Who led Russia through the most turbulent decade of its modern history? Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (February 1, 1931 – April 23, 2007), a Sverdlovsk construction engineer who rose through the Communist Party, was fired by Gorbachev in November 1987, and then came back to become the most consequential political figure of post-Soviet Russia. Elected president of the Russian Federation by direct popular vote in June 1991 and re-elected in July 1996, he served from July 10, 1991 until his surprise resignation on December 31, 1999. He presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the transition to a market economy — the wars in Chechnya.
The standard English-language biography is Leon Aron’s Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (2000). The most balanced scholarly treatment is Timothy Colton’s Yeltsin: A Life (2008). The contemporary Russian view, often sharply critical, is well represented by Vladislav Zubok’s Collapse (2021) and Stephen Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted (2001).
Early Life and Career
Yeltsin was born on February 1, 1931, in Butka, a village in the Sverdlovsk Oblast of the Russian SFSR. His father had been arrested in 1933 and sentenced to three years in a labor camp. The trauma of the family history is something Yeltsin mentioned in his own memoirs; it left him with a lifelong distrust of bureaucratic power.
He studied at the Ural Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1955 with a degree in construction engineering. He worked in the construction industry for the next twenty years, rising from site engineer to chief engineer of a major trust. He joined the Communist Party in 1961, at the age of 30, and rose through the party ranks in the Sverdlovsk region, becoming first secretary of the oblast committee in 1976. His regional record was mixed. He was known for directness and for a willingness to act outside the standard bureaucratic channels. The same qualities would later make him politically difficult.
Yeltsin’s national political career began in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev appointed him head of the Moscow party organization. Yeltsin’s tenure in Moscow was stormy. He was a vocal advocate of radical reform, and he clashed with Gorbachev, the Politburo, and the conservative elements of the party. He was removed from his post in November 1987, after a public outburst at a Politburo meeting and a series of attacks on the slow pace of reform. The episode is one of the great “what if” moments of late Soviet history. A more conventional Politburo figure in the Moscow position would have been a less visible critic of the regime and a less likely challenger to Gorbachev.
The Rise to Power
Yeltsin’s comeback began in 1989, when he won election to the new Congress of People’s Deputies with 89 percent of the Moscow vote. In May 1990 he was elected chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet; in June 1990 he was elected president of the Russian SFSR. The position of Russian president was, in constitutional terms, weak — the Russian Federation was still part of the Soviet Union, and the powers of the Russian president were subordinate to those of the Soviet president. In political terms, however, the position was decisive. The Russian SFSR contained roughly half the population of the Soviet Union, the political capital (Moscow), the principal industrial resources — the most important military and security installations on Russian soil.
The contest between Yeltsin’s Russian government and Gorbachev’s Soviet government was the central political fact of 1990–91. Yeltsin supported Russian sovereignty; Gorbachev supported the Union. Yeltsin supported rapid market reform; Gorbachev hesitated. The contest was settled by the August Coup of August 19–21, 1991.
The Coup and the Dissolution
The coup was the moment that defined Yeltsin’s presidency. On August 19, 1991, the State Committee on the State of Emergency announced that Gorbachev was ill and that Vice President Yanayev had assumed the presidency. Yeltsin, in the Russian White House, issued decrees declaring the GKChP unconstitutional and called for a general strike. He addressed the crowd from a tank outside the building on the morning of August 19 and stayed in the White House for the next three days. The image of Yeltsin on the tank became the defining photograph of the late Soviet period.
Yeltsin’s role in the failure of the coup made him the most powerful political figure in the Soviet Union. The political effects were rapid. Estonia declared independence on August 20; Ukraine on August 24; the other republics followed. The Belavezha Accords of December 8, 1991, in which Yeltsin, the Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk, and the Belarusian leader Stanislav Shushkevich declared that the Union had ceased to exist, were the formal end of the Union. Gorbachev’s resignation on December 25 was the symbolic end.
The Yeltsin Decade
The decade after the dissolution was the Yeltsin decade. The principal political events were the introduction of price liberalization in January 1992, the privatization program of 1992–94 (designed by the economists Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais), the constitutional crisis of October 1993 (in which Yeltsin dissolved the Supreme Soviet, the parliament occupied the White House, and the army shelled it), the First Chechen War of 1994–96, the re-election campaign of 1996 (in which Yeltsin defeated the Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov), the financial crisis of August 1998, and the Second Chechen War that began in 1999.
Yeltsin’s most consequential decision was the 1992 economic reform. The introduction of price liberalization produced hyperinflation of more than 2,000 percent in the first year, the collapse of household savings, impoverishment of the pensioners, the elderly, and the state-sector workers who depended on the ruble. The privatization program produced a small group of oligarchs who acquired control of the most valuable state assets at prices well below market. The economic effects of the Yeltsin years are still being debated; the political effects are clear. The 1990s is the decade that produces the political reaction of the 2000s, and the Putin system in its mature form.
Yeltsin’s health deteriorated throughout the decade. He had heart surgery in 1996, and the re-election campaign was conducted in a way that revealed the severity of his condition. He suffered a heart attack in 1997, another in 1998, and a third in 1999. By late 1999 he had decided not to run for a third term. He named Vladimir Putin, the prime minister and a former KGB officer, as his preferred successor. On December 31, 1999, he resigned and handed the presidency to Putin. The resignation was unexpected in form; the transfer of power was not unexpected in substance.
The Yeltsin Legacy
Yeltsin died on April 23, 2007, at the age of 76. The Russian government declared a national day of mourning. He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. The Russian public’s judgment of his legacy was already mixed at the time of his death. To most Russians, he was the man who gave them their freedom and took away their savings. To a smaller but persistent group, he was the man who lost the Soviet Union, the empire, and the great-power status. The official Russian position, codified in the Putin period, treats the 1990s as a period of national humiliation. The most balanced view, that Yeltsin took the country through a transition no one had a clear plan for and that the transition produced both freedom and chaos, is harder to maintain in the political environment of contemporary Russia.
The constitutional system Yeltsin built — a strong presidency, a weak parliament, a federal structure with more weakness than strength — has been the institutional framework of Russian politics since 1993. Putin has used it for purposes that are not Yeltsin’s. The framework, however, is Yeltsin’s. So is the freedom of the Russian press that existed in the 1990s and that has been systematically dismantled since 2000. So is the economic opening, and so is the political opening. The contradictions of contemporary Russia are in some sense the contradictions of the Yeltsin years.