Title: Boris Yeltsin – Russiapedia Leaders Prominent Russians
Headings: Prominent Russians:
Boris Yeltsin

Prominent Russians: Boris Yeltsin
February 1, 1931 – April 23, 2007

Content: Boris Yeltsin – Russiapedia Leaders Prominent Russians
Prominent Russians: Boris Yeltsin
February 1, 1931 – April 23, 2007
Boris Yeltsin (AFP Photo)
The man who put an end to the USSR was raised to power by Mikhail Gorbachev. Ironically, he went on to depose his mentor and destroy his empire, becoming the first president of the post-Soviet Russia. Boris Yeltsin was born on February 1, 1931 in the village of Butka, near Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), in the Urals, in a peasant family. His father spent several years in Stalin’s labour camps accused of anti-Soviet agitation – Yeltsin only joined the Communist Party in 1961, during Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist reforms. In 1955 he graduated from the Ural Polytechnic Institute (now Ural State Technical University) with a degree in construction and started his first job on a building site the same year. Working in construction, he eventually grew to the head of an integrated house-building plant. In 1968, aged 37, he embarked on a party career but it wasn’t until Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power that he’s got his big break. Hand-picked by Gorbachev to shake up the corrupt Moscow party hierarchy,Yeltsin proved to be an eager and energetic reformer. His rise through the ranks went meteoric but he soon grew weary of the pace of “perestroika” and fell out with Gorbachev, eventually quitting the Communist Party at a party’s congress in 1990.