Yeltsin, Boris Nikolayevich 1931-
Russian statesman

Born in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) and educated at the same Urals Polytechnic as Nikolai Ryzhkov, he began his career in the construction industry. He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1961 and was appointed First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk region in 1976. He was inducted into the CPSU's central committee (CC) in 1985 by Mikhail Gorbachev and briefly worked under the new Secretary for the Economy, Ryzhkov, before being appointed Moscow Party chief in 1985, replacing the disgraced Viktor Grishin. Yeltsin, a blunt-talking, hands-on reformer, rapidly set about renovating the corrupt 'Moscow machine' and was elected a candidate member of the CPSU politburo in 1986; in 1987, at a CC plenum, after he had bluntly criticized party conservatives for sabotaging political and economic reform (perestroika), he was downgraded to a lowly administrative post. No longer in the politburo, he returned to public attention in 1989 by being elected to the new Congress of USSR People's Deputies. In 1990 he was elected President of the Russian Federation. He played a high-profile part in the resistance against the failed attempt to depose Gorbachev as President. In 1996 he was re-elected in the first post-Soviet presidential elections; throughout his presidency he suffered recurring bouts of ill health, and underwent heart bypass surgery in the year of his re-election.