There once was a young boy in Russia who was so mischievous that he wasn't careful with a hand grenade and lost his left index and his left thumb. There was also a drunk Russian politician that fell asleep on the way to a trip to Ireland and never got off the plane at Shannon. Well, the two males were the same man, his name was Boris Yeltsin.
Born a month before Mikhail Gorbachev in 1931, Boris Yeltsin was the son of a labourer who had been a gulag prior to his son's birth. Boris studied at the Urals Polytechnic Institute and studied engineering and when he wasn't studying, he played volleyball. When he graduated, he oversaw the construction of residential projects as a civil engineer. Boris had two children with his wife Naina losfovna Girina.
In 1961, Boris Yeltsin became a Communist party member and in 1968, he joined Sverdlovsk's provincial part committee. Sverdlovsk is now called Yekaterinburg. In 1985, after spending 9 years as party chief of the province, Boris was appointed to party chief of Moscow by Mikhail Gorbachev but in 1987, he lost both posts after rallying against corruption which saw him firing hundreds of lower-level functionaries as well as clashing with Gorbachev over how the pace of reform should go.

In 1989, while on a trip to the US, Yeltsin found himself in a supermarket called Randall's in Clear Lake, Texas. It was there that he saw a supermarket with stocked shelves of actual food! This was a pipe dream in the Soviet Union at the time. The experience changed Yeltsin. He realised that while on paper communism sounded good, it was the opposite when put into action. He decided to be one of many Russians in a glasnost-perestroika USSR to bring down communism. That same year, he won one of the first elections the USSR had with 90% of the vote and got a place in the Russian parliament in a 1990 landslide. That year he renounced his communist party membership. In the run up to the Dissolution of the USSR, he called for Gorbachev to resign which only ended up happening during the Christmas period of that year. By the time that happened, Boris had climbed a tank during the August Coup. With Gorbachev out of the way, Boris was now president of Russia, a position he held for 8 years. During that time, he fell asleep drunk on a plane he took on what was supposed to be a political trip to Ireland, decentralized authority and liberated dissent. Yeltsin was plagued by health problems in the later parts of his life which included heart complaints. He resigned on New Year's Eve 1999 and died in April 2007. He is buried in Novodevichy Cemetery, under a headstone resembling the Russian Flag.