Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin

Boris Yeltsin was born on 1 February 1931 in Butka, a farm village in the Urals. The family was ruined as kulaks during collectivisation, and his father spent three years in a labour camp from 1934 on charges of anti-Soviet agitation. The boy grew up in wartime want and lost two fingers of his left hand dismantling a grenade he had found. Trained in construction at the Urals Polytechnic, he spent his thirties as a site boss known for finishing anything on deadline, whatever it took.

In 1976 he became first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional party and ruled the industrial heartland of the Urals for nine years. Descending on shops unannounced to inspect the shelves, taking impromptu questions in public, his style was far from the apparat norm. In 1977, on the Politburo's decision, he demolished the Ipatiev House where Nicholas II and his family had been shot, a deed he later recalled with shame.

In April 1985 the Gorbachev leadership summoned him to Moscow. His sponsor was Ligachev, who had noted his drive on an inspection tour. That the two men would one day collide head-on over the pace of reform, before a watching nation, no one then could know.

In December 1985 Yeltsin displaced Grishin as first secretary of the Moscow city party. He rode to work by tram and bus, dug into the privileged back-door trade of the shops, and sacked district party secretaries by the dozen. Muscovites were thrilled; officials ground their teeth. In February 1986 he became a candidate member of the Politburo, but his impatience with reform-in-words-only and his friction with second secretary Ligachev kept mounting.

On 21 October 1987, at a Central Committee plenum, he spoke off script: reform was slow, the people had gained nothing, and a new cult of praise was growing around the leadership. By the discipline of a one-party state this broke a taboo. Speaker after speaker rose to denounce him, and in November, hauled nearly from a hospital bed, he was dismissed at a city party plenum. By the party's grammar his political life should have ended that day.

But the grammar of the age was changing. Shunted to a sinecure at the State Construction Committee, he became a legend carried by rumour and photocopy; even forged versions of what Yeltsin really said circulated. In the paradox of glasnost, which turned the fallen into martyrs, he would find something unprecedented in Soviet history: a road back to power from outside the party.

In March 1989, in the first contested elections in Soviet history, Yeltsin stood in the Moscow at-large district. The apparat fielded the director of the giant ZIL car plant against him and deployed every obstruction it knew; the result was an 89 percent landslide. More than five million votes were the people's pardon for a man the party had cast out. At the Congress of People's Deputies he joined Sakharov and others in founding the Inter-Regional Deputies' Group, and opposition politics began in fact.

In May 1990 he was elected chairman of the Russian republic's Supreme Soviet, and on 12 June carried Russia's declaration of sovereignty, the moment the union's own heartland proclaimed the primacy of republican law over union law. At the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress in July he announced his resignation from the party and walked the length of the hall through the delegates' jeers. On 12 June 1991 he was elected first president of Russia with 57 percent: the first supreme leader on Soviet soil chosen by direct popular vote, holding the legitimacy that the indirectly elected Gorbachev lacked.

The duel of two men now became a duel of institutions: a union president and a Russian president, two powers superimposed on one Kremlin. Which of them was real, the three days of August 1991 would decide.

Boris Yeltsin, a former first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional party committee, was brought to Moscow by Gorbachev as the city's party chief, then toppled in 1987 after a clash over the pace of reform. He turned his fall into a platform: reborn as a mass politician campaigning against privilege and for radical reform, he was elected president of the Russian republic by direct vote in June 1991.

On the morning of 19 August 1991, as the Emergency Committee's tanks entered Moscow, Yeltsin climbed onto a tank in front of the Russian government building and called for resistance. The scene became the symbol that broke the coup, and power passed not to the Soviet president but to the Russian one. He promptly suspended the CPSU's activity on Russian territory and confiscated its property.

On 8 December, at a hunting lodge in the Belovezha forest, Yeltsin signed with Ukraine's Kravchuk and Belarus's Shushkevich the accords declaring that the USSR had ceased to exist and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States. No procedure consulted the 76 percent who had voted nine months earlier to preserve the union. With the signatures of three republic leaders, a superpower was erased from the map.

