School No. 1, where Yeltsin moved in 1945, was better known by the second name, Pushkin School, appended to it in 1937 in observance of the centenary of the death of the national poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Built by the potash combine in 1931–32 as a “model” (obraztsovaya) school for Churtan village, it was donated to the city when Berezniki was established. This was the school for the city’s best and brightest youngsters, and admittance was by examination. Its physical plant, in brick and with indoor plumbing and a gymnasium, outclassed the railway school’s. The teachers exacted more at Pushkin, it had a student orchestra and after-school activities, and it had an evening branch and a boarding unit for village children. Doing well was promoted by staff and at meetings between students and parents, where World War II veterans “spoke about the usefulness of being educated.” 51 Punning on the name, the Pushkin School boys were spoken of as pushkari—“gunners” or, as we might say, hotshots. Girls from Berezniki’s two ten-year institutions for females, the Gorky and Ostrovsky Schools, “counted it pure happiness to stroll with the gunners along the local Broadway,” the well-lit stretch of Stalin Prospect near the Berëzka café.52 Pushkin graduates could qualify for a post-secondary education and entry into white-collar employment. First they needed the diploma, and that was no sure thing. In 1948–49, Yeltsin’s final year, there were 660 boys in first through fourth grades, 214 in fifth through seventh grades, seventy-two in eighth and ninth, and a mere nineteen left in tenth grade. Five of the twenty-six pupils in his ninth-year class were not promoted to tenth grade, and two of the remaining twenty-one did not enroll in September 1948.53
In this bracing environment, Boris Yeltsin thrived. Antonina Khonina, the young literature instructor who was his homeroom teacher in eighth through tenth grades, was a demanding educator who “treated all of us like adults” and would hear of no alibis for uncompleted assignments. She took a shine to Yeltsin, and he was one of her stars.54 In ninth grade, he split seven 5s with seven 4s. In tenth, he improved to eight 5s and six 4s: 5s in the three math subjects (algebra, geometry, and trigonometry) and in biology, “The Constitution of the USSR,” geography, astronomy, and German language; 4s in Russian language, literature, Soviet history, world history, physics, and chemistry.55
In the railway school, Yeltsin had been gangly and often sick, with nagging throat and ear problems for which his mother wound his neck in a coarse bandage. As an upperclassman at the Pushkin School, he was broadshouldered, hale, and the tallest in class by a head. He was long-waisted, to boot, possessing a torso that accentuated his height when seated. To some of the younger Pushkin boys, he was a ruffian. One who started first grade in 1948 remembers Yeltsin uncivilly barring him from the second-floor lavatory, which was unofficially reserved for the big boys.56 Boris had grown interested in sports and especially in volleyball, a game in which Soviet athletes excelled. He was captain of the school squad, which played against students and adults. He and a cluster of friends bought their own volleyball and net and practiced serves and rallies in the schoolyard after hours. On the court, he was forward-leaning (napadayushchii), always scouting for opportunities to attack.57 The team were city champions in 1948 and were all presented with wristwatches as prizes. “For postwar boys this was the same as if pupils today were given automobiles.”58 Yeltsin in future, perhaps inspired by this generosity, was to make it a practice of giving wristwatches away.
Yeltsin’s influence with the others had only increased since the early grades. Khonina has left an affectionate cameo stressing this point:
Boris Yeltsin [was] a tall, dignified, and studious youth. His gaze was direct, attentive, and intelligent. He was a good athlete. He never violated any of the rules of school life. Boris did not tolerate lies and made his arguments animatedly and persuasively. He read a lot and loved poetry. When he answered [in class], he would furl an eyebrow and look out at you. He spoke with conviction, making his point without empty words. You could sense a brusque character, a torrid temperament. He was sincere and big-hearted toward his comrades.59
Khonina was not the only member of the faculty to hold him in warm regard. In April 1948 Yeltsin was one of but two pupils, out of a total of more than nine hundred, to be selected by headmaster Mikhail Zalesov to sit on the teachers’ committee organizing the assembly for the May Day holiday. Classmates Robert Zaidel and Viktor Nikolin, the other boy named to the May Day committee, qualified for the school’s gold medal in 1949, with straight 5s in tenth grade. Yeltsin was a tier down, in a cohort that was mobile into social strata closed to the older generation. The adult occupations of thirteen members of the Pushkin class of 1949 are known. Among them were seven engineers—one of them Yeltsin—a physicist (Zaidel), a professor of engineering (Nikolin), an architect, an agronomist, an army officer, and a dentist.60
Yeltsin was rambunctious as well as proficient and a striver. In his brief reminiscences with me about Berezniki, fifty-odd years afterward, he said it was into his relations with the educational system that such discomfort as he had with Soviet reality spilled over:
I did have a certain alienation from the school system. I waged war, if you like. Throughout my time as a pupil, I warred with my teachers—with their dictates, with their pedantry, with the absence of any freedom of choice. I might like [Anton] Chekhov, but they would force me to read [Leo] Tolstoy. I read Tolstoy also, yet still I liked Chekhov more. . . . You may say that, to the extent I opposed the system of instruction, I did it as a sign of protest against something.
