Yeltsin
Page 6
The growing boy had his mother’s square physiognomy. To her, whom he had all to himself during Nikolai’s interlude in the Gulag and then frequent stays at construction jobs, were his warmest attachments. “My mother,” he said in a judgment echoed by everyone who knew her, “was a very kind woman, tender and caressing.” “I . . . loved her considerably more than my father,” he added.17 In disposition, Boris Yeltsin always stressed how much he took after the man of the house: “My father’s character was gruff [krutoi], like my grandfather’s, and I suppose this was passed on to me.” The context indicates the grandfather referred to here is Ignatii Yeltsin (Nikolai’s father), but Vasilii Starygin (Klavdiya’s father), whom Boris Yeltsin knew far longer and better, did not give up much to Ignatii in the gruffness department. In the late 1940s, he was “an imposing codger with a long beard and an original mind,” Yeltsin wrote, and as “unregenerate and obstinate” as they come.18 In a press interview on turning seventy-five in 2006, Boris Yeltsin attributed “my emotionalism and explosive character” to Starygin: “This was inborn. It was handed on to me from my grandfather [Starygin]. My grandmother was afraid to cross him.”19
Between father and son, Nikolai and Boris, bullheadedness on both sides and a rivalry for Klavdiya’s affection, aggravated by Nikolai’s absences, by his binge drinking, and by the wide spacing of the children, made for a fraught relationship. In his first memoir volume, Yeltsin tells of Nikolai strapping him with a leather belt and of the arguments this kicked up between his parents. He would endure it mutely—and his father for his part would also say nothing—until his mother, “my constant protector,” came to the rescue and shooed Nikolai away.20 In one theory about the beatings, Yeltsin’s submission is said to point to masochism in his makeup.21 It is a cockamamie theory: Russian peasant boys took corporal punishment without a murmur; girls could cry, but not boys. Yeltsin took no joy in it and finally pushed back. At fourteen or fifteen, he demanded that Nikolai refrain from pummeling him and leave him in charge of his own character formation. “We are not in the time of the tsars,” Klavdiya remembered him saying to his father, “when it was all right to thrash people with birch rods.” It was then that Nikolai stopped the beatings.22 There is no way to know how often these whippings were administered or at what age they began. Boris Yeltsin’s account says his father brought him into the bedroom, closed the door, and laid him on the bed as he pulled out the strap. This would have had to be in the family house, built in 1944, since in the barracks they had only one room. One might infer from this that the punishment did not begin until the boy was around the age of puberty and did not last more than a year or two.
While the nurturing Klavdiya Vasil’evna took his side against her husband, she should not be turned into a cardboard saint. A boyhood friend, Vladimir Zhdanov, told a reporter in 2001 that Auntie Klava, as the local children called her, had teeth beneath the smile and did not coddle her son: “She was very strong-willed and strict. . . . [He] could not disobey her on anything. If she said, ‘Do your lessons,’ he sat right down and did them.”23 The mature Boris was to take a similar stance toward non–family members subordinate to him.
Nor did everything with Nikolai Ignat’evich have a sharp edge. There was an imaginative side to him, which Boris admired. Here is how he puts it in Confession:
My father was always trying to invent something. One of his dreams was to come up with an automated machine that would lay bricks. He would sketch it out, do drawings, think it over, make calculations, and then produce another set of drawings. It was a kind of phantom for him. Alas, no one has ever invented such a gizmo, although even now whole research institutes rack their brains over it. He would describe to me what his machine would be like and how it would work: how it would mix the mortar, put down the bricks, clean off the excess, and move along. He had worked it all out in his head and had drawn the general plan for it, but never realized the idea in metal.24
Nikolai bequeathed to his son this restlessness, his work ethic, a knowledge of carpentry, and the art of the folk percussion instrument, the wood spoons (lozhki), played by slapping one spoon against another and against the bended knee. He also handed the boy a love of the banya, the wet steambath that alternates sweating with cooling in fresh water or a pool and cleanses the skin, relaxes the mind, and, as Russians see it, strengthens the organism and prepares the bather for life’s trials. The bath is often taken in single-sex groups and in the culture can be conducive to male bonding, as it was at various times for Boris Yeltsin.
