 On 25 December 1991, the USSR was dissolved into 15 post-Soviet states.In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin became the first directly elected president in Russian history when he was elected President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which became the independent Russian Federation in December of that year.The economic and political collapse of USSR led to a deep and prolonged depression, characterised by a 50% decline in both GDP and industrial output between 1990 and 1995, although some of the recorded declines may have been a result of an upward bias in Soviet-era economic data.