The concise stories and plays of Chekhov (1860–1904), with their epiphanies and their argumentative and misunderstood characters, struck much more of a chord with Yeltsin than the voluminous, fatalistic novels of Leo Tolstoy. Chekhov was to be his favorite author: “In one short story he could describe an entire life. He had no need of the tomes that Leo Tolstoy wrote.”61 In 1993, as president of Russia, he spoke with literary critic Marietta Chudakova and her husband, Aleksandr Chudakov, who is a Chekhov scholar. Yeltsin led off with his thoughts on a Chekhov short story that neither of the Chudakovs was familiar with. When they got home, they found it in Chekhov’s collected works.62
In Confession on an Assigned Theme—a title suggestive of a student or employee who departs from the appointed ways and owns up to it—Yeltsin waxed more eloquent about being the ringleader (zavodila) behind group hijinks than about being the class monitor or an exemplary pupil. The text chronicles no fewer than eight pranks and acts of derring-do:
1. At age eleven, in third or fourth grade, he crawled under a fence and purloined two live RGD-33 hand grenades from an arms depot in a derelict church (the John the Baptist temple, it turns out), “to learn what was inside them.”
2. As a fifth grader, he goaded his class to jump out a second-floor window and hide in an outbuilding in the schoolyard.
3. Around that time, motivated by the anti-German emotions rampant during the war, he hammered phonograph needles bottom-up through the seat of a German-language teacher’s desk chair, exposing her to the sharp points.
4. In the springtime, he participated in races over slithery logs on the runoff-swollen Zyryanka River.
5. He led mêlées with fists and clubs and up to a hundred combatants.
6. In 1945 or 1946 (the timing is unclear), he raked his elementary-school homeroom teacher over the coals, before a packed auditorium at graduation from School No. 95, for tormenting the class.
7. In 1948, after ninth grade in the Pushkin School, he went AWOL for weeks in the forest with chums.
8. In 1949 he contested the school’s ruling that he repeat tenth grade after missing time recuperating from his backpack hike.63
And there unquestionably were others, as Yeltsin said to me in an interview. Sergei Molchanov has recounted how the two of them lit a sooty wood fire in a home steambath in their neighborhood; Sergei left for dinner, and Boris blacked out from inhaling the fumes.64
Three of the bravado incidents described by Yeltsin resulted in injury or
illness: the thumb and index finger (and tip of the middle finger) of his left hand blown off by a grenade fuse (he hit it with a hammer while his partners in crime looked on from a safe distance), and surgery to stop the spread of gangrene; a broken, crooked nose from a fight; and three months in the hospital to cure typhoid fever from drinking impure water on the hike. In retrospect, many were death-defying feats. After all, the hand grenade could just as well have sprayed its hunks of steel into his skull as into his left hand. In a medical system with no antibiotics, one in five typhus patients dies, and unchecked gangrene can also be fatal. The scramble across the logs could have drowned the frisky boys. In the nose-breaking fight, he was whacked by a cart axle and thought he was done for—“But I came to, pulled myself together, and was carried home.”65 Molchanov saw smoke engulfing the steambath, ran back, and pulled Yeltsin unconscious into the open air—saving his friend’s life, he says. In Yeltsin’s account, four actions incurred disciplinary penalties at school: grades of 2 out of 5 on the day for going out the window; a reprimand for the phonograph needles; suspension of his elementary-school diploma for the graduation philippic; and the refusal to register him for tenth grade following his recovery from the typhoid infection.