Yeltsin’s exegesis of the years in Berezniki is the most novelistic section of his memoirs, yet it skimps on details and is not always reliable. Two years, 1937 to 1939, were inactive, a respite from education, at home with his mother and baby brother, after the kindergarten in Kazan.25 Six years, 1939 to 1945, were passed at Railway School No. 95, an elementary school operated by the transport ministry (Yeltsin does not name the school), and four, 1945 through 1949, at the municipal Secondary School No. 1, or the Pushkin School (this one he does name), which offered ten years of instruction. The company Boris kept was almost exclusively male. Many of his friends in the first school were the sons of army officers stationed at a military college moved to safety in Berezniki from Leningrad.26 The Pushkin School, under Soviet policy, was converted to an all-boys school in 1946, his second year there.27 Above him, though, at school as at home—and more widely in a society where tens of millions of able-bodied men were in military service or had given their lives in it—those in authority were often female. Of 26 to 27 million Soviet deaths in the war, about 20 million were male. In 1946 women in their twenties outnumbered men by about 50 percent. Two million soldiers from the Urals served in the war and more than 600,000 died.28
Yeltsin as memoirist vouched for the importance to him of the formative phase of his life—of “childhood, out of which come all the models that the person assimilates firmly and forever.”29 It is at this labile time that we find him evincing what I think of as his personal scripts, characteristic bunches of attitudes and behaviors that recur in his adult life.30 He acted out five of them, turning on survival, duty, success, testing of his powers, and rebellion.
Grinding poverty, acquaintance with oppression, and a punitory father all dictated that Boris Yeltsin take care of brute survival and the basics of life. From the outbreak of war with Germany in 1941 until 1947, Berezniki schools had no central heating, only stoves fed with firewood, and the inkwells froze in the winter months. Like the other pupils, Yeltsin frequently wrote his lessons on scissored-up paper wrappings. The family “made ends meet as best they could,” his friend Zhdanov remembers.31 The phasing out of food rationing in the mid-1930s went with a slight improvement in supply in Berezniki, although to levels below the experience of most Westerners.32 Rationing was reimposed during the war. His mother would say much later:
Hunger returned to us in the first winter of the war [1941–42]. Borya would come home from school, sit in the corner of the room, and begin to moan inconsolably, “I’m h-u-n-g-r-y, I c-a-n-’-t take it.” At moments like this, my heart would bleed because I had nothing to feed him with, not even a stale crust. All foodstuffs were being distributed through ration cards, and they were calculated at a minimal level. The daily norm for bread, practically the only thing they gave out, was 800 grams [about two pounds] for [manual] workers and 400 grams for their dependents. On the black market, they asked one-quarter of a month’s pay for a baguette. From time to time, I had to send the children to the restaurant in our neighborhood so they would be fed out of kindness. . . . The children and I had to swallow no small amount of pride because of this.33
One can see how every drop of Polya’s warm milk was precious to the Yeltsins. Boris and his mother mowed hay in the summers, sold their half of the harvest to whoever wanted it, and bought bread with the proceeds. The year he was twelve, he herded sheep on a local farm. He carried pails of water, cooked, and darned his own socks and underwear. “My childhood went by rather chee
rlessly,” he says in summary. “There weren’t delights or delicacies, nothing like that. We just wanted to survive, survive, and survive.”34
The second, closely related script the boy lived by revolved around duties. In the family setting, he was a devoted son, especially in relation to his mother. A half-century after the fact, Klavdiya Yeltsina was to tell a journalist about the thirteen-year-old Boris—not Nikolai—coming to see her in the maternity ward after she gave birth to Valentina, bringing her tasty meals and embroidering a rug with a goldfish theme for her homecoming. When they planted their family garden with potatoes, “My older son would go to hill it and hoe it, without ever having to be reminded.”35 Yeltsin also provided protection to his mother in the home. As he and his mother withheld from the published accounts, Nikolai, who beat Boris, also struck Klavdiya Yeltsina. When his mother was the victim, it was Boris’s turn to stand guard over her. He precociously took moral responsibility for a parent, following a pattern detectable in the younger years of many leading individuals.36
