Boris Yeltsin

Biography

Boris Yeltsin was born on February 1, 1931, in the small village of Butka in the Ural region of Russia. He rose through the Communist Party apparatus to become a populist reformer who defied the August 1991 coup attempt from atop a tank, becoming the symbol of Russian democracy's birth. As Russia's first elected president, he oversaw the chaotic dismantling of the Soviet economic system, the rise of the oligarchs, and the humiliating decline of Russian power — a combination that made him deeply unpopular and dangerously erratic by the mid-1990s. The decision to invade Chechnya in December 1994 was driven by Yeltsin's fear that other ethnic republics might follow Chechnya's example and fragment Russia entirely. His defense minister's boastful miscalculation — that the war would last two hours — encapsulated the catastrophic hubris of the operation. The First Chechen War became Yeltsin's defining disaster, dragging on for two years and ending in an agreement that amounted to Russian defeat. Health-failing, politically weakened, and desperate to preserve his legacy, Yeltsin chose Vladimir Putin as his successor and resigned on December 31, 1999, handing Putin the gift of a second Chechen war to win.

Key Battles