These events follow a two-pronged logic. The river race and the trio ending in bodily harm (and the steambath fire as a marginal case) bespeak what we can term a testing script. Here Yeltsin willingly underwent the risks for no reason other than the thrill of it and to demonstrate his mettle—urges for which pubescent hormones were surely responsible in part. In the tests detailed in Confession, the adversary is nature or his compeers and he narrowly deflects crippling wounds or death. In the literally most stomach-churning test, Boris and schoolmates set out up the western foothills of the Urals, in scorching heat, to find the headwaters of the Yaiva River, a feeder of the Kama; they carried neither an accurate map nor provisions enough to last the trip. The sulphurous spring at the river’s source found, the lads traded their gear for a dinghy, roughed it and straggled aimlessly for a week, and floated in delirium downriver toward Berezniki. Yeltsin docked the boat beneath a railroad trestle before passing out. That and other footloose moments were more unsettling to his mother than to his father, maybe because Nikolai Yeltsin was so frequently away and she dreaded being left alone. As a friend of Klavdiya’s later years noted, since Nikolai was often gone, and since Boris was his mother’s defender upon Nikolai’s return, “A heavy burden was laid on Boris. He helped his mother out at this time but was always trying to get away, run off, vanish, cavort, even in his youngest years. . . . She would say [to me], ‘Why did he do such things, to get some kind of revenge?’ She was always asking this question.”66
The remaining stunts were juvenile protests against authority figures, with hormones as impetus and maybe politics as subtext. In this rebellion script, the lines are tidily drawn and have the schoolboy clashing with callous pedagogues and educational bureaucrats. The most glaring case of hooliganism, as drawn by Yeltsin, is the speech at his graduation from elementary school. He asked for the floor, spoke courteous words about several of his teachers, and then surprised the audience by lighting into his homeroom teacher as “not fit to be a teacher and a rearer of children.” “I went at her hammer and tongs,” giving examples of her insensitivity such as the requirement that boys and girls gather food scraps for her pet pig. “Fury, uproar—the whole event was sullied. The next day the teachers’ council sent for my father and told him my diploma was being canceled.”67 In Yeltsin’s retelling, the enemy mostly crumpled under the force of his salvos. The 2 grades were annulled; his diploma was reinstated and the obnoxious homeroom teacher retired; and he took his tenth-grade finals at the Pushkin School after completing four semesters of course work in two on home study (his pals were not given this privilege). Only the teacher of German, perforated though not seriously injured, did not cave. The crises roped in his father, not his mother, as enforcer of decorum; it was during the graduation ruckus, when Boris would have been fifteen (if his memoir account is correct), that Nikolai last tried to beat his son with a strap. And they gave Yeltsin his first contact with political actors. To resolve the dispute over his diploma, he did an end run around his new headmaster, Vasilii Zanin, to the municipal school directorate and then to the arbiter of all things in Berezniki, the Communist Party apparatus: “That was when I first came to know what the gorkom [city committee] of the party was.”68
The tales of puckishness and delinquency from Confession are required reading for anyone seeking to comprehend Yeltsin’s life, but he was not above embellishing them. The Zyryanka, dammed to form First Pond, is about the width of a city street downstream (where it is five minutes down the hill from John the Baptist church). Even in the annual snow melt, it is not the raging torrent Yeltsin depicts—which is not to rule out jousting on the logs. Vladimir Zhdanov has no remembrance of the fifth graders going out the window; the railway school, he points out, was all on one floor, and it would have been easier to play hooky than to follow a showoff outside. Some of Yeltsin’s defiance of his teachers may have been more impish than impudent. When Zhdanov was asked by the reporter if teachers had tonguelashed Yeltsin for passing his problem sets around, he replied, “They are only finding out about it now.”69 For some events, memoirist Yeltsin mistakes the fine points yet not the main meaning. The jump out the window seems indeed to have occurred, but at the Pushkin School, which has two stories and where Yeltsin’s homeroom (which I saw in 2005) was on the second floor.70 While the mean trick on his elementary school German teacher is uncorroborated, again there appears to have been such an incident with a chair at the Pushkin School. A boxer’s nose and a maimed hand, about which he was always self-conscious, were fleshly mementos of his adventures. Conversations in 2005 with clergy and parishioners at the reopened Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist substantiated that it was used as a furniture factory and munitions warehouse during the war, and that a daredevil could have slipped in and made off with small projectiles. None doubted that Yeltsin had done so. For the wilderness trek and the infection in 1948, we have verification by a fellow pupil.71
