THE MAN WHO GAVE A TOTALITARIAN NATION LIBERTY

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BORIS YELTSIN

As president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, he defied the August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev by climbing atop a tank outside the Russian White House and rallying popular resistance, an image that became one of the defining photographs of the twentieth century. Within months he had negotiated the Belovezha Accords with Ukraine and Belarus, formally dissolving the USSR and replacing it with the loose Commonwealth of Independent States. Yeltsin became the first popularly elected leader of a Russian state stretching back over a thousand years.

Once in power, Yeltsin pushed through one of history's most radical economic transformations, the "shock therapy" liberalization of prices, mass privatization, and the dismantling of central planning, guided by young reformers like Yegor Gaidar and advised by Western economists. This shift from a command economy to a market system, however chaotic, reshaped global capitalism by opening Russia's vast resources and population to international trade and investment.

Politically, Yeltsin introduced Russia to contested elections, a freer press, and multiparty competition, breaking centuries of autocratic and one-party rule. He survived a violent 1993 constitutional crisis, ordering tanks to shell his own parliament when lawmakers tried to oust him, a move that secured his authority but also entrenched a powerful, weakly checked presidency that his successors would later exploit. His willingness to yield power voluntarily, resigning on live television on New Year's Eve 1999 rather than clinging to office, was itself a rare and consequential act in Russian history, even though the man he handed power to, Vladimir Putin, would go on to reverse many of Yeltsin's democratic openings.

Yeltsin's Russia cooperated with the West on nuclear disarmament, withdrawing troops from Eastern Europe and supporting arms-reduction treaties that lowered Cold War-era stockpiles, while also asserting Russian interests in conflicts like the Chechen wars, which exposed both the brutality and the weakness of the post-Soviet military.

To admirers Yeltsin is the man who buried Soviet totalitarianism and gave Russians their first genuine taste of liberty and private enterprise; to critics he is the architect of a catastrophic economic collapse, a widening chasm of inequality, and a weakened state that paved the way for a more authoritarian successor.

365 men who changed the world.

Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.