Nikolai Yeltsin’s older brother, Ivan, was already in Berezniki, having been sent to involuntary labor there in 1935 for “subverting” grain procurement in Butka (he could not meet his quota despite selling all he had to make up the difference); he checked in with the NKVD but was not in lockup. Before 1936 was out, Nikolai and Ivan’s bereaved mother, Anna, had come to be with Ivan after burying her husband at Nadezhdinsk. Dmitrii and Andrian Yeltsin were soon to join them from Butka and Dmitrov. Nikolai got work in 1937 at Sevuraltyazhstroi, the North Urals Heavy Industry Construction Trust, and was assigned to the potash combine project. As an ex-convict, he would be banned until the mid-1950s from residing in Perm, Sverdlovsk, and the USSR’s principal cities and from membership in the Communist Party. Within those limits, he and his family lived a humdrum Soviet life unmolested. Only on July 15, 1989, was he to be exonerated of the 1934 charges, twelve years after his death, by a Gorbachevera commission.69
Boris Yeltsin’s reaction to this palimpsest of misery is more important to his development than the raw facts are. Until the glasnost’ of the 1980s, censorship and political conformism bottled up many neuralgic truths about the Soviet past. The removal of restraints on the exterior did not do away with restraints on the interior. Klavdiya Yeltsina, replying to Andrei Goryun at the highwater mark of revelations about Soviet history, clammed up about the detention of her husband and their sojourn in Kazan. More astounding, she did not mention her parents’ loss or their stolen decade at Nadezhdinsk/ Serov. The years may have dulled an old woman’s memory; it is hard to believe that she did not remember the plight of, and her separation from, her mother and father. Boris Yeltsin cannot be blamed a half-century later for mistaking his age upon the jailing of his father for six rather than three. But a person could not as easily forget that the parent’s sentence, and time out of the nest, was measured in years and not in months. Yeltsin did not say anything about Kazan in Confession on an Assigned Theme; in autobiographical forms dating from the 1960s and 1970s, stored in the Communist Party archive, he had listed it as a place of residence.70 Later, in the second volume of his memoirs, Notes of a President, and in visits to the city in the 1990s and in retirement, he was to recount having lived there.71 He had only fuzzy memories of Ignatii Yekimovich, although he did know Anna Dmitriyevna, who died in Berezniki when he was ten. Whatever he retained about his paternal grandparents, he knew that his maternal grandparents had been uprooted from Basmanovo and Butka and languished in the penumbra of the Gulag until moving to Berezniki and into his parents’ house in 1945. Yeltsin skirted the subject in Confession even though the book was rushed into print in time for his campaign for a seat in the Russian parliament in 1990 and word of his family would have been electorally useful. He still shied away from making known his grandparents’ fate in Notes of a President, which went to press in post-Soviet 1994. (Volume three, Presidential Marathon, was all about the 1990s.) For him, as for his mother, recall was selective and not only blurred.
Why the amnesia? A misplaced shame about trouble with the powers-thatbe, implanted in the Yeltsins by Soviet education and propaganda, was surely part of it.72 A sense of proportion, a mental barometer of sorrow, was also involved. For Klavdiya Yeltsina, having let Goryun in on her father-in-law’s wretched death, it would have been indecent to speak in the same breath about her parents, who got through their purgatory alive. Another dampener, symptomatic of the times, was a conspiracy of silence inside the nuclear family. A nephew of Nikolai and Klavdiya’s from Butka who boarded with them in Berezniki for two years in the late 1950s never heard them refer to Nikolai’s arrest, and in an interview with me in 2005, in Butka, swore that it was a fiction.73 About the incarceration, Yeltsin wrote in Notes: “My father never spoke with me about it. He erased this piece of his life from his memory as if it had never been. The family was forbidden to talk about the subject.” When I asked him about it, he repeated these words almost verbatim.74 The autobiographical note Nikolai wrote in Berezniki did not mention the OGPU and the Gulag.75 Klavdiya Yeltsina was more loquacious and more agitated. Goryun concludes on the basis of his contact with her that she “felt herself innocently wronged” and “could not have failed to tell her children . . . about the tragic occurrences of the 1930s.”76 To my question in 2002 about whether his mother was more unforgiving of the family’s pain than her husband, Yeltsin nodded yes but did not go into detail. And he indicated his familiarity with the Yeltsins and Starygins having been pauperized and stigmatized: “I did not approve of dekulakization, I did not support it. I was hurt for my grandfather [Starygin], whom I loved, and for my father and mother.”77 But being hurt and verbalizing the source of the hurt were two different responses.
