Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  Four years later—and this Boris Yeltsin never acknowledged openly—the noose was tightened. Sometime in 1934, Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin were rounded up in Butka and banished again. It is unclear why, since the mass deportation of peasants ended in 1931. The Soviet norm was for third-category kulaks to work in supervised crews doing heavy labor the government valued, especially in woodcutting and construction. There was no such work at Butka, which perhaps drew official attention to the Yeltsins. Ignatii’s refusal to report to the police may have provoked them to act, and there could possibly have been a connection with the problems his son Nikolai was having that spring in the city (see below). One guesses that Ignatii, beggared in 1930, was reclassified in 1934 as a second-category kulak. Even that device would have created an anomaly. The regulations in effect in the Urals exempted from deportation kulak families that did not include an able-bodied male younger than fifty, and in 1934 Ignatii Yeltsin was fifty-nine.39

  Whatever the pretext, what came next was a long journey in convoy to the verge of nowhere: the uninviting and unfarmable environs of Nadezhdinsk, an ironworking center in the far north of Sverdlovsk province (1939 population 65,000), on the Kakva River 400 miles below the Arctic Circle. The Yeltsins and the ten or twelve other households removed with them could each bring only several sacks of belongings; tools and most of their cash and clothing, peasants’ sheepskin coats (tulupy) included, were taken away.40 In the special settlements, exiles worked under police oversight and had 15 percent of their wages garnisheed to maintain the guard force. The outstations used people up: “The [housing] . . . was unfit for habitation. The lack of food and medical care consigned people to malnourishment and wasting away. Unsanitary conditions spread infections and epidemics of typhus, scarlet fever, and scurvy. All of this led to high mortality rates among the settlers.”41 In the worst years, 1932 and 1933, peasants in some remote northern places had to eat fallen draft animals, moss, and birch leaves.42

  Nadezhdinsk, which in a cruel jest means City of Hope in Russian (it was assigned the name Serov in 1939), held out not an iota of hope to the Yeltsins.43 The outcasts subsisted in a dugout (zemlyanka), a concavity scooped out in the earth, with a wood coal fire for heat and a twig blind against the elements. The only organized industries in the virgin land around Nadezhdinsk were forestry and mining, which Ignatii was too old and arthritic to do. By grace of the police, he was given a few trips back to Butka to fix farm machinery for the kolkhoz. That was his only comfort. Destitute and distraught, he lost his sight and went into mental collapse. Ignatii Yekimovich died a broken man in 1936, at the age of sixty-one, far short of ninety. His widow was let out of the area in 1936 and moved to Berezniki to live with her eldest son, Ivan, and died there before her time in 1941.44

  The story did not end with the deaths of Ignatii and Anna. The gruesome truth is that all four of Yeltsin’s grandparents were victims in their own way of the terror. Vasilii Starygin had hired workmen in his homebuilding business, which was enough for him, too, to be dekulakized and deposited in Butka in 1930. In 1934, the same year the Yeltsins were transported north, the OGPU (the appellation of the Soviet political police in the first half of the 1930s) marooned Vasilii and Afanasiya Starygin in the selfsame subarctic precinct. At Nadezhdinsk/Serov they eked out a threadbare existence for eleven years. They apparently had some contact with the elder Yeltsins in the two years Ignatii and Anna spent in the area. A little younger and in better health, the Starygins were more adaptable than their relations by marriage. Vasilii built himself and his wife an above-ground cabin. He kept his sanity and kept afloat economically by making furniture and cabinets and selling them locally.45 Boris Yeltsin and his mother, he was to say in an interview, paid calls on the grandparents in the summertime and helped out with the gardening.46

  The riddle of how the grandfather could die in the 1930s and miraculously reappear in the 1940s is thus solved: The first grandfather in Yeltsin’s transcription is his father’s father, Ignatii Yeltsin; the second is his mother’s father, Vasilii Starygin. Starygin was the master carpenter, not the blacksmith and mill owner, which would explain why his opinion would have been so treasured by Boris Yeltsin as he pondered going into construction and why Starygin would have wanted his grandson to prove himself with the steambath project. Dekulakized peasants and many administrative deportees in the Soviet Union were allowed out of their places of servitude after the war, especially if a close relative had fought in it; the rest were to be freed after Stalin breathed his last in 1953.47 Possibly since several family members had been in the army, the Starygins, both of them still spry, were discharged in 1945. Nikolai and Klavdiya Yeltsin fetched her parents in Serov and brought them to Berezniki to share quarters with them and their children. They were to live to the ripe old age of ninety-one (for Vasilii Yegorovich, who would die in 1968) and eighty-nine (for Afanasiya Kirillovna, who died in 1970). From the same peasant stock and locale as Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin, they outlasted them by three decades.48

