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Essay about Boris Yeltsin

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Boris Yeltsin

"We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone.

Freedom is like that. It's like air.

When you have it you don't notice." Boris Yeltsin

Yeltsin, Boris Nikolayevich, president of Russia, elected shortly before the breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991. Yeltsin, who was elected to a second term 1996, is a central figure in the transition away from communism in the former USSR and has dominated Russian politics in the last decade.

Early Life

	In 1930, Ignaty Yeltsin, a well-off peasant of Butka village was declared "kulak". His mill and other valuables were seized by the state. Rumors have it that Ignaty either fled the village, or was sent to internal northern exile. 1931, …show more content…

In 1977, Boris was ordered by the Kremlin to destroy the Ipatyev House, where the last tsar, Nicholas 2 was executed with his family, and the hose was demolished over night and the site was paved over with asphalt. In April 1985, Boris moved to Moscow, where he was elected the First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee. This position elevated him to the status of an alternate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee. This period of Boris's life is remembered by the citizens of Moscow, because of the renovation of Arbat (a historical street in downtown Moscow). Boris sharply criticized the Secretariat of the central committee, for it's slow pace of reforms at the plenary meting of the central committee, in 1987. As a result, Boris lost his position in the Moscow committee and in the Politburo. He was hospitalized with heart trouble when the KGB, on the order of Mikhail Gorbachev, made him leave the hospital and escorted him to a plenary meeting of the Moscow city committee, where he was "sacked". The next year, Boris was appointed first Vice Chairman of the state Committee on Construction (an obvious demotion).

Yeltsin the Democrat

	March 1989 became the turning point in Boris's career. He was elected to Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR from Moscow electoral district number 1, in the first multi-candidate parliamentary elections in the entire history of the USSR. One of the more popular

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