We can take Yeltsin at his word that until he held Nikolai Yeltsin’s OGPU interrogation file in his hand in the 1990s he was uninformed about many details of the victimization of his family. He also says in Notes that, if he had come by this information earlier, he would have understood the “banal horror” of Stalinism and his life might have “taken a different turn.”78 This is more problematic, in that Yeltsin was not unaware of the police state and knew generally how it had impinged on his kin. A different political turn in the Soviet 1930s or 1940s would have been impossible. The Urals, like Russia and the USSR as a whole, were bombarded with word of the misdeeds of saboteurs and spies. The Urals party leadership under Ivan Kabakov was purged by Stalin in 1937 as a “right-wing and Trotskyite center,” and officials, intellectuals, and factory directors were arrested by the thousands. Agitprop encouraged citizens to pass on to the police anonymous tips about loose talk. “People had to answer for it if they made remiss statements about Soviet reality or maintained relations with friends or relatives who had been condemned as ‘enemies of the people.’”79 In 1937 and the first nine months of 1938, when the Perm area was still part of Sverdlovsk region, most political prisoners under sentence of death were convoyed to the provincial capital for execution. At a killing field just west of Sverdlovsk, some seven thousand men and women from places like Perm and Berezniki were shot in those twenty-one months, an average of eleven a day. A memorial cross was put up there in the 1990s.80
For those who came of age in the shadow of such barbarism, Yeltsin among them, putting a lid on the recapitulation of terror was a psychological defense mechanism and insurance against repercussions from babbling about it. The trouble was that over the years and the decades the repression fed on itself. The later the sufferings of the elders were owned up to, the more the silence had to be explained, which in turn raised the cost of making a clean breast of it and finally moving on.
CHAPTER TWO
Scripts
Nikolai and Klavdiya Yeltsin, their vagabondage over, settled down in Berezniki, as did Nikolai’s three brothers. Boris lived with his parents there until he headed for Sverdlovsk and a higher education in 1949.
Berezniki was the second city of Perm oblast’, the principal Soviet term for province after 1929. At 59° 24’ north, it is set in taiga of spruce, silver fir, and the spindly birches that lend it its name (bereznik or bereznyak is birch wood), and has only 100 to 110 frost-free days a year. In population, it was 65,000 in 1939, not counting internees, and maybe 80,000 in 1950. The Perm area, having been part of a region centered in Sverdlovsk since 1923, was made an oblast in 1938, the last section of the Urals freed from the control of Sverdlovsk. From 1940 to 1957, it and its capital would bear the name Molotov, after Stalin henchman Vyacheslav Molotov.
The enveloping forest has a pellucid, rustling beauty, and every June and July it has “white nights” as enchanting as those of St. Petersburg or Stockholm. But as factory towns go it would be hard to think of one much bleaker than Berezniki when the Yeltsins made their way there. Decades before, an 1890 travelogue, describing an approach by vessel up the Kama from Perm, drew a panorama of man-made desolation: “The closer you get to Usol’e, the grimmer and more mournful the riverbanks. You no longer see forest; the fields are without greenery. . . .
