Former Speaker of the Russian Parliament Rouslan Khazbulatov, an ally of Boris Yeltsin before turning against him in 1993, has died at the age of 80, state television said Tuesday, January 3, citing relatives. Rouslan Khasbulatov, of Chechen origin, died at his home in a Moscow suburb, according to the same source.
Human rights activist Alexander Cherkasov confirmed that Ruslan Khasbulatov died Tuesday without specifying the cause of death. His body will be transported to his home village of Tolstoy-Yurt in Chechnya, where his funeral will take place, he said on Facebook. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Rouslan Khazbulatov, a close ally of Boris Yeltsin, was appointed Speaker of Parliament. The two men had opposed the coup of August 1991 together.
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But a rivalry quickly resisted them. The power struggle culminated in the October 1993 revolt when Boris Yeltsin sent tanks to storm the parliament building. Ruslan Khasbulatov was briefly detained. In 1994 he was granted amnesty, but his political career was over. “Yeltsin basically ruined my life,” Ruslan Khazbulatov told the newspaper Argumenty i Fakty in 2014.
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