Riot police take cover behind their shields as they face rock throwing anti-Boris Yeltsin demonstrators on the barricades set up in the center of Moscow in this October 2, 1993 file photo. For the first two years of his rule, Yeltsin battled with a hostile Soviet-era legislature. Eventually, in 1993, he blasted them out of the parliament building with tanks and pushed through a new constitution giving himself far wider powers. Former Russian president Yeltsin, who clambered on to a tank to bury the Soviet Union, then led Russia falteringly through its first years of independence, died on April 23, 2007 aged 76.