctioned demonstrations on Moscow streets, Yeltsin wrote a letter of resignation to Gorbachev, who was on holiday at the Black Sea. Gorbachev later described his reaction as stunned. Nobody in Soviet history had voluntarily resigned from the Politburo.

  When Yeltsin spoke at the Central Committee plenary meeting on the 27th of October 1987, he expressed frustration with the slow pace of reform, the servility shown toward the general secretary, and his own untenable position under pressure from Ligachyov. In speaking this way before the Central Committee, he had done something not seen since Leon Trotsky addressed a party leader in such terms in the 1920s. Gorbachev accused him of "political immaturity" and "absolute irresponsibility." Nobody in the room backed him.

  Within days, news of what was called his "secret speech" spread through Moscow. Fabricated samizdat versions began circulating. On the 9th of November 1987, Yeltsin apparently tried to kill himself and was rushed to hospital bleeding from self-inflicted cuts to his chest. Gorbachev ordered him from his hospital bed to a Moscow party meeting two days later, where he was denounced in what Yeltsin himself likened to a Stalinist show trial before being fired as First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party. He said he would never forgive Gorbachev for what he called "immoral and inhuman" treatment.

  Demoted to First Deputy Commissioner for the State Committee for Construction, Yeltsin began plotting a return. A smear campaign against him backfired: reports of his allegedly drunk behavior during a visit to the United States in September 1989 only deepened popular sympathy. On the 26th of March 1989, he won election to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union with 92 percent of the vote as the delegate from Moscow district.

• 5. The Grocery Store Moment

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  On the 16th of September 1989, during a tour of the United States, Yeltsin visited a medium-sized grocery store called Randalls in Texas. What he found there unsettled him in ways that a political speech never could.

  Leon Aron, in his 2000 biography Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life, quoted a Yeltsin associate who was on the plane afterward: "For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. 'What have they done to our poor people?' he said after a long silence." Aron also recorded Yeltsin's own later reflection on the Houston excursion, which he described as causing the "pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments." Yeltsin added: "I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans."

  An aide, Lev Sukhanov, was reported to have said that it was at that moment that "the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed" inside his boss. In his autobiography, Against the Grain, published in 1990, Yeltsin hinted that after the tour he made plans to open a line of government-subsidized grocery stores to alleviate Russia's shortages. The plan never materialized, but the encounter captured a turning point: the man who had spent a career building the Soviet system had seen, in a Texas supermarket, exactly what that system had failed to deliver.

• 6. Dismantling the Soviet State

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  On the 12th of July 1990, Yeltsin resigned from the Communist Party in a dramatic speech before party members at the 28th Congress; some responded by shouting "Shame!" He had already been elected chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic on the 29th of May 1990, despite Gorbachev personally pleading with Russian deputies not to choose him.

  The coup of August 1991 accelerated everything. After Yeltsin's tank-top defiance and the coup's collapse, Gorbachev was restored to his position but politically destroyed. By September, Gorbachev could no longer influence events outside Moscow. Yeltsin began absorbing what remained of the Soviet government, ministry by ministry. On the 6th of November 1991, he issued a decree banning all Communist Party activities on Russian soil.

  On the 8th of December 1991, Yeltsin met Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk and the leader of Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich, in Belovezhskaya Pushcha. The three signed the Belovezha Accords, declaring that the Soviet Union no longer existed "as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality" and announcing the formation of a Commonwealth of Independent States. On the 17th of December, Gorbachev accepted the outcome and agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union. On the 25th of December, he resigned. The next day, the Council of the Republics voted the Soviet Union out of existence.

  The aftermath was immediate and disorienting. Economic relations between former Soviet republics were severely compromised. Millions of ethnic Russians found themselves living in newly formed foreign countries. The state that had shaped Yeltsin's entire career had ceased to exist, and he was now the president of something called the Russian Federation.

• 7. Shock Therapy and Its Consequences

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  On the 2nd of January 1992, Yeltsin, acting as his own prime minister, ordered the liberalization of foreign trade, prices, and currency. This was economic shock therapy applied to the world's largest command economy, a policy his advisers had debated in terms of speed: rapid versus gradual. The rapid approach prevailed.

  Anatoly Chubais, Yeltsin's deputy for economic policy, became the leading advocate of privatization. In late 1992, Yeltsin launched a programme issuing free vouchers to all Russian citizens, each with a nominal value of around 10,000 rubles, for buying shares in state enterprises. Within months, the majority of those vouchers had converged in the hands of intermediaries who paid cash for them outright. By mid-1996, substantial ownership shares over major firms had been acquired at very low prices by a small number of people who came to be known in the mid-1990s as "oligarchs," among them Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin, and others.

  Through the 1990s, Russia's GDP fell by 50 percent. Hyperinflation wiped out personal savings. Tens of millions of Russians were pushed into poverty. Some economists compared the severity of Russia's 1990s economic collapse unfavorably to what the United States and Germany had endured during the Great Depression six decades earlier. In February 1992, vice president Alexander Rutskoy denounced the programme as "economic genocide."

  The political cost was severe. By 1993, conflict between Yeltsin and parliament had escalated into a constitutional crisis. Yeltsin ordered the unconstitutional dissolution of the Supreme Soviet on the 21st of September 1993. Parliament declared him removed. On the 4th of October, tanks shelled the parliament building; 187 people were killed and nearly 500 wounded. A new constitution, approved by referendum at the same time, significantly expanded the powers of the president and created what became known as a super-presidential system.

• 8. Last Years and the Succession

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  Yeltsin underwent emergency quintuple heart bypass surgery in November 1996. He had been recuperating from a series of heart attacks throughout early that year, even as he campaigned for re-election. His approval ratings had been close to nonexistent when campaigning began. Chubais served as both campaign manager and adviser on privatization, using control of that programme as an instrument of the re-election effort. U.S. president Bill Clinton threw his support behind Yeltsin, and American advisers were sent to assist the campaign team.

  Yeltsin won the run-off on the 3rd of July 1996 with 53.8 percent of the vote against Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov's 40.7 percent, with a turnout of 68.9 percent. Critics assert the election was rigged. His second term was marked by the 1998 Russian financial crisis, in which the government defaulted on its debts and the ruble collapsed, and by escalating tensions with NATO over the bombing of Yugoslavia.

  On the 9th of August 1999, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin, then relatively unknown, as prime minister, announcing his wish to see Putin as his successor. On the 31st of December 1999, in a televised New Year address on the state-owned ORT channel, Yeltsin resigned. He apologized to Russia's people for "not making many of your and my dreams come true. What seemed simple to do proved to be excruciatingly difficult." Putin's first decree as president granted Yeltsin lifelong immunity from prosecution.

  Yeltsin died of congestive heart failure on the 23rd of April 2007. He was buried on the 25th of April at the Novodevichy Cemetery, following a period when his body lay in repose at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. He was the first Russian head of state in 113 years to receive a church burial, after Emperor Alexander III. On that date, President Putin declared a national day of mourning, with flags flown at half-staff across the country.