Shock therapy began on 2 January 1992, when the Gaidar government freed prices across the board. Inflation that year exceeded 2,500 percent even by official statistics, and citizens' lifetime savings turned to waste paper. Industrial output collapsed year after year; wages and pensions went unpaid for months at a time. Privatization funnelled state assets into a few hands, and the loans-for-shares deals of 1995–1996 handed the oil and metals industries to the new oligarchs at token prices.

As conflict with the Supreme Soviet over the social cost of reform escalated, Yeltsin dissolved parliament by Decree No. 1400 on 21 September 1993. The Constitutional Court ruled the decree unconstitutional; he pressed on. On 3 October clashes between parliament's supporters and police and troops turned bloody, and on the morning of 4 October tanks shelled the parliament building: the same White House before which he had defied the coup two years earlier. More than 140 people died by the official count alone. The new constitution adopted by referendum two months later concentrated enormous power in the presidency.

In the 1990s Russian male life expectancy fell to 57–58 years, and excess deaths are estimated in the millions. His re-election in 1996 was won through the total mobilization of oligarch-owned media. On 31 December 1999 Yeltsin resigned, naming Vladimir Putin his successor; he died on 23 April 2007. It was a trajectory that began in the name of democracy and ended in the shelling of a parliament and in oligarchy.

As independent Russia's first president, Yeltsin drove through radical market reform, the shock therapy that began with price liberalisation in January 1992. The shelves filled, but prices rose twenty-five-fold within a year, and the privatisation of state property funnelled wealth to the few later called oligarchs. The Chechen war launched in 1994 took tens of thousands of lives. In 1996, starting from single-digit approval, he won re-election with the full mobilisation of the tycoons' media, an election remembered at once as a turning point and a corruption point of Russian democracy.

As health and economy failed together came the default of 1998 and a revolving door of premiers. In August 1999 he installed the obscure security-service veteran Vladimir Putin as prime minister, and on the night of 31 December announced his resignation in a televised New Year address, asking forgiveness of a people who deserved to be happy. His successor's first gift was a decree of immunity for the former president.

His legacy has two faces: the man who broke a coup from the top of a tank and ended one-party dictatorship, and the man who shelled a parliament and left behind a superpresidential constitution and an oligarchic order. When he died in 2007 Russia held its first church state funeral since the tsars, but the argument over the memory of the 1990s has never ended.

In the autumn of 1991, Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former Soviet air force general, seized power in Chechnya and declared independence from Russia. Yeltsin declared a state of emergency but the Supreme Soviet overturned it, and amid Moscow's chaos Chechnya spent three years in de facto separation. By the summer of 1994 Yeltsin had struck a special autonomy treaty with Tatarstan, but Dudayev refused anything short of full independence.

In the autumn of 1994 Yeltsin backed Chechen opposition forces in a covert attempt to topple Dudayev. On 26 November a Russian-orchestrated offensive was routed in Grozny, and with Russian regulars exposed as prisoners, Yeltsin convened a closed Security Council meeting and authorised full-scale military intervention. On 11 December some 40,000 troops crossed into Chechnya under the banner of 'restoring constitutional order'. Opposition came from within the army itself: deputy ground-forces commander General Vorobyov resigned, calling it 'a crime to send the army against its own people', and General Gromov, hero of the Afghan war, walked out in protest.

On New Year's Eve the Russian assault on Grozny met catastrophe. The 131st Maikop Motor Rifle Brigade was virtually annihilated; half-trained conscripts fell into the ambushes of Chechen fighters. Russian forces took Grozny three months later, but the war bled into a mountain guerrilla campaign. In April came the massacre of civilians at Samashki; in June, the Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis left more than a hundred dead. Yeltsin's approval ratings collapsed, and the war's incompetence and brutality scarred his democratic legitimacy.

In April 1996 Russian forces homed in on Dudayev's satellite phone and killed him with a missile strike. Resistance did not break; in August Chechen fighters retook Grozny. With the presidential election two months away, Yeltsin dispatched General Alexander Lebed as envoy, and on 31 August the Khasavyurt Accord was signed. It halted hostilities, mandated Russian withdrawal, and postponed Chechnya's status for five years. The official Russian military death toll was 5,500; civilian estimates range from 30,000 to 100,000. Grozny lay in ruins, and half a million had become refugees. Hours after the signing, at a press conference with President Clinton, Yeltsin said: 'There are no military operations in Chechnya.'