party officials. But Yeltsin quarreled with Gorbachev in November
1987 and was fired. Gorbachev publicly humiliated his one-time pro-
tégé, dragging him before a Central Committee meeting while he was
recovering from a heart attack. In 1988 Yeltsin took over the leader-
ship of the reformist movement in the Soviet Union, opposing Gor-
bachev from the left. Yeltsin called for massive reforms of the party
and government, including changes in the KGB. While Yeltsin made
enemies of many reactionaries in the security service, others saw him
as a necessary champion of change.
At the time of the August putschof 1991, the plotters failed to ar-
rest Yeltsin, which allowed him to lead the opposition for three days
at the Russian White House, the parliament building in the center of
Moscow. Following the failure of the putsch, Yeltsin cemented his
role as president of the newly minted Russian Federation. As presi-
dent, Yeltsin sought to end some of the traditional abuses of the se-
curity service and oversaw the division of the service into a number
of independent organizations, but he assured that he would maintain
control of the services from the president’s office. The president’s
former bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov, helped him restructure
the security community to make it responsive to him alone.
Once entrenched in power, Yeltsin used the Russian intelligence
servicesto guarantee his political power, much like any Communist
Party general secretary. During his years in power, the services pre-
vented investigations of major financial crimes and protected his
“family” of supporters. The new Russian services are run by expe-
rienced Chekists, who use many of the same tools as their commu-
nist predecessors. Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor, Vladimir
Putin, was a KGB officer and served as chief of the FSB(Federal
Security Service).YEZHOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH (1895–1940). The most infa-
mous of the Soviet security generalissimos, Yezhov was born into a
military family in Russian Lithuania. He later altered his birth cer-
tificate to show he came from a working-class family and had been
born in St. Petersburg. Yezhov deserted the tsarist army in February
1917 and joined the BolshevikRed Guard in May of that year. Dur-
ing the civil war, he served as a political officer in the Red Army; af-
ter the war, he drifted into party work.292 •YEZHOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH (1895–1940)06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 292