November 23, 1998. Copyright 1998. Graphic News. All rights 
reserved.

SICK MAN OF RUSSIA
by Lis Ribbans

LONDON, November 23, Graphic News: BORIS NIKOLAEVICH YELTSIN was 
born on February 1, 1931, in the village of Butka, in the 
Ukrainian region of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). His mother, 
Klavdiya, was a seamstress, and his father, Nikolai, a 
construction worker who in 1934 was sentenced to three years in a 
Gulag labour camp for anti-Soviet agitation.
Later, the family moved to Berezniki, where Boris attended 
Pushkin High School. A bright student, he went on to study 
engineering at Ural Polytechnic Institute back in Sverdlovsk, 
where he also played volleyball in the USSR first division.
He graduated in 1955 and advanced rapidly in his profession. 
Despite having lost a thumb and finger while playing with a 
grenade as a boy, he mastered 12 construction industry crafts and 
by 1963, aged 32, he was chief of a house-building plant with 
thousands of people under his command.
In 1956, Yeltsin had married Naina Girina, whom he met at 
college, and their two daughters, Yelena and Tatiana, were born 
in 1957 and 1959.  
He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1961, 
and stepped onto the first rung of the administrative ladder in 
1969 when he was appointed Chief of the Construction Department 
of the CPSU in Sverdlovsk, later becoming the regionÕs first 
secretary.
In April 1985, he was brought to Moscow as secretary of the 
Central Committee for Construction by Mikhail Gorbachev, the new 
general secretary of the CPSU, and by December had been elected 
the First Secretary of the partyÕs Moscow City Committee.
A moderniser and outspoken critic of the hidebound apparatchiks, 
he threw his weight behind GorbachevÕs ÔperestroikaÕ reforms but 
became openly impatient with the pace of reform. In 1990 he left 
the Communist Party and a year later was elected president of the 
newly independent Russian Federation.
In September 1991, three months after his election, he climbed 
atop a tank in the streets of Moscow to demand the reinstatement 
of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during an attempted 
right-wing coup. However, that December, he oversaw the 
liquidation of the Soviet Union and its replacement with the 
decentralised Commonwealth of Independent States.
YeltsinÕs first term also saw radical economic reform aimed at 
creating a market economy. Shops and markets filled up, street 
cafes blossomed, historic buildings were restored and the 
colourful, vodka-loving president added to his popularity by 
riding public transport to meet ordinary people. On the downside, 
there was rising crime and corruption, and an ill-fated decision 
to send troops to quell the separatist uprising in Chechnya. 
By the time he was re-elected in July 1996, he had survived a 
coup and two heart attacks. Within four months of his return to 
power he underwent a quintuple heart bypass and remained dogged 
by ill health and attempts by the opposition to impeach him or 
otherwise force his resignation. Nevertheless, he struggled on, 
growing sicker, more out of touch and increasingly scorned. In 
March 1998, he fired his entire government. But Yeltsin's attempt 
at a show of strength was in vain. His first two choices for a 
new prime minister were rejected by the Duma, before - with the 
country now mired in economic crisis and unable to pay many of 
its workersÕ wages Ð the parliament settled on Yevgeny Primakov 
who promised to curtail RussiaÕs failed experiment with 
capitalism. So, in effect, ended the increasingly quixotic reign 
of Russia's first elected leader.
/ENDS