Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1931–2007) rose through the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a construction engineer turned regional party boss in Sverdlovsk, before Mikhail Gorbachev brought him to Moscow in 1985. After a public falling-out with Gorbachev over the pace of perestroika, Yeltsin reinvented himself as a reformist outsider and was elected Chair of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR in 1990. In June 1991 he won Russia's first direct presidential election.
Yeltsin's defiance of the August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev — famously addressing crowds from atop a tank outside the Russian White House — made him the dominant figure of the late Soviet period. On 8 December 1991, together with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus, he signed the Belavezha Accords, declaring the USSR dissolved and establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
As president of an independent Russia, Yeltsin launched "shock therapy" reforms designed by Yegor Gaidar: price liberalization, mass privatization through voucher schemes, and rapid integration with global markets. The results were contested — hyperinflation, collapse of output, and the rise of the oligarchs — and his standing eroded. In October 1993 he ordered tanks to shell the Russian parliament after a constitutional standoff with the Supreme Soviet, then pushed through a new 1993 Constitution concentrating power in the presidency.
His second term (re-elected 1996) was marked by the First Chechen War (1994–1996), NATO's eastward enlargement, the 1997 NATO–Russia Founding Act, and the August 1998 ruble crisis and sovereign default. In declining health, Yeltsin resigned on 31 December 1999, naming Prime Minister Vladimir Putin acting president. He died in Moscow on 23 April 2007.
His legacy remains polarizing: a destroyer of Soviet communism and architect of Russian democracy to admirers; the man who delivered Russia to oligarchic capitalism and Putin to critics.
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In December 1991, Yeltsin met Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus at Belavezha Forest to sign the accords formally dissolving the Soviet Union.