MOSCOW, April 23: Boris Yeltsin, who died on Monday at the age of 76, oversaw the transformation of Russia out of all recognition under his presidency.
Born into a peasant family in February 1931 in the region of Sverdlovsk, in the Urals, Yeltsin was trained as an engineer and embarked on a political career in 1968, becoming head of the local communist party.
Here are key dates in that career:
1985 — Dec 24: Promoted by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin is named first secretary of the Moscow Communist party.
1986 — February: Yeltsin is appointed candidate member of the Politburo and joins the presidium of the supreme soviet (parliament) of the Soviet Union.
1987 — Nov 11: Yeltsin is dismissed from his post as Moscow first secretary after criticising Gorbachev.
1988 — Feb 17: Yeltsin is dismissed as candidate member of the Politburo and loses ministerial rank the following May.
1989 — March 26: Yeltsin returns to the political trail, winning a seat in the Soviet parliament with 89.4 per cent of the vote and becoming effective head of the “democratic opposition.”
1990 — June 12: Yeltsin is elected speaker of parliament.
July 12: Yeltsin resigns from the Communist party during its 28th Congress.
1991 — June 12: Yeltsin is elected president of the Russian Federation with 57.4 percent of the popular vote.
August: After an attempted hardline coup against Gorbachev, Yeltsin heads the popular resistance from parliament headquarters.
Nov 6: Yeltsin decrees the dissolution of the Communist party on Russian territory.
Dec 8: Yeltsin and the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus proclaim the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
1992 — January: Following the resignation of Gorbachev, Yeltsin launches an ambitious programme of market reforms, removing price controls and privatising key sectors of the economy.
1993 — Sept 21: Yeltsin dissolves the Russian parliament unconstitutionally, triggering a rebellion by opposition deputies.
Oct 3-4: Yeltsin orders tanks to shell the parliament building where the deputies have taken refuge.
Dec 12: A referendum approves a new Russian constitution. Elections are held for a new parliament.
1994 — Dec 11: Yeltsin orders Russian troops into the separatist southern republic of Chechnya, triggering an eighteen-month conflict that will leave tens of thousands of dead.
1995 — July, October: Yeltsin suffers two heart attacks, requiring lengthy absences from the Kremlin.
1996 — June 27: Days before the second round of presidential elections, Yeltsin suffers another heart attack. Kremlin spokesmen say only that he has “lost his voice.”
July 3: Yeltsin is re-elected president with 53.8 per cent of the vote.
Nov 5: Yeltsin undergoes a quintuple heart bypass operation lasting seven hours.
1997 — May 27: Yeltsin travels to Paris to sign a treaty with NATO countries in which Russia reluctantly accepts the Atlantic alliance's enlargement to the east.
October 9: Yeltsin announces that he will not seek another mandate.
1998 — July 17: A visibly flagging Yeltsin attends ceremonies marking the reburial of Nicholas II, the last Russian tsar, and his family in Saint Petersburg.
Aug: Russia plunges into financial crisis following a massive de facto devaluation of the ruble. Yeltsin plumbs new depths of unpopularity as living standards plummet further and new allegations of corruption at official levels surface.
1999 — Aug 9: Yeltsin appoints the head of the security services, Vladimir Putin, as prime minister, saying he sees Putin as his preferred successor.
Sept 23: Russian warplanes bomb the Chechen capital Grozny for the first time since the end of the first Chechen conflict in 1996, triggering a new war.
Dec 31: Yeltsin resigns ahead of the end of his presidential term.—AFP