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He was born a peasant in the Ural Mountains in 1931. By the age of 24 he had earned an engineering degree, and at the age of 30 he entered politics, which in the Soviet Union in 1961 meant you became a member of the Communist Party.
1991 was a busy year for Yeltsin. After 30 years of working his way up through the ranks to president, he quit the communist party, with great pomp and ceremony, and won the first free presidential election in his country, becoming the first democratically elected leader in the history of the Soviet Union. Almost immediately hard line communists attempted a coup, which Yeltsin managed to thwart without firing a shot. Then he negotiated the breakup of the Soviet Union, one of the two most powerful nations on Earth. And before the year was out he began to dismantle 75 years of communist totalitarianism - not an easy task.
In 1993 he fought off a second coup attempt by the hard line communists, and in 1996 was re-elected by the people. In 1999 he resigned because of ill health. But during his decade of power he changed the face of the world, and the course of history. He had inherited a country that was falling apart at the seams. A country that was full of nuclear weapons. A country that was on the verge of civil war. A country that but for his courageous efforts, would have undoubtedly fallen back into another communist dictatorship.
For a decade Yeltsin walked the razor's edge between anarchy and totalitarianism, and managed to hold his country together, and give it a good push down the road to democracy. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton: "Fate gave him a tough time in which to govern, but history will be kind to him because he was courageous and steadfast on the big issues — peace, freedom, and progress."
Who knows, we may even have Mr. Yeltsin to thank for preventing the horrors of a third world war. Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin died today of heart failure at the age of 76.
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