Most Powerful

• #1 Boris Yeltsin
  Former Soviet UnionRussia Imperial SovereigntyPolitical Cold War and Globalization State Power Power: 100
  Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) was the first president of the Russian Federation and the dominant political figure in the chaotic transfer from Soviet rule to post-Soviet statehood. He belongs to imperial sovereignty because his career revolved around control of the state during a constitutional and civilizational break: the power to dissolve old institutions, create new ones, command coercive force, and redistribute vast assets that had previously belonged to the Soviet system. Yeltsin was both destroyer and founder. He helped break the monopoly of the Communist Party, resisted the August 1991 coup, and presided over the end of the Soviet Union. Yet the order that followed was not a clean liberal settlement. It was a volatile mixture of executive improvisation, rushed privatization, oligarchic bargaining, regional tensions, and periodic recourse to force. Yeltsin’s Russia opened markets and elections, but it also normalized a powerful presidency and a style of rule in which constitutional order could be remade through confrontation. His legacy therefore lies at the origin of post-Soviet Russia’s freedoms and its later pathologies alike.