  Another bolt of lightning hit Boris Yeltsin’s parents. Nikolai, while admitted to the Butka kolkhoz, was looking even before his son’s birth for something better. This search led him to Nadezhdinsk, of all places, the little town near which his parents were to land in 1934. There he joined the great wave of peasants in quest of work in the new factories burgeoning in the Soviet Union’s first five-year plan. His 1950s autobiography tells us he “worked from 1930 to 1932 as a foreman” in Nadezhdinsk, presumably in the construction of a factory there.49 His presence in Nadezhdinsk could not have been continuous. He was in Basmanovo to father Boris Nikolayevich in May or June of 1930, he was in Butka for the baptism in February or March of 1931, and he was attached to the Butka kolkhoz after Boris’s birth.50 Spotty evidence suggests that Nikolai, Klavdiya, and their newborn spent the winter of 1931–32 in Nadezhdinsk and returned to the village after that.51 In December 1932 the kolkhoz chairman let Nikolai and his kid brother, Andrian, go somewhere else. The train they boarded was not to Nadezhdinsk or to Berezniki, as Yeltsin’s first book of memoirs says, but to Kazan, the polyglot capital of the republic of Tatariya, on the Volga River equidistant from Sverdlovsk and Moscow.

  Ivan the Terrible conquered the Volga Tatar khanate at Kazan in 1552, annexed its territories, and opened it to Russian settlers and to Orthodoxy (the Tatars are Sunni Muslims). Lenin lived there for a few months in 1887 and was expelled from the local university for revolutionary activity. The population was a quarter million in 1932. The Yeltsin men signed on as woodworkers in Aviastroi, the syndicate constructing Works No. 124, an aviation plant, at the hamlet of Karavayevo, five miles north of the Kazan kremlin. The works was going to produce gleaming military aircraft designed by the illustrious aeronautical engineer Andrei Tupolev.52 Those who put it up were limited to pick and shovel, flatbed trucks, and hand tools. Nikolai was promoted to leader of a crew that built housing, an equipment depot, and a workshop in the assembly hangar. He also, it would seem, studied in the evenings in a technical school (tekhnikum) for construction personnel.53 Klavdiya and her toddler lived with him in Barracks No. 8 in the settlement of Sukhaya River. A Russian “barracks” (barak) is a ramshackle wood shack, either unpartitioned or ranging bedrooms off of a long corridor; the Sukhaya River building had the latter plan. Nikolai and his wife and son had an unadorned family room to themselves; Andrian’s bachelor room was one door down. “Like nomads,” Klavdiya and Boris again flitted to Butka in the spring and back to Kazan when the snow flew. They kept up their shuttling between village and city, which was commonplace in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia, for several years.54

  On April 27, 1934—not in 1937—the young family’s world was turned topsy-turvy. OGPU officers, let in by the barracks commandant, collared Nikolai and Andrian Yeltsin and took them off in a “black crow” paddy wagon to the Kazan political prison. The arrest report said all their rooms contained were sticks of furniture and a smattering of letters and identification papers.55 Six Aviastroi work
ers from Urals and Volga farm families had been under observation since January 1934. In conspiratorial mode, the OGPU gave them the code name Odnosel’chane, Countrymen, implying that they were from the same village or district. But they were not. Besides the two Yeltsins, there were Prokofii Gavrilov and his son Ivan, ethnic Russians from another part of the Urals, plus Vasilii Vakhrushev, whose nationality was Udmurt, a Finno-Ugric minority, and who was from Udmurtiya, and Ivan Sokolov, a Russian from Tatariya. The file bulged with materials from their home villages and the Kazan workforce. Three weeks of bullyragging led to accusations of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” a crime under the infamous Article 58, Section 10 of the Russian penal code. On May 23 an OGPU tribunal, ruling on Case No. 5644, found them guilty as charged and sentenced five of the six (the Yeltsins, the Gavrilovs, and Vakhrushev) to three years in a forced-labor camp, minus one month for time served; Sokolov, fingered as the inciter, got five years. If they had come into the police’s clutches in 1930 or 1931 or after 1935, they would have been much more liable to be tortured or put to death.56