On both banks . . . you find salt barns, linked by dark, cold tunnels. Great black saltworks stand out against the pewter sky and create an impression of gloom.”1 By the 1930s the new city’s factories were turning out soda, mineral fertilizers, dyes, and pesticides. Its residential center was built about five miles inland, to keep travel time to the workplaces there to a minimum. During World War II (the Great Patriotic War of 1941 to 1945, as the Russians knew it), a magnesium and titanium mill was added to the chemical works. Berezniki was awash in refugees and wounded servicemen, several schools served as rehab hospitals, and evacuated factory machinery was stored in mine shafts and chutes. In addition to gunpowder and conventional explosives, Berezniki was one of five cities in the Soviet Union to produce toxic compounds for chemical weapons. Workers made mustard gas, lewisite, hydrogen cyanide, and adamsite and decanted thousands of tons of them into canisters for the army and air force. The ecological byproducts were horrendous. Contaminants spewed unfiltered into the water, atmosphere, and soil; puddles of brine and effluent pockmarked the townscape; tailings coughed up by the mines, ashes, and chemicals all sprawled in windblown dunes up to 250 feet high; houses and factories could sink into karsts and mining cavities. All these years later, Berezniki is one of the most polluted cities in Russia. Industrial smoke and fumes still foul the air. A containment pond for liquid wastes, built next to the Kama after the war, glows an iridescent green and does not ice over in wintertime. Berezniki’s children have abnormal rates of morbidity and are eight times likelier to have blood ailments than those in other urban centers.2
Never far away in the Yeltsins’ allotted hometown were the barbed wire, watchtowers, and guard dogs of the Gulag. A stockade for 11,000 German and Axis prisoners of war was set up in 1943. A new strict-labor camp for Soviet convicts came in 1946 to expand a chemical plant, and to build another in 1950, when its workforce capped off at 4,500. Across the Kama artery in Usol’e lay a camp specializing in lumbering (with 24,900 inmates in 1940 and 3,600 in 1953). Twenty miles upriver at Solikamsk, the location of the Stroganovs’ first salt pit, was a small camp for building a pulp and paper mill (4,300 inmates in 1938) and a big one for lumbering (32,700 in 1938); at Kizel, forty miles south, captives logged and built hydro dams in two waves (with peaks at 7,700 in 1946 and 21,300 in 1953).3 Taken together, this unfree labor dwarfed the legally free workforce of Berezniki.4
Soviet cities were cauldrons for social change and for the conversion of peasants into proletarians. But the size of the inflow from the villages, the tenacity of agrarian identities, and the systematic underinvestment in urban infrastructure meant that the cities themselves were substantially peasantized in the 1930s and 1940s.5 When the Yeltsins first walked its streets, Berezniki had almost no pavement, no sewage system, and no public transit. It had some asphalt and sewage mains by 1950, though still no buses or streetcars. And yet, Berezniki had been laid out by planners from Leningrad as a “socialist city,” and there was some attention to culture and leisure: the Avangard cinema, a live theater, a museum, several stadiums, a park and arboretum on Stalin Prospect (Lenin Prospect today). Postwar apartment houses had “elements of the classical orders, immense window apertures reminiscent of Roman triumphal arches,” and “obelisk-like turrets in memory of those who had fallen” in the crusade against fascism.6
Nikolai Yeltsin made the best of the situation. He bootstrapped himself during and after the war from woodworker at the bench to foreman, work superintendent, dispatcher, planner, and head of several technical bureaus at Sevuraltyazhstroi. In wartime Klavdiya Yeltsina did twelve-hour shifts as a dressmaker. After 1945 she was that rarity in the urban USSR, a housewife who worked wholly in the home. She reared their two sons and a daughter, Valentina, born in July 1944, took in sewing to pad out Nikolai’s income, and cared for her parents, who did not work once they were out of exile.
Debarking in 1937, the family found lodgings for several months in Usol’e, from where Nikolai commuted to work by ferry (there was no bridge over the Kama until the 1950s). After about a year shoehorned with three other households into a scruffy timber cottage in Berezniki, they were given one of the twenty rooms in a new two-story wood barracks, in the adjacent Zhdanovo Fields section of town. It had outdoor plumbing (privies and a well) and was so leaky and drafty that the children huddled on winter nights with a nanny goat. The animal, Polya, was also a source of fresh milk. In Confession on an Assigned Theme, Yeltsin fastened on the auditory porousness of the thin walls. Were any tenant to mark a name day, birthday, or wedding, someone would put on the windup gramophone “and the whole barracks would be singing. . . . Quarrels, conversations, scandals, secrets, mirth—the entire barracks could hear, everyone knew everything. It could be that is why I still remember the barracks with such revulsion.”7 Across the street was the city’s only public bathhouse, where a weekly soaping and soaking could be had for pennies. Next to it was the bustling farmers’ bazaar, one of the thousands in Soviet towns where peasants since 1935 had been allowed to sell, at unregulated prices, food they grew in plots behind their homes. On another side were sheds for the barracks dwellers’ goats, chickens, and geese, while cattle grazed in the unbuilt portion of Zhdanovo Fields. The log house and the barracks have long since been torn down.8
