Título: Boris Yeltsin
Seção: Privatization and the rise of "the oligarchs"
Background: Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (Russian: Boris Nikolaevich El'tsin, IPA: [ba'rjis njIka'laIvjItc 'jeljtsin] ( listen); 1 February 1931 - 23 April 2007) was a Soviet and Russian politician and the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999. Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. During the late 1980s, Yeltsin had been a candidate member of the Politburo, and in late 1987 tendered a letter of resignation in protest. No one had resigned from the Politburo before.

Conteúdo: Boris Yeltsin was born in the village of Butka, Talitsky District, Sverdlovsk, USSR, on 1 February 1931. In 1932 after the state took away the entire harvest from the recently collectivised Butka peasants, the Yeltsin family moved as far away as they could, to Kazan, more than 1,100 kilometres from Butka, where Boris' father, Nikolai, found work on a construction site. Growing up in rural Sverdlovsk, he studied at the Ural State Technical University (now Urals Polytechnic Institute), and began his career in the construction industry. In 1934 Nikolai Yeltsin was convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to hard labour in a gulag for three years. Following his release in 1936 after serving two years, Nikolai took his family to live in Berezniki in Perm Krai, where his brother Ivan, a blacksmith, had been exiled the year before for failing to deliver his grain quota. Nikolai remained unemployed for a period of time and then worked again in construction. His mother, Klavdiya Vasilyevna Yeltsina, worked as a seamstress. Boris studied at Pushkin High School in Berezniki. He was fond of sports (in particular skiing, gymnastics, volleyball, track and field, boxing and wrestling) despite losing the thumb and index finger of his left hand when he and some friends furtively entered a Red Army supply depot, stole several grenades, and tried to disassemble them. In 1949 he was admitted to the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk, majoring in construction, and he graduated in 19

user: what were the oligarchs

assistant: tycoons in finance, industry, energy, telecommunications, and the media who came to be known as "oligarchs" in the mid-1990s.

user: What did privatization have to do with it?

assistant: Yeltsin promoted privatization as a way of spreading ownership of shares in former state enterprises as widely as possible to create political support for his economic reforms.

user: why did he do this

assistant: West, privatization was viewed as the key to the transition from Communism in Eastern Europe,

user: was he successful?

assistant: ' In the early 1990s, Anatoly Chubais, Yeltsin's deputy for economic policy, emerged as a leading advocate of privatization in Russia.

user: what role did the oligarchs play

assistant: The vouchers were bought out by a small group of investors.

user: Is there anything else you found interesting?

assistant: By mid-1996, substantial ownership shares over major firms were acquired at very low prices by a handful of people.