Boris Yeltsin was the one who engineered the final collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s transition to a free market.
Photo: Pavel Kassin
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Former Russian President Yeltsin Dies in Moscow
Russia’s first elected President Boris Yeltsin has died, a Kremlin spokesman said Monday. News agencies cited medical sources as saying he had died of heart failure. Kommersant presents highlights of Yelstin's career in a photo gallery.
Boris Yeltsin was elected Russian President in 1991 and 1996. He was the one who engineered the final collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s transition to a free market. In 1999, Yeltsin resigned, handing power over to Vladimir Putin.
Boris Yeltsin was born on February 1, 1931, in the Ural Mountain region of Siberia. In 1955, he received a degree in construction engineering from Kirov Ural Polytechnic Institute. In the late 1960s, Yeltsin entered local politics after joining the Soviet Communist Party. In the mid-1980s, he was called to Moscow by new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to run the construction agency. In 1990, Yeltsin quit the Communists, tearing up his party card in public to protest Gorbachev’s slow pace of reforms.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton stressed Yeltsin’s achievement in a television speech on Monday: “He believed that democracy was the best system. I think it was in every firbre of his being.”
www.kommersant.com
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