Boris Yeltsin, the first President of the Russian Federation, was born on this day in 1931.
He was born in the village of Butka in the Sverdlovsk Oblast in western Siberia. Butka is located in the West Siberian basin, some 100 km from the Urals. The closest city with a population of over one million is Yekaterinburg, which was called Sverdlovsk until 1991 (after the Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov).
In his youth, Yeltsin lost the thumb and forefinger on his left hand, allegedly during an accident involving explosives. At the time Hitler’s Third Reich invaded the USSR (Operation Barbarossa), Yeltsin was 10 years old. At that time he attended school in the city of Berezniki, between Moscow and the Urals.
When World War II ended, Yeltsin was 14 years old. At the age of 25 he married Naina Girina, who bore him two daughters – Tatyana and Elena. He became the President of the Russian Federation at the age of 60, and died in 2007, aged 76.
