Yeltsin, Russia’s president who led his country after the collapse of communist Soviet Union, resigned on New Year’s Eve in 1999. Handing over power to Vladimir Putin, he said Russia needed to enter the new century with new political leaders
Anti-establishment streak
Yeltsin, whose father was once convicted of anti- Soviet agitations and sent to labour camp for three years, was appointed the ‘Mayor’ of Moscow by the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 to “sweep aside the mafia which had ruled the city’s bureaucracy”. Yeltsin took them on with relish and became popular
But Yeltsin soon clashed with Gorbachev over the slow pace of reforms—which the latter had famously initiated—and resigned from the Politburo in 1987, the first person ever to do so voluntarily. In 1989, Yeltsin bounced back, winning the Moscow constituency with a massive 89.4 per cent of the vote in elections for the Soviet parliament
‘Dictatorship will not pass’
In August 1991, hard-core communists incarcerated Gorbachev in a coup. Yeltsin drove to Moscow, climbed atop a tank and roared, “Dictatorship will not pass”, and became the undisputed leader. After Yeltsin’s death in 2007, Gorbachev said, “(He did) major deeds for the good of the country as well as serious mistakes.”
Troubled tenure
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Yeltsin spearheaded radical economic reforms. However, the country suffered from corruption while its army was caught in the Chechnya quagmire