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: A History Quiz
Russia is the world’s largest country by area, and it has a history to match. Test your knowledge of Russian (including Soviet) history with this quiz. Political rise and fall
Yeltsin attended the Urals Polytechnic Institute and worked at various construction projects in the Sverdlovsk oblast from 1955 to 1968, joining the Communist Party in 1961. In 1968 he began full-time work in the party and in 1976 became first secretary of the Sverdlovsk oblast party committee. Thereafter he came to know Mikhail Gorbachev, then his counterpart in the city of Stavropol. 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.