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: Yeltsin won two presidential elections, the first of which occurred while Russia was still a Soviet republic. But despite successfully ushering in a freer and more open society, his tenure was marred by economic hardship, increased corruption and crime, a violent war in the breakaway republic of Chechnya and Russia’s diminished influence on world events. Boris Yeltsin’s Early Years
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born on February 1, 1931, in Butka, a small Russian village in the Ural Mountains. His peasant grandparents had been forcibly uprooted by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture, and his father was arrested during the Stalin-era purges. In 1937 Yeltsin moved to the factory town of Berezniki, where his father—fresh out of a Gulag prison camp—found work as a laborer. Rebellious even as a youth, Yeltsin lost two fingers while playing with a hand grenade. He left Berezniki for Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in 1949 to attend the Urals Polytechnic Institute. As a student there, he trained to become a civil engineer, played volleyball and met his future wife, Naina Iosifovna Girina, with whom he would have two daughters. Did you know? Boris Yeltsin was the first freely elected leader in Russia’s 1,000-year history.