Boris Yeltsin

President

• Born: February 1, 1931
• Birthplace: Butka, Sverdlovsk region, Soviet Union
• Died: April 23, 2007
• Place of death: Moscow, Russia

President of Russia (1991–1999)

From within the Soviet establishment, Yeltsin led the increasingly radical forces that first sought to reform the Soviet Union then engineered its demise. Yeltsin became the first president of the post-Soviet Russian Federation.

Area of achievement Government and politics

Early Life

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born in the town of Butka, in the Soviet Union’s Sverdlovsk region. As a young child, Yeltsin experienced his father’s absence while the elder Yeltsin served three years of hard labor for anti-Soviet agitation. As a youth, Yeltsin displayed a combination of intelligence and impertinence. He was once expelled from school but later returned and, in 1955, earned an engineering degree from Ural Kirov Technical College.

Yeltsin joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1961 at the age of thirty. The Soviet Union, at that time led by Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, was embroiled in a Cold War with the United States. The Soviet Union defined its international role as leading the communist world against the Washington-led capitalist world. Focusing more on domestic economic issues, Yeltsin steadily rose through the ranks of the regional party and became first secretary of Sverdlovsk’s CPSU committee in 1976. In 1985, the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev personally selected Yeltsin to serve as the chair of the party committee for the Soviet Union’s capital city, Moscow. The following year, Gorbachev elevated Yeltsin to the CPSU’s top body, the Politburo.

Life’s Work

Gorbachev’s selection of Yeltsin for the Politburo position was part of his larger attempt to place more liberal (reformist) allies in positions of authority. Gorbachev had concluded that his country had been severely weakened by the unrelenting international competition of the Cold War, and so he sought to modify long-standing economic and social policies as a way of reversing the Soviet Union’s decline. Gorbachev clearly hoped that Yeltsin and the other reformers would support his various reform efforts. Yeltsin did just this, endorsing reform on a number of fronts, including marketization of the economy, loosening of censorship, and decentralization of authority. He took a vigorous, public stand against conservatives in the Politburo and elsewhere who opposed liberalization. Soon, however, Yeltsin was criticizing Gorbachev himself for being too timid in pursuing his own reform program. Events came to a head at a Central Committee meeting in the fall of 1987, when Yeltsin accused the Soviet leadership of hypocrisy in its sham reform efforts. Shortly thereafter, Yeltsin was dismissed from the Politburo.

The political and societal forces unleashed by Gorbachev continued to spin out of control. In March 1989, Gorbachev allowed semifree elections to be held for the first time in Soviet history. In these elections, Yeltsin was overwhelmingly elected to the Soviet parliament (representing a district centered on Moscow). In addition to nationwide liberalization, popular forces pressed for a decentralization of power from Moscow to the regional governments. Concurrently, Yeltsin came to be associated less with the goal of reforming the Soviet Union and more with the objective of gaining greater freedom for the Russian Soviet Federated Soviet Republic (RSFSR), the largest of the fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union. By the late 1980s, similar independence drives were gaining ground in most of the Soviet republics.

In the late 1980s, in the face of mounting public pressure, political intransigence, and worsening economic conditions, Gorbachev’s reforms became increasingly desperate. Again hoping to defuse popular dissatisfaction and propel like-minded allies to power, Gorbachev authorized popular elections in the country’s republics in March 1990. Again, one of the main beneficiaries of those elections was Yeltsin, who secured a seat in the RSFSR’s parliament, which in turn elected him leader of the republic.

Yeltsin had become Gorbachev’s most potent rival. As the leader of the RSFSR, Yeltsin’s constituency included more than half of the Soviet Union’s population, and his authority extended across three-quarters of the country’s territory. Several months after attaining the RSFSR’s top political position, Yeltsin dramatically relinquished his membership in the Communist Party. As a political maverick frequently at odds with Gorbachev, Yeltsin enjoyed the support of most of the country’s liberals, capitalists, and national liberationists. His mandate was strengthened in June 1991, when, in free elections, Russian voters decisively elected him to the newly created Russian presidency.

