Boris Yeltsin

Boris Yeltsin, born to a peasant family in the Urals, worked as a construction engineer before rising through the Communist Party in Sverdlovsk. Gorbachev brought him to Moscow in 1985, but he broke with the leadership in 1987 and left the party in 1990. Elected president of Russia in June 1991 with 57 percent, he led resistance to the August coup from atop a tank and in December signed the Belovezha Accords dissolving the Soviet Union. He won re-election in 1996 against the communist Gennady Zyuganov, suffered a heart attack during the campaign, and resigned on 31 December 1999 in favor of Vladimir Putin.

Admirers credit Yeltsin with defeating the 1991 coup, ending communist rule in Russia without civil war and holding contested elections. Critics point to the human and economic cost of his rule. GDP fell by about half in the 1990s, tens of millions fell into poverty, and privatization created a small class of oligarchs, ending in the 1998 default. In October 1993 he ordered tanks to shell the parliament building; the official count was 147 dead and 437 wounded. The First Chechen War of 1994-1996 killed an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 Chechen civilians and displaced more than 500,000 people, and his human rights adviser Sergei Kovalev estimated 27,000 civilian deaths in the first five weeks alone. By his resignation his approval rating had reportedly fallen to 2 to 4 percent.