Title: Boris Yeltsin - HISTORY
Headings: Boris Yeltsin
Boris Yeltsin
Contents
Boris Yeltsin’s Early Years
Did you know? Boris Yeltsin was the first freely elected leader in Russia’s 1,000-year history.
Boris Yeltsin’s Political Comeback and the Collapse of the Soviet Union
Boris Yeltsin as President
Russia After Boris Yeltsin
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Content: As president, Yeltsin broke from his Soviet predecessors by generally supporting freedom of the press, permitting public criticism and letting Western popular culture seep into the country. He also agreed to nuclear arms reductions and brought home soldiers from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. Nonetheless, he did not completely disavow military action. After surviving impeachment proceedings, Yeltsin disbanded the communist-dominated parliament in September 1993 and called for elections to a new legislature. He then resolved the ensuing standoff by ordering tanks to shell the parliamentary building. The following year Yeltsin sent troops into the breakaway republic of Chechnya, an action that left roughly 80,000 people dead—the majority of them civilians. Though the fighting ceased in August 1996, it picked back up again in 1999 and lasted most of the next decade. Health problems, some of them caused by heavy drinking, eventually began to take their toll on Yeltsin. In 1995 alone he had at least three heart attacks. Yet he decided to run for president anyway in 1996, winning a second term and then undergoing quintuple bypass surgery.