Yeltsin, Boris Nikolayevich

(1931– )

   Boris Yeltsin rose quickly in the Communist Party to head the Sverdlovsk party apparatus in the late 1970s. He was, however, twice deeply embarrassed by the KGB in the 1970s. KGB Chair Yuri Andropov ordered him to destroy the house in Sverdlovsk in which the Romanov family had been murdered in 1918. A few years later, when a biological weapons plant released anthrax spoors into the atmosphere in 1979 and 69 people died, he was ordered to cover up the mistake by claiming the problem came from rotten meat.

   Catching the eye of reformist party leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, Yeltsin was brought to Moscow as party first secretary in 1985, and he gained a reputation of being a reformer willing to take on party officials. But Yeltsin quarreled with Gorbachev in November 1987 and was fired. Gorbachev publicly humiliated his one-time protégé, dragging him before a Central Committee meeting while he was recovering from a heart attack. In 1988 Yeltsin took over the leadership of the reformist movement in the Soviet Union, opposing Gorbachev from the left. Yeltsin called for massive reforms of the party and government, including changes in the KGB. While Yeltsin made enemies of many reactionaries in the security service, others saw him as a necessary champion of change.

   At the time of the August putsch of 1991, the plotters failed to arrest Yeltsin, which allowed him to lead the opposition for three days at the Russian White House, the parliament building in the center of Moscow. Following the failure of the putsch, Yeltsin cemented his role as president of the newly minted Russian Federation. As president, Yeltsin sought to end some of the traditional abuses of the security service and oversaw the division of the service into a number of independent organizations, but he assured that he would maintain control of the services from the president’s office. The president’s former bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov, helped him restructure the security community to make it responsive to him alone. Once entrenched in power, Yeltsin used the Russian intelligence services to guarantee his political power, much like any Communist Party general secretary. During his years in power, the services prevented investigations of major financial crimes and protected his “family” of supporters. The new Russian services are run by experienced Chekists, who use many of the same tools as their communist predecessors. Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, was a KGB officer and served as chief of the FSB (Federal Security Service).