In 1944, in anticipation of Valentina’s birth, Nikolai used his construction skills and tools and, it may be hazarded, his connections with materials suppliers to erect a private house, as was permissible under Soviet legislation. It was in brick and stood on a parcel of land known as the Seventh Block, facing First Pond, the water reservoir for the old Stroganov mine. The home’s four rooms and a kitchen were enough to accommodate the Starygins comfortably when they arrived from Serov in 1945. Boris Yeltsin did not note this change of circumstances in his autobiography, saying only that they lived in the Berezniki barracks for ten years (the actual figure was about six) and passing over how they were housed after that. More than likely, he feared some readers would impute the family’s acquisition of such an asset to greed or privilege. A private house (but not the land beneath it, which was owned by the state) was a valuable nest egg, and protection against the inflation that ate into cash savings.9
A decade and a half after dekulakization, the Yeltsin house, which is still in use, was palpable betterment, and it spoke well of the esteem Nikolai was earning in the urban world. Ironically, it also re-created the rural ambience the family had lost and felt the need of. Grandfather and grandmother Starygin having moved in, the three generations cohabited, much as they would have in the Russian village, where they would have shared a house or lived within walking distance. Out in the yard were a woodpile, a vegetable garden, some poultry—and the small steambath Boris built for Vasilii Starygin in 1949. But the village continued to tug at the family’s heartstrings. In 1955 Nikolai was asked to act as chairman of a Urals collective farm—in the village of Urol, Molotov oblast—during an all-USSR campaign to recruit urban specialists for positions in the agrarian economy. He accepted, but the experiment failed, and he took back his technical job in the Sevuraltyazhstroi construction trust in two months.10 In 1959 he was sent to represent the trust at the USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements, the trade fair and amusement park in Moscow lorded over by Vera Mukhina’s steel statue of a brawny male worker and a peasant woman holding aloft a hammer and a sickle. When he received the invitation to the capital, which he had never laid eyes on, he could not believe his good fortune: “He read it out, grabbed his head, and bounded off to the office [to check it], although by the standards of those years he cut a figure that corresponded [to the honor].”11 But the bright lights were not really for him. In 1962 Nikolai was to take a pension and, after a thirty-year absence, to repatriate to Butka with his wife, turning the wheel full circle. Klavdiya’s aging parents made the move with them. The sale of the Berezniki home allowed them to purchase a cozy cabin at 1 Korotkii Lane with cash.12
The family’s mores were rooted in communism and in the austerity of the Urals
countryside and of their Old Believer and Russian Orthodox forerunners there. While Klavdiya was “devoutly religious” from first to the last, the Yeltsins, in the land of official atheism, were not observant. Churchgoing was impossible in Berezniki, as the only Orthodox temple, the Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist, was closed by the government in 1937 and did not open again for worship until 1992. Valentina Yeltsina, unlike her brothers, was not christened as a babe in 1944. A layman could have administered the sacrament, or the Yeltsins could have gone to a village church outside of Berezniki, but they took neither option. The living room of the home had no icons on display, although the Starygins did keep icons in their bedroom and Klavdiya Vasil’evna prayed before a miniature icon she hid from prying eyes.13 Boris grew up with no religious beliefs and developed a regard for Christianity only in the 1980s and 1990s.14
Nikolai and Klavdiya, she said in 1991, two years before her death, agreed that it was a big job “raising a good person who does not run around the streets like a waif or come into bad company.”15 None of the siblings smoked, played cards or dice, used smutty language, or touched liquor. Any trespass on this code would have been condemned in the classroom as well as in the home. Teachers at the schoolhouse where Boris studied after the war would order the pupils to shun for an entire month any pupil with the odor of tobacco on his or her breath; for the smell of alcohol, the penalty was a one-week suspension from classes and a stern note to the parents. At the age of sixteen, Yeltsin intercepted another adolescent in the act of buying a glassful of vodka at a roadside stand; he prudishly poured the liquid on the sidewalk, paid the vendor for it, and walked off. Unlike cigarettes, gambling, and swearing, drinking was one thing in which he would indulge in later life. His old classmate Sergei Molchanov, who lived in Berezniki until his death in 2006, was sure that the first alcohol that Yeltsin ever touched was the glass of champagne he was given to sip at his secondary-school graduation party in 1949.16
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