Boris Yeltsin was born in 1931. He became the President of the Russian Federation in 1991. As for his education, he finished Uralsky Politechnical University. And from 1955 till 1968 he was engaged in construction organizations of Sverdlovsk. Then in 1961 he joined the Communist Party and in 1976 became the 1st secretary of the Sverdlovsky regional Committee of the the Communist Party. In the year of 1985 Mikhail Gorbachov invited Yeltsin to Moscow to reform the organization of the capital’s Parties. In 1987 he was dismissed from the position of the 1st secretary of the Moscow State Committe of the Soviet Communist Party. This happened because he criticized the slow progress of the reforms development. In 1989 Yeltsin was elected by moscovities as а national deputy of the USSR and a year later he was elected as a chairman of the State Duma of Russia.

It should be noticed that Boris Yeltsin became the 1st publicly elected leader in the history of Russia, when he won the presidential elections in June of 1991. In august he bravely played a striking role in the defeat of the failed antidemocratic military putsch. The further confrontations with the conservatives led to the following actions. In 1993 he directed tanks to the Russian Parliament to destroy it; in 1994 he sent Russian troops to the Caucasus and to the Chechen Republic, which proclaimed Independence from Russia. As a result, a cruel war took place between Russia and the Chechen Republic.

In 1991 Yeltsin initiated the break up of the Soviet Union, insisting on the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States and meaning Russia to be the leader amongst these States. In 1996 he was elected to be the president of the Russian Federation for a 2nd period. But in December of 1999 he passed the ruling power to the new president of Russia, V.Putin.

Let’s see what other people think of Yeltsin as a man and politician. I made a small review according to which we can understand Yeltsin’s character.

Strobe Talbott, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, who specialized in Russia affairs, says that “The memory of President Yeltsin that I will carry with me all my life is of a proud, powerful man who not only was willing to undertake big fights, but was almost eager to do so, who threw himself into major struggles, having to do with the most fundamental issues about what was going to happen to his country. He was a man who led a hard life, in many ways. And he was very hard on himself, in lots of ways. And his career, including the way in which it gets played out publicly, contained plenty of reminders of some fairly basic human frailties. ”

Another person whose opinion is worth reading is Boris Fyodorov, a former Russian Finance Minister (1993-1994). According to him, “ Yeltsin never understood anything about the economy, and he never understood what has to be changed. ... Mr. Yeltsin was just a political fighter. For him the predominant task was to get personal power. Dealing with the economy, he showed a total lack of understanding, and only when the problems were most acute... at these times Yeltsin looked around and tried to see whether there was anybody who was coming with any remedies for dealing with the crisis, and that’s how Mr. Gaidar appeared and that’s why many other people, including me, appeared in the government.”

Chief Political Analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow from 1990-1994 E. Wayne Merry considers Yeltsin a person who “has many positive qualities”. “Understanding of modern economics is not one of them. I don’t think anyone could reasonably be under the illusion that Yeltsin had much grasp of what many people in his team were doing. I don’t think he had more than a fleeting comprehension of the mechanisms that were being discussed between his reform team and the West.”

And the last person I would like to cite is Pavel Voschanov, Boris Yeltsin’s press secretary from 1991-1993. According to his words, “ ...One may charge Yeltsin with many wrongdoings - corruption, economic chaos, a huge bureaucracy - all this is true. But Yeltsin’s main crime lies in the fact that he has discredited the very idea of a democratic society. This is the biggest loss of the last 10 years. It is hardly possible to restore it over the next 5 or 10 years. It’ll take a long time. We are doomed to live in a very strange political system for a number of years. We are going to live under a "party-less" authoritarianism, with some elements of democracy. ”

In conclusion, it may be said that no matter what kind of person or politician Yeltsin used to be, - he was the President elected by society - by us.

Ksenia Denisova