- Born
- Died
- Birth nameBoris Nikolayevich Yeltsin
- Height6′ 1½″ (1.87 m)
- Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1 February 1931 - 23 April 2007) was a Russian and Soviet politician who served as the first president of Russia from 1991 to 1999. He was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1990. He later stood as a political independent, during which time he was viewed as being ideologically aligned with liberalism and Russian nationalism.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Bonitao
- He grew up in the most impoverished circumstances, which caused the family to flee the countryside in search of work. After school, Yeltsin began studying at the Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk in 1949, graduating in 1955 with a degree in civil engineering. In 1956 he married the civil engineer Anastasia Iossifovna Girina. Together they became parents of two daughters. During his subsequent professional career, he rose to become chief engineer in the public construction administration. As such, he headed the housing complex in Sverdlovsk from 1963. Although Yeltsin joined the CPSU in 1961, his political career in the party began only in 1968, when he was appointed department head of the Sverdlovsk Region Party Committee.
In 1975 he was promoted to secretary and the following year to first secretary. In 1978 he became a member of the Union Soviet of the Supreme Soviet. In 1981 he was accepted into the Central Committee (CC) of the CPSU. Yeltsin served on the Soviet Transport, Postal and Telecommunications Commission from 1979 to 1984. From 1984 he sat on the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. In 1985, the new General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev appointed him to head the Central Committee for Construction in Moscow. In the Soviet capital, Yeltsin soon rose to become party leader and feared official who took a stand against the favoritism of the party elite. Even more radical than Gorbachev, Yeltsin called for the reform of the CPSU and the abolition of all official privileges. He impatiently called for a more rapid implementation of the new political course of "Glasnost" and "Perestroika". Differences with the Moscow party leadership led to Yeltsin's resignation in November 1987.
But the political commitment of the controversial reformer was not exhausted. He continued to campaign for accelerating reforms and was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989 as a deputy from a Moscow constituency. In May 1989, Yeltsin entered the Supreme Soviet, where he became Gorbachev's fiercest critic, whom he attacked for assuming numerous power functions. That same year, 1989, Yeltsin met President George Bush on a speaking tour of the United States. After Yeltsin's 1990 election to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Russian Soviet Federative Republic, he was nominated as President of the Congress and thus of the Republic. Shortly afterwards he resigned his CPSU membership, which was hardly compatible with his cross-party role.
Now he found the opportunity to finally completely abolish the long-disputed privileges for the party's leading officials. On June 12, 1991, Yeltsin was elected President of the Russian Federation in the first direct popular elections. Two months later, the new president made a name for himself by successfully resisting the attempted coup by Orthodox communist forces that had captured Mikhail Gorbachev in Crimea. His stance during the coup permanently strengthened Yeltsin's political position, especially vis-à-vis Gorbachev. At the end of 1991, in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was sealed by the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Russian Federation under Yeltsin's leadership took over as its diplomatic successor. The president met with President George H. W. Bush in Washington in 1992 to discuss disarmament agreements.
Yeltsin's presidency was characterized by serious economic problems that resulted from the market economy opening of the former Soviet economic area. Ethnic and national differentiations also became increasingly noticeable within the Russian Federation, which erupted in bloody battles in various regions such as Moldova, Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh, in which Russian troops openly took part. Yeltsin soon appropriated the concentration of power that Gorbachev had once criticized. The President of the Russian Federation temporarily took over the office of head of government at the end of 1991 and also the Ministry of Defense in the spring of 1992. In December 1992, however, the Congress of People's Deputies stipulated that the President should submit a list of candidates to the Congress when appointing the head of government.
Yegor Gaidar, previously nominated by Yeltsin, was now rejected, which is why the President nominated Viktor Chernomyrdin as the new head of government. At the same time, Yeltsin tried to control the mass media to compensate for his lost power. In 1993, the Russian president found himself in a permanent conflict with parliament, which was triggered by Yeltsin's plans for constitutional reform and culminated in the unconstitutional dissolution of the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet on September 21st. Yeltsin's arbitrary actions resulted in his dismissal by the Supreme Soviet, to which he in turn responded with the military siege of the parliament building. At the beginning of October 1993, the conflict escalated into open fighting in which the insurgent parliamentarians took control of the television center and other public authorities in Moscow. Eventually, troops loyal to Yeltsin ended the uprising.
The subsequent new elections in December 1993, which were combined with a constitutional referendum, resulted in approval of Yeltsin's draft constitution, but also a new majority in parliament for his opponents and those who stopped reform. Before the new year, the Russian president visited NATO in Belgium. In 1994, during a visit to Russia by US President Bill Clinton, Yeltsin announced the continuation of the reform course. The Russian president also intervened in the Bosnian conflict, where he was able to mediate between NATO and Bosnian Serbs. Domestically, his term in office continued to be marked by inexorable economic collapse. The crisis was not least due to anti-reform forces in parliament and the authorities, who insisted on traditional structures of clientelism and usurpation of power. Despite these difficulties, the Russian president won re-election in 1996.
On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin announced his resignation and handed over the reins of government to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In 2000, Putin was confirmed as president. Yeltsin left Russia on the verge of bankruptcy, with broken state structures and an impoverished population. Yeltsin was already in poor health when he was Russian president. Several heart attacks had already made bypass operations necessary in the 1990s.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin died on April 23, 2007 in the Moscow Kremlin Hospital as a result of heart failure.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth
- SpouseNaina Yeltsina(September 28, 1956 - April 23, 2007) (his death, 2 children)
- Children
- ParentsNikolai YeltsinKlavdiya Vasilyevna Yeltsina
- RelativesBoris Yeltsin Jr.(Grandchild)Gleb Dyachenko(Grandchild)Maria Yumasheva(Grandchild)
- Silver hair
- President of Russian SFSR/Russia from 10 July 1991 to 31 December 1999.
- Was hospitalized 16 times during his presidency.
- Received a World Record personal majority (determined by the winning margin in number of votes) as the people's deputy candidate for Moscow in the Soviet parliamentary elections on 26 March 1989: he received 5,118,745 votes out of 5,722,937, when his closest rival received 392,633. Yeltsin won by a margin of 4,726,112 votes.
- Had his look-alike puppets in satirical puppet shows Puppets (1994), Spitting Image (1984) and Les Guignols de l'info (1988).
- First freely-elected leader of Russia.
- [from his 1994 memoir "The Struggle for Russia"] The debilitating bouts of depression, the grave second thoughts, the insomnia and headaches in the middle of the night, the tears and despair . . . the hurt from people close to me who did not support me at the last minute, who didn't hold up, who deceived me - I have had to bear all of this.
- [resignation speech, 12/31/99] I ask forgiveness for not justifying some hopes of those people who believed that at one stroke, in one spurt, we could leap from the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past into the light, rich civilized future. I myself believed in this, that we could overcome everything in one spurt.
- [resignation speech, 12/31/99] Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians, with new faces, with new, smart, strong, energetic people. And we who have been in power for many years already, we must go.
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