Labels:text | man | human face | person | clothing | watch | screenshot OCR: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Yeltsin, Boris Boris Yeltsin Boris Yeltsin will be remembered as the president who destroyed the Soviet Communist party, helped disband the Soviet empire, and introduced sweeping economic and democratic reforms. After qualifying as an engineer and joining the Communist party in 1961, he attracted attention as first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Communist party. When Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed general secretary in 1985, Yeltsin was elevated to the Politburo. Increasingly critical of Gorbachev and the slowness of "perestroika" (economic reconstruction), Yeltsin was eventually stripped of his posts. In 1990 he shocked the country by resigning from the Communist party. A year later he was elected president of Russia. With Boris Yeltsin, declarations of independence being made by Russian politician, 1931 - various Soviet republics, in December 1991 Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, leaving Yeltsin to take Russia LLLL into a democratic system with a free market economy and to reassert Russia's power over the breakaway republios CHRONOLOGY
