Boris Yeltsin
Boris Yeltsin was the first president of the Russian Federation, dismantled the Soviet Union, and left the country to a successor he chose. Born in Sverdlovsk province in 1931 into a peasant family whose father was sent to a labour camp, he lost the thumb and forefinger of his left hand to a grenade as a boy, trained as a construction engineer, and rose through the party to run the Sverdlovsk region. Mikhail Gorbachev brought him to Moscow in 1985 as party chief, where he rode public transport and attacked privilege. He denounced the pace of reform at a Central Committee plenum in 1987, was removed and publicly humiliated, and came back by winning an open election in 1989 with about ninety per cent of the Moscow vote. He became chairman of the Russian parliament in 1990, quit the party, and was elected Russian president in June 1991. During the August coup he climbed onto a tank outside the White House and read a statement of defiance, which broke the plotters' authority. In December he signed the agreement dissolving the USSR. He then imposed shock therapy — price liberalisation and mass privatisation through vouchers — which produced hyperinflation, a collapse in output larger than the Great Depression, and the transfer of major assets to a small group of oligarchs. Life expectancy for men fell sharply. He shelled his own parliament in October 1993 after a constitutional standoff, and launched the first Chechen war in 1994, which killed tens of thousands. He won re-election in 1996 from about five per cent in the polls, funded by the oligarchs, after concealing a heart attack. He resigned on 31 December 1999, handing power to Vladimir Putin, and died in 2007.
- Lived: 1931 CE – 2007 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: First President of the Russian Federation (1991-1999)
