Boris Yeltsin was the first president of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999. He was the first popularly elected president after the end of the Soviet Union. He lost his popularity when there was a series of economic and political crises in Russia in the 1990s. This era was marked by a widespread corruption, economic collapse, and lots of enormous political and social problems. In August 1991 Yeltsin won international praise for casting himself as a democrat and defying the August coup attempt of 1991. He was very unpopular when he left office. Just hours before the first day of 2000, Yeltsin made a surprise announcement of his resignation, leaving the presidency for Vladimir Putin.
« Nikita Kruschchev by Kira
Nikita Kruschchev was in office from 1953-1964. He served as a General Secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. He was born and raised poor. He trained and worked at professional mines and factories. Kruschchev became involved in trade union activities in World War I and, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, became a Bolshevik party member. Following the German occupation of Ukraine, Kruschchev joined the Red Army and served as a junior commissar in the Southern Front of the Russian Civil War. Most Russian leaders are noted for their calm, formal and aloof personality. But Kruschchev was different because he became world famous for his outlandish behaivor. He would do it for sometimes attention. He had a reputation for interrupting speakers to insult them. He disrupted a lot of other peoples speeches and start pounding on the table with his fists and yelling in Russian. He died from a heart attack on September 11, 1971.
Boris Yeltsin by Dominique »« Warsaw Pact
Around 1955 after the NATO agreement, the Soviet Union decided it was time for some change. After the NATO agreement the Soviet Union began to feel threatened and attacked. Therefore they wanted to do something about it. Through these feelings the Warsaw Pact was created, an alliance system to allow for their own containment policy. The Warsaw Pact was an alliance that was open to whoever wanted to join, and ally with the Soviet Union. The problem with that was, not all the countries were interested and wanted to stay unallied, countries like Japan and India. On the other hand, many countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, were open to the agreement.
The Warsaw Pact involved two branches, the Political Consultative Committee and the Unified Command of Pact armed forces. Both the branches had different jobs and mostly based off military. The Political Consultative Committee was non-military jobs and the Unified Command of Pact Armed Forces did jobs for the military like organizing troops and such. The Warsaw Pact was beneficial to the Western countries and helped organize countries and stay in tuned with NATO.
Nikita Kruschchev by Kira »« Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Brezhnev was a born the son of a steelworker in Kamenskoye, Soviet Union in 1906. He joined the Komsomol, or the Communist Youth Organization in 1923 and was appointed the position of an agricultural surveyor. He joined the actual Communist Party in 1931. in 1938, he was appointed the political party chief of Dnepropetrovsk while working under the leadership of Nikita Khruschev. During World War II, he served as the Political Commisar. This meant that he was a high-ranking official at the headquarters of the Soviet Military. Following the war, he became a party boss in Moldavia. During his rule in Moldavia he was successful in bringing communism into full effect. Impressed by his leadership skills, Josef Stalin invited Brezhnev in 1952 to join the Politburo, the executive committee of the numerous communist parties in the Soviet Union. The following year, Stalin died, which gave Khruschev the Presidential Position. Contradictory to Stalin’s actions, Khruschev removed Brezhnev from Politburo and sent him to Kazakhstan. Eleven years later, Khruschev was overthrown, which allowed Brezhnev to return to the Politburo. By the early 1970′s he was seen as one of the Soviet Union’s most powerful political figures, not only being the First Party Secretary of the Communist Party, but the President of the Soviet Union. During his rule, the Soviet economy came to a stand still. During his rule, Brezhnev led the Soviet Army in it’s invasion of Afghanistan. World leaders questioned the reasoning of this invasion and still do today. Brezhnev died in 1982. He is still viewed as a large figure in the Cold War to this very day. 
Warsaw Pact »« Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A)
The C.I.A was created by Congress after the passage of the National Security Act or 1947. The immediate descendant of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA was created after world war two as a police agency directly supervised by the president. The main goal of the CIA, in president Franklin Roosevelt’s words, were to create an organization: ”which will procure intelligence both by overt and covert methods and will at the same time provide intelligence guidance, determine national intelligence objectives, and correlate the intelligence material collected by all government agencies.” The CIA was not required to follow certain laws as a secret police. For example, the CIA did not have to disclose its organization, functions, officials, titles, salaries or numbers of personnel employed, unlike all other businesses. The CIA was very active during the cold war. They overthrew a democratically elected government for the first time in Iran, invented such advanced technology as the U-2 aircraft, (and later the SR-71 Blackbird) which took pictures from space and sent them back to earth, as well as attempt to assassinate the then-current dictator of Cuba Fidel Castro. In present times, the CIA is involved in matters such as Al-Qaeda and the war on terror, Drug trafficking, the war in Iraq and Homeland security.
Leonid Brezhnev »« The KGB
The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 was a confrontation between the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. During the incident the Soviet Union defied the Monroe Doctrine and decided to strategically place nuclear missiles in Cuba. American U2 spy planes found the missiles and the American government did everything in their power to get the missiles removed. At the end of the conflict the Soviet Union finally complied and removed the missiles. This is the closest to nuclear war the United States got during the Cold War.
The KGB »« The Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain was a metaphorical, and in some places physical, boundary dividing Europe into two parts after World War II. On the western side were mostly the members of NATO (Britain, France, the United States, etc) and on the eastern side were countries allied with the Soviet Union, who signed the Warsaw Pact. The Curtain was mostly comprised of increased border defenses between the countries of Western and Eastern Europe. Germany was divided in half by an actual wall, the Berlin Wall, which served as a symbol of the Iron Curtain until its demolition in 1989. Generally, people were not allowed to travel from east to west across the Curtain. The Iron Curtain lasted until the end of the Cold War in 1991.
The Cuban Missile Crisis »« The Truman Doctrine
After hard fighting by many nations, the third reich finally surrendered. Roosevelt did not get to live to see the Nazis surrender, but his successor, Harry Truman, received the news of the Nazi surrender. Harry Truman was now the leader of the U.S. During the Cold War, described as the battle between super powers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had growing tension towards each other. Between 1946 and 1947 Soviet-American relations continued to worsen. The U.S. became increasingly worried and wanted to stop the growing of Soviet threat in Eastern Europe. He decided that it was time to stop “babying” the Soviets and adopted a foreign policy of containment. This was a policy used to block Soviet influence and prevent the expansion of communism. This would include creating alliances to help weaker nations avoid the soviet threat. Truman’s support for countries that rejected communism was called the Truman Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine was authorized on March 12, 1947. There was great controversy because some nations objected American interference with other nations’ affairs, and others argued that the U.S. lacked the resources to cary on a global crusade against communism. Congress immediately authorized over $400 million in aid to Turkey and Greece. 
The Iron Curtain »« NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty, also called the Atlantic Alliance is a military alliance established by signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949. The NATO headquarters are in Brussels, Belgium. The organization constitutes a system of collective defense, which requires its members to assist other members when attacked by a non-member. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the organization was drawn into the Balkans and began building better links with form potential enemies in the east, specifically former Warsaw Pact members. On April 1, 2009, membership was enlarged to 28 with the entrance of Albania and Croatia. Since September 11, 2001, NATO has attempted to refocus itself to new challenges and has deployed troops to Afghanistan as well as Iraq.
The Truman Doctrine »« The Reunification of Germany
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