Gorbachev had been trying to occupy the middle of the political spectrum (between the old communist ideology and Western liberal capitalism), but the rush of events in the late 1980s and early 1990s polarized society. Now, the two main groups were old-guard communists who wanted to preserve the union and the political system, and liberal reformers who sought varying degrees of capitalism, democracy, and decentralization of power. Yeltsin became the standard-bearer for the latter group. The climactic clash between the two groups occurred in August 1991, when a small cabal of communists and conservative military leaders attempted to seize control of the government. They hoped to preserve the Soviet Union, which they believed Gorbachev had endangered with his reforms.

On August 18, the coup leaders arrived at the dacha where Gorbachev was vacationing and demanded that he turn over power to them. When Gorbachev refused, the coup plotters had him placed under house arrest and assumed emergency executive powers. Early in the morning of August 19, the Soviet press agency claimed that Gorbachev had an “illness” and announced that Vice President Gennady Yanayev had assumed presidential powers. Yanayev led an eight-member group called the State Committee for the State of Emergency in the U.S.S.R., which began issuing decrees that suspended various civil freedoms.

Significantly, Yeltsin, who inexplicably had not been detained by the coup plotters, rallied the anticoup forces. He proclaimed his own control of the RSFSR and called for general strikes and public resistance. Thousands of Muscovites heeded Yeltsin’s call and surrounded the central government building, dubbed the “White House,” where Yeltsin and his loyal lieutenants were staying. Soldiers refused orders from the State Committee to fire on the building, and the coup dissolved after only three days. An iconic photograph from the event showed Yeltsin atop a tank addressing a crowd.

From that point onward, Yeltsin was seen as the country’s liberator. He became not only the new leader for the reform movement begun by Gorbachev six years earlier but also the central figure who defeated the reactionary forces that opposed reform. Gorbachev never recovered politically from the coup and spent his remaining months as Soviet president in the shadow of Yeltsin. Moreover, the coup attempt precipitated the final unraveling of the Soviet Union. Within four months, all fifteen republics had declared their independence. On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president, and the Soviet Union was declared defunct. The RSFSR was renamed the Russian Federation on the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin now led a country that possessed the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal, held one of the five permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council, and otherwise represented the “successor” to the Soviet Union.

Notwithstanding the Soviet Union’s collapse, Yeltsin could not entirely escape the problems that had earlier beset Gorbachev. Many elites, including a majority of Russia’s parliamentary members, opposed Yeltsin’s efforts to proceed with market reforms. The growing tension between Yeltsin and the parliament reached a climax in the fall of 1993, when Yeltsin ordered the military to attack the parliament building. Victorious, Yeltsin wrote a new constitution that strengthened the presidency. He also ordered new parliamentary elections in December 1993, but the new parliament was no less ideologically hostile to Yeltsin than the last. The following year, Yeltsin found it necessary to order the army to fight secessionists in Chechnya, one of Russia’s many ethnic-based republics. A tentative peace was achieved in 1996, but Chechens and other ethnic people of the Russian Federation remained restive.

Yeltsin faced reelection in the summer of 1996. He failed to achieve 50 percent in the first electoral round against one dozen candidates. He faced communist leader Gennady Zyuganov in a run-off one week later and won the race comfortably. Although the Russian constitution limits the president to two terms, Yeltsin would not rule out the possibility of running again in the year 2000. He somewhat coyly suggested that, because his first election occurred before the current constitution was written, it should not count toward his two-term limit.

Yet the largest obstacle to Yeltsin’s future leadership was his health. Frequently beset by heart troubles and bouts of apparent alcohol abuse, Yeltsin’s tenure was marked by periodic health-related absences. A serious heart attack shortly after his reelection, followed by quadruple bypass surgery and pneumonia, kept Yeltsin out of the public eye for much of 1996 and 1997. Yeltsin appeared in public with a bit more frequency in 1998, but he clearly was becoming more physically frail and mentally weak. Spending much of his time in hospitals and sanatoriums, Yeltsin had largely removed himself from the day-to-day operations of the Russian government.

Like his health, Yeltsin’s popularity plummeted in the months and years after his reelection. By early 1999, Yeltsin’s public approval rating had dropped to about 1 percent. This was in large measure due to the near free-fall of the Russian economy and the worsening chaos within the Russian government. Like Gorbachev before him, Yeltsin had, in the space of a few years, gone from being a worshiped public hero to a despised politician, blamed rightly or wrongly for destroying a once-proud country.

