The New Russian State
During the late 1980's Boris Yeltsin emerged as the chief opponent of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, criticizing the slow pace of his reforms and championing the economic and political sovereignty of all the union republics. In 1990 Yeltsin was elected president of Russia by the Russian parliament.
In national elections in 1991, Yeltsin became the first popularly elected president in Russian history. Throughout that year, Yeltsin continued to advocate sovereignty for Russia and the other republics.
Meanwhile, during 1989–91, the Soviet Union experienced a period of rising nationalism and increasing demands for democratic reforms. By November, 1991, virtually all of the Soviet Union's republics had declared independence. In December, 1991, Russia became a founding member of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose confederation of former Soviet republics. Later that month, Gorbachev resigned and the USSR ceased to exist.
Russia was beset by numerous problems upon independence. The government's plan to create an economy based on market forces caused widespread economic hardship. Russia's relations with Ukraine became strained, largely due to a dispute over which nation would control the former Soviet Black Sea fleet. In 1992 the Russian government signed a new union treaty with most of its autonomous political subdivisions.
The parliament, however, continued to obstruct Yeltsin's programs. In late September, 1993, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament. Shortly afterward the parliament deposed Yeltsin and named its own president. Tensions rose between members of parliament (and their supporters) and Yeltsin. In early October supporters of parliament rebelled in Moscow. After two days of armed conflict, the rebellion was crushed. A new constitution was approved in December.
In 1994 Yeltsin sent the army into the small Central Asian republic of Chechnya, which had declared independence from Russia in 1991. After a 21-month war in which more than 35,000 people were killed, the Russian army withdrew, granting the Chechens limited independence. In December, 1995, the Communists, fierce critics of the Chechen war, won more than a third of the seats in the Duma. The next year Yeltsin was only narrowly reelected.
In 1997 Russia signed an agreement of mutual cooperation and security with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The agreement paved the way for NATO to admit countries formerly allied with the Soviet Union. In 1998 Russia devalued its currency and defaulted on some of its international debt.
On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin resigned and named his prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, as acting president; Putin was elected president in March, 2000. Earlier in 1999 the Russian army began a new campaign to fight Chechen rebels in Chechnya. Chechen rebels laid seige on the Moscow Theater in 2002, which resulted in the death of 130 hostages, and on a school in the Russian town Beslan in 2004, which resulted in the death of more than 300 hostages, mostly children.
Putin was reelected in March, 2004. Later that year the government under Putin took several actions seen as centralizing its power, including the abolishment of the direct election of governors.
Also that year, in September Chechen terrorists invaded a school in Beslan in southwest Russia. They took more than 1,000 people, many of them children, hostage. More than 300 hostages and approximately 30 terrorists died as a result of the three-day seizure.
