Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1 February 1931 – 23 April 2007) served s president of the independent country of Russia from 1991 through 1999.
Yeltsin was born in the village of Butka about 250 km east of Sverdlovsk, Russia. He graduated from the Ural Polytechnic University in Sverdlovsk became an engineer as a young man.
In the 196
0s Yeltsin joined the Communist Party – the political group that controlled the Soviet Union. In 1976 the Party put him in charge of the Sverdlovsk region.
When Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev assumed power in 1985, Yeltsin assumed the post of first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee.
In 1990 he was elected president of the Russian republic. Yeltsin retried on December 31, 1999. He died in Moscow.
Boris Yeltsin played a critical role in both the collapse of the USSR, which was the final marker that definitively ended the Cold War and the founding of the new Russian Federation, which he served as its first president.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin
