Religion backed up legal categories and geography. Many Slavic settlers in the Urals were disciples of the Old Belief, the purist sect that seceded from Russian Orthodoxy in the 1650s in a schism over liturgical practices. There was an eschatological streak to the Old Believers; a spirit of outback resistance to the absolutist state and its bailiffs, foresters, and military recruiters; and a line of self-willed martyrs, “men who could keep silent no longer” in the face of ungodliness and injustice.7 Their reserve, frugality, and diligence in all things economic were “to a certain extent . . . reminiscent of the Protestant ethic” in the West.8 In all of the guberniya (province) of Perm, the largest in the Urals in the late tsarist period, the Shadrinsk district was one of the three with the heaviest concentration of dissidents.9 There were pious and not-so-pious Old Believers up and down the Belyakovka Valley. They prayed with their brethren in peasant houses, there being no chapels or ordained clergy for them, and often participated in Orthodox parishes.10
The Yeltsin surname derives from yel’, Russian for “fir tree,” and is a fairly common one in the region.11 The ancestors of Boris Yeltsin were age-long inhabitants of the Urals and adjoining parts of Russia’s north, probably since the fifteenth century. They are thought to have migrated from Novgorod, the principality opening out to the Baltic and distinguished by its local assembly, private property, and trade with Scandinavia and the Hanseatic League; Novgorod was devoured by Muscovy in 1478. Courtesy of the archivist Dmitrii Panov, there is a genealogy on the father’s side spreading back eight generations to one Sergei Yeltsin, a state peasant registered at the start of the eighteenth century in the village of Basmanovo, or Basmanovskoye. Basmanovo was half again as big as Butka (its 1897 population was 1,307) and is located eight miles south, upriver on the Belyakovka. The connotations of the name were better than those of Butka. Basman, imported from the Tatar, refers to a loaf of bread baked for the royal court and stamped with its badge.12 Sergei’s son Anika made his home in Butka, his grandson Pëtr in Basmanovo, and his great-grandson Ivan in Beregovaya, two miles downriver from Butka. Commencing with Boris Yeltsin’s great-great-grandfather, Savva, whose year of birth was 1807, and his great-grandfather, Yekim, born the fifth of Savva’s eight children in 1841, the family hearth was in Basmanovo.13 Another branch of the Yeltsins hailed from the hamlet of Konovalovaya, on a tributary of the Belyakovka fifteen miles to Butka’s east. Except for the odd soldier (an Ivan Yeltsin fought against Napoleon at Borodino in 1812, in the Yekaterinburg Regiment), the menfolk did not stray from the Basmanovo-Butka-Beregovaya-Konovalovaya quadrangle.14 The Basmanovo subgroup originally spelled the name “Yeltsyn,” and in Konovalovaya it was “Yel’tsyn.” The name was standardized to “Yel’tsin” after 1900. (I use the anglicized “Yeltsin.”)
Yekim Yeltsin had three sons, and Ignatii Yekimovich Yeltsin, evidently the oldest of them, born in Basmanovo in 1875, was to be Boris Yeltsin’s paternal grandfather. His paternal grandmother, the future Anna Dmitriyevna Yeltsina, was born there in 1877.15 Ignatii’s religious pedigree, it can be established secondhand, was Old Believer.16 The family’s dissidence had dimmed with time, as he was baptized Orthodox and worshiped in the Holy Trinity Orthodox congregation in Basmanovo (some say he was a deacon). But the telltale asceticism and industriousness of the sect endured. Wiry and bearded, Ignatii Yeltsin was a self-made man, a backwoods capitalist who, by Urals and Russian standards, prospered before the 1917 revolution. Shortly after marrying Anna in 1900 or 1901, he built a sizable framed house, trimmed in white, on the left bank of the Belyakovka; it stands to this day, a TV antenna jutting up between it and the toolshed. On twelve hectares (thirty acres) leased from the local land commune, he planted rye, wheat, and fodder. He had about five farmhands and owned a combine harvester, a thresher, five horses, four milk cows, and sheep and goats. In an outbuilding to his house, Ignatii worked as the Basmanovo blacksmith, shoeing horses, forging farm implements, and repairing mechanical equipment. He was also the proprietor of a water-powered flour mill on the Belyakovka and a larger windmill on the brow of the hill above the Yeltsin homestead. He was firm in the belief that, as one of his daughter-in-laws—Boris Yeltsin’s mother—was to put it after his death, good land and good economic results in this world fell to those who earned them: “People who worked lived well. And then there were lazybones and drinkers; they lived poorly.”17
A half-decade of accumulation was sacrificed to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and Russia’s civil war, when platoons of Red and White troops marauded through Basmanovo and Butka and helped themselves to horses and loot. Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak’s anti-Bolshevik cavalry were driven from the middle Urals in late 1919. The requisitioning of grain by Moscow under War Communism eased off in 1920, although food was in short supply in 1921–22. Resilient Ignatii picked up where he had left off. By terms of the liberalized New Economic Policy enacted by Vladimir Lenin in 1921, which let private entrepreneurs operate in farming, light industry, and commerce, he cultivated twelve acres and rehabilitated the windmill. Doubled over time from four to eight sails, the mill was the only one that peasants for miles around could use to process grain. To minimize envy and taxation, Ignatii Yeltsin relied on family members for manpower and in 1924 divvied up title to many of his assets among his three oldest sons.18
Nikolai Ignat’evich Yeltsin, the father of Boris Yeltsin, was born in Basmanovo in June 1906. He was the middle of the five offspring Ignatii and Anna produced between 1902 and 1912. From eldest to youngest, the others were Mariya, Ivan, Dmitrii, and Andrian. Nikolai was schooled in reading, writing, and arithmetic for four years—Basmanovo, unlike Butka, had a one-room school—and went into the Yeltsin businesses about 1920. Of the four sons, he and Andrian did carpentry and odd jobs, Ivan worked as a blacksmith with his father, and Dmitrii tended to the windmill on the hill. With an ear for music and a dulcet voice, Nikolai sang in the church choir with his father and brothers and played the harmonica and accordion in the evenings. He appears to have tried to assist with the Communist Party–sponsored government in Basmanovo; according to an autobiographical essay written in the 1950s, he worked from 1924 to 1928 “in an elective post attached to the village soviet [council].” In that same text, he said he “worked as a carpenter in a district workshop” in 1928 and 1929.19 But both these positions, so far as one can tell, were accessorial to his base activity, which was to labor with his father and brothers in the private sector.
In early 1928, bowing to Ignatii’s wish that he terminate a dalliance with a married woman,20 Nikolai wed the nineteen-year-old daughter of a family of lesser means, which had been farming in Basmanovo since the 1670s. The bride’s name was Klavdiya Vasil’evna Starygina. Unschooled, she and her younger sister had been relegated to spinning, sewing, and field chores while waiting for husbands. “My mama would say,” she once told a journalist, “‘For what does a maiden need to be literate? To write letters to boys? She needs to think about getting married.’”21 Klavdiya, who was not much over five feet tall and had braided hair down to her waist, had known Nikolai since age fifteen. When he came courting, they decided to tie the knot immediately, during the Christmas season, and did without a church wedding. She was gladdened to enter the Yeltsin family, with its “golden hands” and property, but her people were not penniless. Vasilii Yegorovich Starygin, her father (born in 1877), was an accomplished carpenter and cabinetmaker who built houses in Basmanovo with the aid of relatives and wage workers; Afanasiya Kirillovna Starygina, her mother (born in 1881), was a needleworker of local acclaim.22
Nikolai could afford a matrimonial home in Basmanovo, which Klavdiya festooned with tablecloths and other hand-crafted textiles. It was across the lane from Ignatii’s and from the humbler cabin built by Nikolai’s brother Ivan. (Dmitrii’s place was on another street, and Mariya and husband Yakov lived with her in-laws, the Gomzikovs.) Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin saw the light of day on February 1, 1931—in Butka. Nikolai and Klavdiya’s firstborn was brown-haired and had his mo
ther’s sparkling blue eyes. In the Russian folk calendar, it was the time of the “Epiphany frosts” (kreshchenskiye morozy), the nippiest of the winter. Why a child conceived in Basmanovo was born in Butka—and why in an overcrowded little house, on marshy land on the far side of the Belyakovka from the village green—I shall explain shortly.23 As his mother told him, and as he retold in his first autobiographical volume, Confession on an Assigned Theme, the baby all but drowned at christening when the priest, bibulous on homebrew, let him drop to the bottom of the font. Hearing the gurgles, Klavdiya retrieved him from the water, and the cleric proposed he be named Boris, from the same root etymologically as “struggle” and “fighter” (and also the name of one of Russia’s first two saints and one of its earliest tsars).24 The family domicile in Butka, about fifteen feet by twenty, was filled to the rafters by a ménage of a dozen Yeltsins in three generations, most of whom slept on straw mattresses and overgarments. It still rests crookedly beneath a rusting iron roof at 22 Toilers Street. No plaque or sign immortalizes Yeltsin or his birth. When I ferreted out the house in September 2005, some denizens of the street did not know that the family had ever lived there.25
At this juncture, the clan’s luck had taken a calamitous turn. In 1928 Stalin and his allies applied pressure on the Soviet peasantry to increase deliveries to government granaries. In 1929–30 they unleashed a social revolution in town and country, swinging from the market-oriented New Economic Policy to breakneck, state-led industrialization. In village Russia, the communists set neighbor against neighbor, divested well-to-do peasants, the kulaks, of their property, and corraled independent growers into kolkhozes and sovkhozes, bureaucratized collective and state farms.
Collectivization did not go unopposed. The young Leonid Brezhnev, who was to lead the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, worked in the 1920s as a land surveyor and organizer of collective farms in Bisert district, to the west of Sverdlovsk; he became a probationary member of the party there in 1929. In his memoirs, he wrote that irate farmers “railed at us with ropes, pitchforks, malicious notes, and stones heaved through the window”—prompting government agents to “lead the onslaught against the hated kulaks” with ever more fervor.26 It was an unequal contest and one in which, toward the end of 1929, the ruling party pressed its advantage with fury. If 1 percent of peasant households in the unified Urals region were collectivized in May 1928, that ratio went up to 7 percent in October 1929, 19 percent by late November 1929, and 67 percent by March 1930; many of the new collectives fell apart in 1930 and had to be reorganized in 1931 and 1932.27
In Yeltsin’s birthplace, as at many a Urals address, symbols of the past came thudding down: The Church of the Presentation, shorn of its icons and its seven-point Orthodox cross, and the bronze bells in its belfry melted down, was converted into the district House of Culture and, in the 1950s, into a movie theater.28 In 1932 and 1933, the leanest years, when crops failed and many peasants slaughtered their livestock, residents say there was cannibalism in Butka.29 The population stagnated, coming to 1,007 in the Soviet census of 1939, only 182 more than in 1897. Lenin had envisioned communism in an amaranthine slogan as “Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country.” Butka was to be wired into the national electric grid only in 1946, after World War II. The first macadam road to Talitsa came in 1936 (asphalting waited until 1976), the first Butka school in 1937, and a spur line from the railroad, laid by corvée labor, in 1949.
In Confession on an Assigned Theme, composed hurriedly in 1989 and published in still-Soviet Russia in 1990, Boris Yeltsin sketched the Butka scene in one solitary page and without proper names, identifying individuals only by their position in the line of descent (father, mother, grandfather). He writes of “dekulakization” (as nasty a word as any in the Soviet lexicon) of “one and all”;30 of bread and seed grain running out; of armed brigands roving the village; of his grandfather, seeing the family’s last cow and horse starve, installing home stoves for cash in 1935.
Some paragraphs down, we read how the teenaged Yeltsin decided in 1949 to get his grandfather’s blessing for his plans to study construction engineering in Sverdlovsk. Grandpa had the boy build a home steambath single-handedly as a show of his commitment. As for Nikolai, the word was that in 1935, “to save the family,” he fled Butka with them to drudge in construction in the city of Berezniki, which is in the vicinity of Perm, on the western, European incline of the Urals. Later in the memoir, Boris referred in a single disarming sentence to an arrest in the 1930s. “I well remember when my father was taken away in the night, and I was six years old,” which would date it in 1937.31 The Sverdlovsk journalist Andrei Goryun, who had conversations with Yeltsin’s mother, quoted her in 1991 as saying her father-in-law, Ignatii, going on eighty, was “sent away to certain death” on the northern taiga in 1931 and made it for only several months. Goryun also quoted a statement by Boris Yeltsin at a news conference in Sverdlovsk in 1989 that his father sat “several months in prison” in 1937.32
Hamstrung by incomplete data and by Yeltsin’s taciturnity, analysts long recited these bits and pieces as gospel truth. Unwittingly, they misstated and understated the family’s tribulations.33 Some shards, it transpires, were correct and some were not. Even in the accounts as of 1990, there were gaps and discrepancies. Ignatii Yeltsin could not have been eighty in 1931; if so, he would have been fifty when he sired his first child, most unlikely in a peasant family. Boris Yeltsin speaks in Confession of his grandfather surviving wraithlike in Butka until 1934–35, while his mother has him deported in 1931. Yeltsin describes meeting with his grandfather in 1949, almost two decades after he reputedly died in the north, and gives his age then as “over seventy,” another inconsistency. Yeltsin also states that both grandfathers got into their nineties, which would belie what his mother said about Ignatii Yekimovich. And nothing was ever said about what befell Anna Dmitriyevna Yeltsina—her very name was missing from the narrative.
