CHILDHOOD

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born on February 1, 1931, in Butka, a small Russian village in the Ural Mountains. Rebellious even as a youth, Yeltsin lost two fingers while playing with a hand grenade. In 1937 Yeltsin moved to the factory town of Berezniki, where his father—fresh out of a Gulag prison camp—found work as a laborer. Rebellious even as a youth, Yeltsin lost two fingers while playing with a hand grenade.

 He left Berezniki for Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in 1949 to attend the Urals Polytechnic Institute. As a student there, he trained to become a civil engineer, played volleyball and met his future wife, Naina Iosifovna Girina, with whom he would have two daughters.

Upon graduation, Yeltsin worked as an overseer of residential construction projects. He also stepped into the political arena, becoming a Communist Party member in 1961 and joining Sverdlovsk’s provincial party committee seven years later. After he served as party chief, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev summoned him to Moscow.

Teenage Years

 Within a year, Yeltsin was party chief there and a non-voting member of the policy-making Politburo. He became well known for railing against corruption, going so far as to fire hundreds of lower-level functionaries. He lost both of his posts in late 1987 and early 1988, however, after clashing with Gorbachev over the pace of reform.

Entry Into Politics

Yeltsin began his political comeback in 1989 by winning election to a newly formed Soviet parliament with nearly 90 percent of the vote. The following year he won a similar landslide victory in a race for Russia’s parliament, became its chair and then renounced his membership in the Communist Party. He also submitted himself to elections for the Russian presidency, winning 59 percent of the vote in June 1991, compared to just 18 percent for his closest competitor.