The Russian parliament, in the meantime, was asserting increasing independence and power. In May, 1999, various opposition parties attempted to impeach Yeltsin on various grounds, including the allegedly unconstitutional dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and his launching of internal conflict in Chechnya. In the short run, Yeltsin survived these and other challenges. He also continued to reorganize cabinets and replace prime ministers, ending up with the little-known Vladimir Putin.

Finally, on December 31, 1999, Yeltsin unexpectedly relinquished the presidency to Putin. (Reportedly he had not even told his wife of his plans.) His televised speech was rather contrite, acknowledging that “many of our hopes have not come true” and asking that the population “forgive me for not fulfilling some hopes of those people who believed that we would be able to jump from the grey, stagnating totalitarian past into a bright, rich, and civilized future in one go.” At the same time, he emphasized that he was stepping down not in defeat, and not due to ill health, but because “those of us who have been in power for many years . . . must go” and allow Russia to “enter the new millennium with new politicans, new faces. . . .” Putin, asserted Yeltsin, would be one of those new politicians to lead the country.

With a presidential election scheduled for the spring of 2007, Yeltsin paved the way for the first turnover in the Russian presidency. In a field of twelve candidates, Putin won that election in the first round with 53 percent of the vote. Yeltsin’s designated successor won a subsequent reelection in 2004, with 71 percent of the vote out of a field of six candidates.

Yeltsin maintained a low profile after resigning. He seldom made public appearances, and the media took less and less interest in him. One of his few high-profile public moments during his retirement was when he and Gorbachev jointly criticized Putin’s attempt to replace the popular election of regional governors with presidential appointments. Putin later abandoned the plan. For the most part, though, Yeltsin’s post-retirement influence on Russia was limited to infrequent and informal meetings with mid-level government officials and businesspeople.

Although his health was an issue throughout his presidency, Yeltsin remained modestly active and continued to travel almost until his death. In April 2007, his condition suddenly worsened, and he missed several scheduled appearances. Yeltsin died of congestive heart failure on April 23, 2007. The man who dissolved the Soviet Union and presided over a reborn Russia lay in state in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow and was buried in a church ceremony—another first for a former Soviet leader.

Significance

There is no question that Yeltsin was one of the twentieth century’s most influential world leaders. While Gorbachev began the Soviet Union’s liberalization, Yeltsin led the country’s turn from communism and its dissolution into sovereign republics. Moreover, Yeltsin helped shape the new, post-Soviet Russia during a time of global and national upheaval. He was directly responsible for the country’s 1993 constitution, hand-picked the country’s top cabinet officials, saw the country through a two-year civil war in Chechnya, and crafted a new foreign policy in the post–Cold War world. Although he earned his share of criticism in carrying out these tasks, Yeltsin deserves credit for managing a turbulent, nuclear-armed former superpower during one of the world’s most critical periods. He also voluntarily relinquished power, permitting Russia’s first democratic transfer of the presidency a few months later. However, the Russian government continued to exhibit evidence of corruption and illiberal tendencies during Yeltsin’s tenure and even into Putin’s second term. Some even question whether Russia in the early twenty-first century was much different than it would have been had the August 1999 coup succeeded. Yeltsin’s future reputation as Russia’s savior depends largely on the answer to that question.

Bibliography

Aron, Leon. Boris Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Print.

Ellison, Herbert J. Boris Yeltsin and Russia’s Democratic Transformation. 2006. N.p.: U of Washington P, 2015. Print.

Fedorov, Valentin P. Yeltsin: A Political Portrait. Bellevue: Imperial, 1996. Print.

Rutland, Peter. “Yeltsin: The Problem, Not the Solution.” National Interest 49 (1997): 30+. Print.

Solovev, Vladimir, and Elena Klepikova. Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography. New York: Putnam, 1992. Print.

Yeltsin, Boris N. Against the Grain. New York: Summit Books, 1990. Print.

Yeltsin, Boris N., and Catherine A Fitzpatrick. The Struggle for Russia. New York: Belka, 1995. Print.

Yeltsin, Boris N. Midnight Diaries. New York: Public Affairs, 2000. Print.