Young Boris and his parents, 1931.

Boris Yeltsin was born to a peasant family in Butka village, Talitsky district, Sverdlovsk region on February 1, 1931. His father, Nikolai Yeltsin, was convicted of Anti-Soviet agitation in 1934 and had to serve in Stalin's labor camps of Gulag for three years. After his release he remained unemployed for a while and then worked in construction. His mother, Klavdiya Vasilyevna Yeltsina, worked as a seamstress.

When he was only 11 years old, in the middle of WWII, Boris Yeltsin blew off the thumb and forefinger of his left hand while disassembling a grenade (type: RGD-33) that he and two of his friends had stolen from a weapons warehouse.

During a fight in his youth, Boris's nasal bone was hit by a pole, which caused the typical form of his nose.

Boris studied succesfully at the Pushkin High School in Berezniki, Molotov region. According to his teachers, he was impertinent. The teachers Boris didn't like had a hard time having him in the classroom. He was expelled from school after having studied there for seven years. But soon he was taken back to school again and graduated with the highest marks possible.

In 1955 he graduated from the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk, his major was construction.

The Yeltsins in the late 1950s.

The Yeltsins: Yekaterina, Boris, Naina and Tatyana.

In 1956 Boris Yeltsin married Naina Iosofovna Girina (1932), a student he knew in college. The Yeltsins have two daughters: Yelena (1957), who graduated from the Ural Polytechnic Institute and Tatyana (1960), who finished Moscow's State University's Department of computional maths and cybernetics.

Boris has five grandchildren: Yekaterina (1979), Boris (1981), Maria (1983), Gleb (1995) and Ivan (1998). He also has one great-grandson: Alexander (1999), Yekaterina's son.