Sverdlovsk oblast from 1955 to 1968, joining the Communist Party
in 1961. In 1968 he began full-time work in the party, and in 1976
he became first secretary of the Sverdlovsk oblast party
committee. Thereafter he came to know Mikhail Gorbachev, then his
counterpart in the city of Stavropol; and, after coming to power,
Gorbachev chose him in 1985 to clean out the corruption in the
Moscow party organization and elevated him (as a nonvoting member)
to the Politburo in 1986. As the mayor of Moscow (i.e., first
secretary of Moscow's Communist Party committee), Yeltsin proved
an able and determined reformer, but an estrangement between
himself and Gorbachev set in when Yeltsin began criticizing the
slow pace of reform at party meetings, challenging party
conservatives and even criticizing Gorbachev himself. Yeltsin was
forced to resign in disgrace from the Moscow party leadership in
1987 and from the Politburo in 1988.
Yeltsin was demoted to a deputy minister for construction but then
staged the most remarkable comeback in Soviet history. His
reputation as an advocate of democracy and economic reform had
survived his fall, and he now became the people's champion in
Moscow, winning a multicandidate election to the U.S.S.R. Congress
of People's Deputies (i.e., the new Soviet parliament) in March
1989 by a landslide. A year later, on May 29, 1990, the parliament
of the Russian S.F.S.R. elected him president of the Russian
republic against Gorbachev's wishes. In his new role, Yeltsin
publicly supported the right of Soviet republics to greater
autonomy within the Soviet Union, took steps to give the Russian
republic more autonomy, and declared himself in favour of a
market-oriented economy and a multiparty political system.
In July 1990 Yeltsin quit the Communist Party. His victory in the
first direct, popular elections for the presidency of the Russian
republic (June 1991) was seen as a mandate for economic reform.
During the brief coup against Gorbachev by hard-line Communists in
August 1991, Yeltsin defied the coup leaders and rallied
resistance in Moscow while calling for the return of Gorbachev.
When the coup crumbled a few days after it had begun, Yeltsin
emerged as the country's most powerful political figure. In
December 1991 he and the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus
(Belorussia) established a new Commonwealth of Independent States
that would replace the foundering U.S.S.R. When the Soviet Union
collapsed after Gorbachev's resignation as Soviet president on