The episode that remains mysterious is the one to which Yeltsin gives the most import: the stand against his oafish teacher at School No. 95 and the struggle for exculpation that followed. Yeltsin’s own account does not quite add up. He writes that after the fracas he “decided not to return” to the school and to enroll at Pushkin, the place that was to open doors for him. But School No. 95 offered seven years of classes only, and so he would have had no choice but to move on to a secondary school had he finished the seventh grade there; the one secondary school in Berezniki that accepted boys was School No. 1, the Pushkin School. Muddying the waters is a prosaic detail: Pushkin School records, and the commemorative plaque outside, show Boris Yeltsin to have transferred there in 1945—in the second half of or at the end of sixth grade or in the first half of seventh grade—and not, as he says, after seventh grade, which would have been in mid-1946.72 The acting up with his teacher, if it happened, could not have been at his graduation, since he never passed out of School No. 95.73 But something got Yeltsin in hot water there. His mother told relatives later that he left his first school because of a disagreement with a female teacher. It was unheard-of for a pupil to quit a Soviet elementary school without completing the sequence of instruction in it. Teachers at the Pushkin School believed that the decision was mutual, that friction over behavior such as the theft of the grenades had coiled to a level where young Boris was happy to go and the exasperated staff of School No. 95 was relieved to see the last of him.74
A bloodline in the free and religious peasantry, a proud and individualistic family, the confiscation of hard-earned property, the arbitrary arrest and loss of loved ones, a closet anti-communist of a father—any one ingredient would have shortened the odds that Yeltsin would eventually strike out on another road. He was not unique in any one of these respects, and not in the millstone of hardship
he carried. Other Soviet leaders had poverty and politically driven private tragedies in their blood. For Yeltsin, it is not the particulars but the gestalt that commands our attention.
Already his life’s plotline diverged from that of his future ally and antagonist, Mikhail Gorbachev. Although the Gorbachevs of Privol’noye, Stavropol province, had their share of tears, the family had been dirt poor and supported the collectivization drive that was at its climax when Gorbachev and Yeltsin were born in 1931. Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather, Pantelei Gopkalo, was a communist, the organizer of a peasant cooperative in the 1920s, and the first chairman of the local kolkhoz; his father, Sergei, to whom he was close, joined the party at the front during World War II.75 While still in Privol’noye, in 1948, young Gorbachev was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, one of the USSR’s highest laurels, for his norm-busting work at bringing in the harvest (Sergei, a tractor driver, won the Order of Lenin), and won a medal in school for a hagiographic essay about Stalin.76 Yeltsin, the son and grandson of kulaks, would be torn from the village by collectivization, grew up in a city, had a twinge of doubt about Stalin, had strained relations with his father, and would wait until 1971 to win his first Order of the Red Banner. In 1950, still a teenager and about to leave Privol’noye for university in Moscow, Gorbachev applied for the Communist Party and was made a probationary member; he was promoted to full membership in 1952, with Stalin still in the Kremlin.77 Yeltsin was to take out probationary membership ten years after Gorbachev and full membership nine years after him.
To deal with the demands of his provincial youth, Boris Yeltsin developed a repertoire of life scripts. They were not mere coming-of-age stereotypes but were to be of ongoing relevance in later life. The scripts implied various relationships with the social environment. Survival was for the lonely individual, and the few others he trusted, to achieve, leaving nothing to chance and saying not a word more about it than needed to be said. Duty was about conforming to conditions and meeting the standards of family, equals, and superiors. Success was earned in contestation with others, not primarily through the pursuit of security at all costs or through cooperation. Testing was also a comparative exercise, though more about the capability of acting than the doing. And rebellion, in the confines of the Soviet system, required a break with convention and with lines of subordination. Artistry in one role did not negate the next. The boy with the mathematical cast of mind also had a Tom Sawyer–like taste for adventure. Yeltsin could give teacher Khonina the sense that he “never violated” the rules, and get faculty approval as class monitor year after year, while showing her a “fiery temperament” and coming on to the other young people as someone who could contravene the rules to his and sometimes their benefit. As his friend Sergei Molchanov put it, “He stood out, without a doubt. He . . . was someone who made things a little dangerous.”78 As both propagator of and occasional scoffer at the constituted ways, he was more than a face in the crowd. One comparative study of modern rulers finds that as youths 61 percent of them tended to conform to authority and 16 percent were nonconformists. Yeltsin in a sense was these two things together.79
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