In wider context, Soviet society swaddled its members, young and old, and taught them to put collective over individual needs. Not to do so was to woo disaster. Boris Yeltsin cites his father as his role model in dutifulness. Fragmentary remarks and body language implied that Nikolai Yeltsin had no use for those who had inflicted such pain on him and his. As Boris pictured it in an interview, choosing his words with care:
He never was close to the communists and he never was a communist. This mirrored his conviction that communism was not the line Russia should take. . . . In general, it was not customary in our family to have conversations . . . about the Soviet regime, about the communists. But we did talk in a restrained way, in a very restrained way. In this connection, my father was more guided by principle [than my mother] and had a greater influence on me. He had his opinion, his point of view, and he defended it. And he taught me about being principled, for sure. He taught me a lot.37
For the father, then, being “principled” meant, on the one hand, never praising those who had done you wrong. On the other hand, it meant bearing one’s cross stoically, a moral he had set aside in Kazan. And it meant abiding by the established rules and giving society and the Soviet behemoth their due. Nikolai Yeltsin did not wear a soldier’s uniform in the war; he most likely was needed more in Berezniki. His brother, Boris’s uncle Andrian, did serve and was killed at the front; brother Dmitrii was invalided home to Berezniki with an amputated leg and died of complications in the 1950s. Hard feelings from some of these events lingered for decades. Andrian’s son (Boris Andrianovich Yeltsin), who has spent all his life in Berezniki, said to a journalist shortly before Boris Nikolayevich’s death that Nikolai “used tricks to get out of going to the front, at the same time as my father died in battle.” Because they were ashamed, he claimed, Nikolai and his family turned their back on Andrian’s widow and son afterward.38 Despite the strikes against him politically, Nikolai, the inventor manqué, did not back down in work-related disagreements. In the early 1940s, he paid from his own wages for specialists to take the train from Moscow to check a factory design he said was unsound; the outsiders bore him out. “He held his ground. . . . He risked his neck, even though, in the case of success, he had nothing to gain.”39 At the construction site, he was a taskmaster, intolerant of the unproductive and the unpunctual, though never profane or screaming.40
Boris Yeltsin knew about the iniquities of communism, which might in principle have turned him away from the Soviet dictatorship in toto. Asked in retirement about whether this was so, he said point-blank that it was not:
In those early years, when I was in school, I was not yet conscious of [the system]. I hardly could have been. It may be that awareness was forming subconsciously [podspudno], but I did not formulate it for myself, or I did not formulate it with any clarity. I was not that conscious of the perniciousness of Soviet power or of the communist regime. . . . Propaganda and ideology were everywhere. They took a person down one and the same track. There was no chance for him to deviate to the left or the right.41
Far from bucking the system, the adolescent Yeltsin was an amenable cog in it. He enlisted in the red-scarved Young Pioneers, the official Soviet organization for building character in young children, in 1939 or 1940, and in the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, after his fourteenth birthday in 1945. He participated energetically in Pioneer and Komsomol assemblies and hobby circles, without taking a leadership position in either organization.42 When war broke out, he and his buddies “wanted to go to the front but, of course, we were not allowed.” So they played soldier games, making faux pistols, rifles, and cannon to act out their patriotic fantasies.43
