Outside the Beltway

In Memoriam: Boris Yelstin

· Monday, April 23, 2007 · 1 comment

Via the BBC: Russian ex-president Yeltsin dies

Boris Yeltsin, who oversaw the Soviet Union’s demise and became Russia’s first president, has died aged 76, the Kremlin says.

Mr Yeltsin had a history of heart trouble, though the cause of death has not been announced.

While Yeltsin conjures jokes about too much vodka, the fact of the matter is that he was a key figure in the historical development of the Soviet and then Russian politics and to the international system as a whole.

Some key dates in Yeltsin’s career:

July 1990: Resigns from Communist Party
June 1991: Elected president of Russian republic (in USSR)
August 1991: Rallies citizens against anti-Gorbachev coup, bans Russian communist party
December 1991: Takes over from Mikhail Gorbachev as head of state
1992: Lifts price controls, launches privatisation
October 1993: Russia on brink of civil war, Yeltsin orders tanks to fire at parliament
December 1994: Sends tanks into Chechnya
June 1996: Re-elected as Russian president, suffers heart attack during campaign
1998: Financial crisis, rouble loses 75% of its value
December 1999: Resigns, appoints Vladimir Putin successor

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Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Comments

  1. tequila says:
    Tuesday, 24 April 2007 at 07:01

    Thanks in part to Yeltsin and his clique of advisors and cronies, the average Russian male’s life expectancy declined by over nine years from Soviet times, and the Brezhnev era is looked back on with great fondness — except in Chechnya, of course, where hundreds of thousands of formerly living people now look back on nothing at all.

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