What’s the difference between position of Gorbachev and Yeltsin?

Question by tms171717: Difference between position of Gorbachev and Yeltsin?
I’ve been reading about the collapse of the USSR and there’s one thing that remains unclear to me. I understand that Gorbachev was appointed President of the Communist Party in the USSR in 85 and from what I’ve read, resigned from this position in the wake of the August Coup in 91. What confuses me is that I’ve read that Yeltsin was also President at this time and then took over. Can someone clarify this for me? What were their respective positions?
Answers and Views:

Answer by poproc
Gorbachev was head of the communist party that ruled the USSR. IN 1991, the USSR started to break up, Yeltsin was president of Russia, the break off republic of the USSR.

On 12 June 1991, Yeltsin won 57% of the popular vote in the democratic presidential elections for the Russian republic, defeating Gorbachev’s preferred candidate, Nikolai Ryzhkov who got just 16% of the vote. In his election campaign, Yeltsin criticized the “dictatorship of the center”, but did not suggest the introduction of a market economy. Instead, he said that he would put his head on the railtrack in the event of increased prices. Yeltsin took office on 10 July.
On 18 August 1991, a coup against Gorbachev was launched by the government members opposed to perestroika. Gorbachev was held in Crimea while Yeltsin raced to the White House of Russia (residence of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR) in Moscow to defy the coup. The White House was surrounded by the military but the troops defected in the face of mass popular demonstrations. Yeltsin responded to the coup by making a memorable speech from the turret of a tank. By 21 August most of the coup leaders had fled Moscow and Gorbachev was “rescued” from Crimea and then returned to Moscow. Yeltsin was subsequently hailed by his supporters around the world for rallying mass opposition to the coup.
Although restored to his position, Gorbachev’s powers were now fatally compromised. Neither union nor Russian power structures heeded his commands as support had swung over to Yeltsin. Through the fall of 1991, the Russian government took over the union government, ministry by ministry.
On 6 November 1991, Yeltsin issued a decree banning the Communist Party throughout the RSFSR.
In early December 1991, Ukraine voted for independence from the Soviet Union. A week later, on 8 December, Yeltsin met Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk and the leader of Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich, in Belovezhskaya Pushcha, where the three presidents announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union and that they would establish a voluntary Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. According to Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union at that time, Yeltsin kept the plans of the Belovezhskaya meeting in strict secrecy and the main goal of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was to get rid of Gorbachev, who by that time had started to recover his position after the events of August. Mikhail Gorbachev has also accused Yeltsin of violating the people’s will expressed in the referendum in which the majority voted to keep the Soviet Union.
On 24 December, the Russian Federation took the Soviet Union’s seat in the United Nations. The next day, President Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union ceased to exist, thereby ending the world’s largest and most influential socialist state. Economic relations between the former Soviet republics were severely compromised. Millions of ethnic Russians found themselves in the newly formed foreign countries.

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