Boris Yeltsin, the ruddy-faced Communist party boss who helped destroy the Soviet Union and set Russia on the path to a market economy, has died at the age of 76.

The death of Russia's first popularly-elected president was confirmed this afternoon by a Kremlin spokesman, although no details were given. Russian media said that Yeltsin, who had undergone heart surgery several times, had died of a heart attack.

Yeltsin was president of the Russian Federation from June 1991 to December 1999, when he resigned abruptly in favour of Vladimir Putin, then Prime Minister.

He made his name internationally for his spirited defiance of an abortive August 1991 coup by hardline Communists who had detained the then Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

As Red Army troops surrounding the White House - the Moscow headquarters of the Supreme Soviet - defected, Mr Yeltsin made a powerful speech from the turret of a tank.

Two days later the coup leaders had fled the Russian capital and Mr Gorbachev had been released. By the end of that year, when the Soviet Union was dissolved, Yeltsin was Russia's undisputed leader.

But even though he brushed aside heart problems to win a second term in office in 1996, Yeltsin ended up as a largely discredited figure, deeply unpopular both for his economic "shock therapy" of the early 1990s and for the widespread corruption that accompanied it.

He was also criticised for his erratic behaviour, much of it ascribed to heavy drinking bouts.

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born in the Sverdlovsk district, in Russia's Ural mountains, on February 1, 1930. His father, Nikolai, spent three years in a labour camp after being convicted of anti-Soviet agitation, but Boris Yeltsin worked through high school and graduated in 1995 with a diploma in construction.

He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961, becoming a party boss in the Urals and building connections with the Kremlin. From the mid-1980s, under Gorbachev, he was promoted to high-ranking positions in Moscow, although he was sacked from those posts and the Politburo after a clash with Gorbachev in 1987.

From then on he made his name as an opposition figure, elected to the Congress of People's Deputies in March 1989 as a delegate from the Moscow district, although he did not resign from the Communist Party until July 1990.

Yeltsin became the first popularly elected president of the Russian Federation - then still part of the Soviet Union - in June 1991, winning 57 per cent of the vote.

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