About male child Yeltsin and the received wisdom, the most that can be said is that he was youthfully inquisitive and entertained half-formed representations of abuse. He purchased at a bookstore and borrowed from the Berezniki town library volumes out of the collected papers of Lenin—of whom there was (and is) a life-sized statue in the courtyard of the Pushkin School—so as to understand for himself the revolution of 1917. He had found the answers in the textbooks unsatisfying and was thrown by citations in Lenin of revolutionaries who were nonpersons under Stalin. He did not read the sterilized, Stalin-edited Short Course of party history: “I understood I would not find the answers there. I wanted to get an answer from Lenin.” He gave his notebooks to brother Mikhail when he left for college.44 Boris’s concern with Lenin fit with the general style of a Stalinist political education, which “was based on devotion not so much to ideas as to specific leaders who were identified with them.”45
It was at this point that a political demigod not in the Marxist-Leninist pantheon enthralled him. That was Peter I, or Peter the Great, the tsar who reigned from 1682 to 1725, built St. Petersburg (Leningrad in the Soviet period), and brought Russia into the community of European powers. Yeltsin read Aleksei Tolstoy’s historical novel Peter I, which was studied in all Soviet schools, and saw the film based on it, directed by Vladimir Petrov and starring Nikolai Simonov, which came out in two parts in 1937–38. Peter, Yeltsin said in 2002, for him wore a halo and was “one of my teachers by example” in school.46
Along with bare-bones survivalism and compliance with duty, Yeltsin was responding to a third script—for personal success through the development and assertion of self. In his memoirs, he writes of his prowess in the classroom: “I stood out among the other youngsters for my activism and vigor. From first grade to tenth . . . I was always elected class monitor [starosta]. I always did well at my studies and got 5s,” the highest mark on the five-point Russian scale.47 Vladimir Zhdanov, his fellow pupil in the railway school, concurs:
He had authority. We often turned to him for advice, and every year we elected him class monitor. He always studied hard and willingly. Every subject came easy to him. He would often be called to the blackboard, particularly when someone was not able to answer. His best subject was mathematics. Borya had a mathematical cast of mind. He was always the first to finish his quizzes and would then pass his exercise book around the class. He never minded if we copied the answers. . . . [He] was a good comrade to all.
That Yeltsin’s sharing of his problem sets was not only an unselfish but a corrupt act, and one against the norms of any Soviet school, seems not to have occurred to Zhdanov. Cheaters in the class would have had a leg up on the others and would have owed Yeltsin a favor. Did Yeltsin call in his debts? Zhdanov does not say. Instead, he goes on to recollect that Yeltsin was an effective if not an artful communicator: “He spoke in a vivid Urals accent. Dragging out his syllables, he expressed himself in the way of simple people. In his gesticulations and manner of contact, it was the same.”48
The awakening to his own talents, coalescing with awareness that others benefited from the stratified Soviet order more than he and his parents, spurred a desire in Yeltsin to gain standing in the system. Klavdiya Yeltsina gave Andrei Goryun the telling vignette of her son learning in the war years, befo
re he was old enough to shave, that the store where they exchanged their ration coupons for food had a closed subdivision for “the upper echelons” in the town. Borya found his way in and gawked at the white bread, cheese, and American canned spam on the shelves. “This was when I heard him say, ‘Mama, no matter what, I’m going to be a boss.’ Yes, yes, ‘boss’ [nachal’nik], I remember it well.”49 In another version, Boris tells Klavdiya he wants to become an engineer when he grows up.50
The rub was that Railway School No. 95 was an unsatisfactory springboard for any youth’s career. Built of logs near the Berezniki train station, it was founded in 1906 to bestow literacy on the sons and daughters of railroad workers; after 1917 its clientele widened to the children of all blue-collar workers, but the mission stayed the same. It became a seven-year school only in 1932. Most graduates went either into a trade school or into manual labor for the railroad or the saltworks. It says a lot about the Yeltsins’ tenuous status that in 1939, two years out of kindergarten, Boris was assigned to School No. 95, on Vainer Street, a twenty-minute walk from their barracks, and not to School No. 1, which was on Shkol’naya Street five minutes away.