The world still remembers the man who stood atop a tank to resist an attempted coup by Russian Communists in August 1991.
He was the man who engineered the peaceful end of the Soviet State on December 25 that year. Boris Yeltsin was the first-ever popularly-elected President in Russian history.
Though he was widely hailed as an effective reformer, Yeltsin's era was a traumatic period in Russian history. His rule was marked by widespread corruption, economic collapse and enormous political and social problems.
Following the dissolution of Soviet Union in December 1991, Yeltsin, vowing to transform Russia's socialist planned economy into a capitalist market economy, endorsed a program of 'shock therapy,' cutting Soviet-era price controls and introducing drastic cuts in State spending.
The reforms immediately devastated the living standards of much of the population, especially the groups dependent on Soviet-era State subsidies and welfare entitlement programmes.
His confrontations with Parliament climaxed in the October 1993 Russian constitutional crisis when Yeltsin called up tanks to shell the Russian White House, blasting out his opponents in parliament.
In December 1994, Yeltsin launched a war against separatists in the southern republic of Chechnya. Tens of thousands of people were killed in the conflict and a defeated and humiliated Russian army withdrew at the end of 1996.
By the time he left office in a dramatic address on New Year's Eve in 1999, Vodka-loving Yeltsin was a deeply unpopular figure in Russia, with an approval rating as low as 2 per cent by some estimates. In his later years, Yeltsin retired from public life and was dogged by health issues. He passed away on April 23, 2007, following a heart attack.
Photograph: Mazim Marmur/AFP/Getty Images
Also read: Russians mourn Yeltsin's demise
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