Title: Boris Yeltsin | Biography & Facts | Britannica
Headings: 
Boris Yeltsin
president of Russia
Political rise and fall
Comeback and first term as president
Second term and resignation
Boris Yeltsin

Content: After Gorbachev came to power, he chose Yeltsin in 1985 to clean out the corruption in the Moscow party organization and elevated him to the Politburo (as a nonvoting member) in 1986. As the mayor of Moscow (i.e., first secretary of Moscow’s Communist Party committee), Yeltsin proved an able and determined reformer, but he estranged Gorbachev when he began criticizing the slow pace of reform at party meetings, challenging party conservatives, and even criticizing Gorbachev himself. Yeltsin was forced to resign in disgrace from the Moscow party leadership in 1987 and from the Politburo in 1988. Comeback and first term as president
Yeltsin was demoted to a deputy minister for construction but then staged the most remarkable comeback in Soviet history. His popularity with Soviet voters as an advocate of democracy and economic reform had survived his fall, and he took advantage of Gorbachev’s introduction of competitive elections to the U.S.S.R. Congress of People’s Deputies (i.e., the new Soviet parliament) to win a seat in that body in March 1989 with a landslide vote from a Moscow constituency. A year later, on May 29, 1990, the parliament of the Russian S.F.S.R. elected him president of the Russian republic against Gorbachev’s wishes. In his new role, Yeltsin publicly supported the right of Soviet republics to greater autonomy within the Soviet Union, took steps to give the Russian republic more autonomy, and declared himself in favour of a market-oriented economy and a multiparty political system. Yeltsin, Boris
Boris Yeltsin, 1990. © David Fowler/Dreamstime.com
In July 1990 Yeltsin quit the Communist Party. His victory in the first direct, popular elections for the presidency of the Russian republic (June 1991) was seen as a mandate for economic reform.