The missing links in the chain of events can now be filled in, thanks to informational nuggets from family members and, for Nikolai Yeltsin, his unpublished autobiographical note and the forensic research of Aleksei Litvin, a historian from Kazan State University. The fate of the Yeltsin paterfamilias and his spouse was as harsh as Klavdiya Yeltsina presented it to Goryun, though different in some of the particulars. The die was cast when the Basmanovo village council in 1928 or 1929 slapped a punitive tax on Ignatii Yeltsin and disenfranchised him under a clause in the Soviet Russian constitution of 1918. The elections in which he had lost the right to vote were by now bogus affairs without competition; the real penalty was being fixed a member of a social category hostile to the regime and ineligible for all state benefits and services.34 In 1930 the authorities officially branded Ignatii a kulak. He was triply vulnerable, as a profit-making cultivator, a mill owner, and a blacksmith—all of them in the regime’s black book.
Dekulakization scarred one and all indirectly but a substring of the rural population directly and viciously. A decision of the party Politburo, in Moscow, in January 1930 delineated three categories of kulak. The first were the “counterrevolutionary kulak activists,” persons who had been in the White armies or were against the regime; they were to be arrested and sent to concentration camps. Category two was “rich” kulaks, who had property but had not committed political offenses; their punishment was to be sent to boreal exile in “special settlements.” Ignatii was slotted into the third, smallest, and least nefarious category. Third-class kulaks were to be expropriated and resettled, serflike, on inferior land in their home districts, and could keep some of their farm tools and possessions on the say-so of the local government. The boundaries between the three categories of kulak were indistinct, as was the line between kulaks and the “middle peasants” below. The typical dekulakized family in the Urals owned a house, one cow, and three domestic fowl, worked five to eight acres of land, and was “far from prosperous.” 35 These assets were considerably less than Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin
had had in the 1920s and much less than they had before 1917, so they were at risk for being put into the second category. But the third category was bad enough. In August or September of 1930, at harvest time, the village leaders impounded Ignatii’s farmstead and ran him, Anna, and his sons and daughters-in-law (one of them the pregnant Klavdiya Yeltsina) out of the community and sent them to Butka, which had been made the district seat for the area in the early 1920s. As he was put on a horse-drawn cart for the ride to Butka, the heartsick Ignatii wept and wrung his hands. He asked his daughter, Mariya, the only one of his progeny to stay behind, to pray for him: “Why am I being forced to go? For what I built with my own hands!”36 His windmill and smithy would quickly fall into ruin, their remnants hauled off for scrap by neighbors.
This was the act of spoliation, expulsion, and spite that drove the Yeltsins to rent the rough-hewn, poorly situated cottage in Butka from an elderly widow. It was a lacerating demotion from their four houses and assorted farm buildings in Basmanovo. They were among the 4,200 Urals families, or roughly 21,000 people, subjected to local deportation in 1930; 100,000 people were put in camps or sent to the north. The upper Urals by January 1932 held almost a half million deported peasants, about one in three of the USSR total.37 In Butka, Ivan, Nikolai, Dmitrii, and Andrian Yeltsin were admitted to the new Red May kolkhoz; Ignatii was not. For a year or two, like many Soviet peasants in his position, he went on the lam, hiding out with relatives and scavenging for handyman’s jobs to earn his keep.38 With the stress and despair this begat, Klavdiya Vasil’evna could well have remembered him as eighty years old.
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