  The investigation and summary trial were a travesty, a paranoid era in microcosm. It is plain from Aleksei Litvin’s sleuthing, though, that the defendants had “an ill-concealed dissatisfaction with conditions at the construction site.”57 This provided the OGPU with ammunition for prosecution as a deterrent to their coworkers. The six, the formal indictment alleged, had underhandedly preyed on “the actual difficulties” with food and supplies at the factory. They grumbled about scarcity of their rationed provisions, soup made from rancid meat, a ban on solemnizing Orthodox Easter, and deductions from their pay packets for state bonds and to make donations to communists imprisoned in Austria. OGPU interrogators trolled for more political articulations, dragooning a laborer from Basmanovo, Sergei Kudrinskii, into testifying under oath to the Yeltsins’ kulak origins and to the twenty-two-year-old Andrian having said the people would be better off if a war broke out and the Soviet government was toppled. For Nikolai Yeltsin, no such words were hit upon, although his and Klavdiya’s bedroom in the tumbledown Barracks No. 8 was where the most inculpating conversations were said to have taken place. The canard that most occupied the inquisitors was offered by Maksim Otletayev, a Tatar carpenter, who gave information that Nikolai had prevented the workers from reading Soviet newspapers out loud at the Aviastroi site. The dossier shows the presiding officer staging an in-person meeting between Nikolai and Otletayev and peppering Yeltsin with queries on this and other venial offenses:

  INTERROGATOR: Did you tell Otletayev not to read the newspaper and that he would not find anything in it anyway, and then tear it away from him?

  YELTSIN: To say that there was nothing in the newspaper—I did not say that. As far as ripping the newspaper out of Otletayev’s hands is concerned, I did that unintentionally.

  INTERROGATOR: Did you say we do not need to help workers who are rotting in prisons in capitalist countries?

  YELTSIN: I don’t exactly remember. But I guess I said that because I am a simpleton.

  INTERROGATOR: And with respect to the dining arrangements, [did you complain] when the dinner was bad?

  YELTSIN: We discussed this in our crew when the food was lousy.58

  These equivocations and a steadfast denial of any lawbreaking, recorded in his signature on the indictment, were the best Nikolai Yeltsin could do in the OGPU snake pit. That he felt disaffection with the Soviet regime in 1934 is beyond question. It was anchored in the ravages of collectivization and forced-draft urbanization and in the lot of the Yeltsin and Starygin families. But it was his grousing about Aviastroi that got him into the police’s bad books. He faulted the newspaper readings mostly as a drag on productivity, as tallies with his crusty personality.59 He and his brother, unlike many Soviets in Stalin’s time, begged off collusion with the police. When the OGPU approached them, the reed they grabbed was the same artifice of peasant simple-mindedness that Nikolai had pleaded in his interrogation. The OGPU papers sent to the camp specified they were “not subject to recruitment” as stool pigeons and were to be watched with special vigilance.60

  Boris Yeltsin cried himself to sleep the night his father was taken into custody. He was too young to follow it but “could see my mother was sobbing and how petrified she was.”61 The two were imperiled when the Aviastroi barracks prepared to kick them out after Nikolai’s sentencing. A Good Samaritan—Vasilii Petrov, a sixty-year-old medical orderly and World War I veteran who was Nikolai’s cell mate as they awaited trial—took pity on them and asked his wife, Yelizaveta, and young daughter, Nina, to help out. Help they did. They came upon mother and child crouched in the hallway, locked out of their room, and gave them sanctuary in the Petrov cottage on Sixth Union Street. Klavdiya Vasil’evna would scrape by, working as a seamstress at a Kazan garment factory, where she learned to read and write in an evening class, and as a baker’s helper at Bread Factory No. 2. The boy, Nina said in the 1990s, was “skinny, calm, and obedient.” “When his mama would say to him, ‘I’m going to work, sit here quietly,’ he did not fuss. . . . The only toy he had was a doll. He wasn’t to touch it, only to look at it. But kids will be kids. Borya played with little pyramids he made out of pieces of wood. In the winter he and I loved to go on toboggan rides.”62 In 1936–37 Boris attended a kindergarten in Kazan, perhaps one attached to the bakery.63

  Nikolai Ignat’evich did his time at the Dmitrov camp on the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Suez-size dig to open up the capital to Volga water and shipping, which was the most pharaonic project in Stalin’s Gulag. The work, as a bearer and carpenter, was backbreaking and hellishly unsafe. Death rates among the canal’s almost 200,000 inmates were high. One in six was claimed by exposure, accidents, and disease in 1933 alone, so Nikolai’s chances of making it through three years were maybe fifty-fifty.64 He did make it, however, and was released seven months early. Aleksei Litvin is convinced there was an explicit deal for him to do post-Gulag work duty in Berezniki, and his discharge form from the Dmitrov camp did say he was bound for Berezniki.65 This, though, would not explain why Nikolai did not go there directly.

  In October 1936 Nikolai Ignat’evich was restored to his wife and son at the Petrovs’ in Kazan. His registration papers said he was unemployed, that is, not formally signed up at a state workplace, in 1936–37. He must have found some work in the informal sector to put bread on the table. He may also have re-enrolled at the construction tekhnikum where he had taken classes before his arrest.66 Further reason to tarry in Kazan was Klavdiya’s pregnancy with their second child. Mikhail Yeltsin was born in July 1937. The six-year-old Boris was godfather at his christening. Right after, on July 31, the four pulled up stakes for Berezniki and the Urals, trundling their every possession in a wood laminate trunk. Vasilii Petrov was released from captivity and died in late 1937; his wife lived until 1966 and Nina until 2002. Klavdiya Yeltsina and the Petrovs corresponded and then lost track of one another during the war. As a mark of gratitude, Boris Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, bought Nina and her family a two-room apartment in Kazan in 1999, using Yeltsin’s book royalties; in 2006, on a visit to the city, she laid flowers on Nina’s grave.67

  The Yeltsins’ destination in 1937 was on the upper Kama River, some 400 miles northeast of Kazan (which is near where the Kama, flowing south, empties into the Volga) and 100 miles north of the major city of Perm. Berezniki lay over the proverbial Russian salt mines. First at the mouth of the small Zyryanka River on the left bank and later in the right-bank town of Usol’e, the Stroganovs, a monied merchant family from Novgorod, had begun in the sixteenth century to extricate unpurified sodium chloride out of the ground and refine it through desiccation and boiling. The saltworks went into decline in the eighteenth century, undersold by product from the Volga basin. In the nineteenth century, admixtures of calcium and magnesium chlorides were discovered in the local brine; these could be separated out through ammonia treatment and used as ingredients for fertilizers, industrial chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. T
he Belgian company Solvay and a Russian shipbuilder, Ivan Lyubimov, constructed a soda plant in the village of Churtan in 1883. Communist planners were taken with the area’s potential after 1917, and opened Russia’s first radium mill there in the 1920s. In the first five-year plan, they made it the epicenter of the Soviet chemical industry—a “republic of chemistry,” in a shibboleth of the day. The municipality of Berezniki was formed in March 1932 as an amalgamation of Churtan, the other four villages over the salt beds on the left bank of the Kama, and Usol’e, which was to be severed from it in 1940.

  As a sign of the times, the city had its own penal colony, an arm of the camp complex at the conflux of the Kama and the Vishera, the first Gulag outpost in the Urals. The encampment on Adamova Hill, assigned in May 1929 to build the Berezniki Potash Combine on log piles driven into a bog, had as many as ten thousand workers in the early 1930s. Convicts were needed because free laborers did not want to go to Berezniki, which was short of housing and food and had had an outbreak of typhus in 1930. As the OGPU (renamed the NKVD in 1934) reassigned the prisoners to new building sites, other workers, many of them former inmates or indigent deportees under police restrictions, took their place. “The mass of the builders of the city were exiles and resettled people—dekulakized peasants from central Russia, Tatariya, and Ukraine, politically unreliable elements, counterrevolutionaries, intellectuals, and so forth. Later [during World War II] they would be joined by [deported] Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, et cetera.”68 Berezniki was a venue for the dregs of society, as those who ruled Soviet society defined it.