A slug of the energy Yeltsin felt was injected into his studies, in which he got almost all 4s and 5s, the honors grades. He was known for a fire-and-ice pattern of work, cramming for exams and handing in assignments in the nick of time. “He studied in quite a strange way—by snatches, convulsively, whatever you want to call it. For the days when the most intense exercises or examinations were scheduled, he would manage to master a mound of information. Then he would take a long break, which did not appeal in the slightest to his teachers.”21 It foreshadowed his style as president of Russia four decades later.
The frolicking and jousting with classroom instructors that were so frequent in Berezniki tailed off. Yeltsin’s tiff with a lecturer in political economy, a dour communist by the name of Savel’ëva (the students nicknamed her Sova, the Owl), was trivial by comparison. He was turned off more by her unbending pedagogy than by the conservatism of her lectures. His grade of 3 in the course barred him from graduating with distinction, and he waived the chance to retake the exam and try for a higher grade.22 Yeltsin cut classes in favor of athletic and other interests, but his friend, group monitor Yurii Poluzadov, who filled out attendance sheets with the dean’s office, covered for him. Poluzadov and Yeltsin both had their stipends docked one September for late filing of their reports on summer activities.23 Yeltsin allows in Confession on an Assigned Theme that some of his teachers were hard on him out of disapproval of the time he put into athletics. The example he gives is not Savel’ëva but Stanislav Rogitskii, the head of the department of construction mechanics. In a course on elasticity, Rogitskii once gave him a snap quiz, saying that a great athlete like him would need no preparation, and did not let him use the formulas recorded in his notebook. Yeltsin was not up to the exercise, and the two “fought for a long time.” One day, though, Yeltsin found the solution to a mathematical problem set by the professor, which, he said, had baffled students for ten years. Rogitskii worked up “a true affection” for Yeltsin—repaid in Yeltsin’s memoirs—but still gave him a grade of 4, not the 5 Yeltsin expected. As with Savel’ëva, Yeltsin refused an offer to retake the final exam.24
Yeltsin shunned all political topics and involvements at Urals Polytechnic and did not talk about the regime’s maltreatment of his family. His attitude makes for a ringing contrast with his rival-to-be, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev, a Komsomol organizer in his village school, served as a Komsomol secretary in the Moscow State University law division and took out full membership in the governing party in 1952, in his second year of study. Yeltsin gave wide berth to the UPI committee of the Komsomol, in which participation was necessary for anyone intending to work in the guilds of the Communist Party apparatus and the Soviet security services. Committee documents cite his name but two or three times, in connection with his favorite extracurricular activity: sports, and specifically volleyball.25
Games sublimated Yeltsin’s need to prove himself, at an age when boyish capers were no longer appropriate. At the Pushkin School in Berezniki, he had conditioned muscles and nerves to compensate for the gash in his left hand and to get firmer control of the all-white leather sphere. His love for volleyball was quasi political: “I liked the way the ball obeyed me, the way I could pounce on it and return the most awesome of volleys.”26 That he was tall and strong helped. He also liked volleyball’s cooperative dimension. In the other games he tried out (cross-country skiing, decathlon, gymnastics, boxing, and wrestling), the competitors were individuals; only this was a team endeavor, with six per side and a need for synchronization on the compact playing surface. Versatility and waiting one’s turn were required, since volleyball players rotate through the positions. Yeltsin’s favorite move was the downward “spike” of the ball over the net after it had been set on a high flight. Impatient with waiting, he had the squad work out maneuvers that let him spike from the back court as well as the normal location, the two hitter’s places in the front row.27 He made the divisional and institute-wide teams his freshman year, captaining both and coaching several other teams for extra income. He gleefully noted in his memoirs that he logged six hours at the gymnasium daily and, between that and homework, pared his sleeping time to four hours a night—a figure confirmed by contemporaries.
But the schedule took its toll. In 1952 overexertion made Yeltsin ill. It cost him a year in the program and “nearly put me in the grave” at the age of twenty-one. An untreated streptococcal infection of the throat grew into inflammation of his tonsils, joints, and coronary valves. It would have responded to penicillin; there is no mention of an antibiotic or any drug in Yeltsin’s writeup. By his account, he went to the hospital only when his temperature surged to 104 degrees and his pulse to 150 beats per minute. The physician prescribed four months in sick bay to allow his heart to recover. Still feverish, says Yeltsin, he skipped out several days later—lowering himself out the window on a cable of knotted bed sheets—and went to his parents’ house in Berezniki. Fellow students have recollected that Yeltsin had earlier sneaked out of his sickroom to play in a big game, then returned to the hospital before making his final escape. After shinnying down the sheets to leave for home, he was given a sendoff by teammates and friends. “Our room consoled him and promised to write him letters. And we kept our word. Each day one of the eight of us took a turn and wrote him.”28
When not reading his mail, Yeltsin soon started taking volleyball serves in the Berezniki gym:
My friends would put me down on a bench and I would lie there. I felt trapped: I might never break out of this situation, my heart would be permanently damaged, I would be washed up as a player. Nonetheless, I decided to fight and to go only forward. At first I took the court for a minute at a time, and after that two and then five, and within a month I was able to make it through a whole game. When I got back to Sverdlovsk, I went to the doctor. “Well, even though you gave us the slip,” she said, “it would appear that you have spent the entire time in bed, and now your heart is fine.” I have to admit I had taken a colossal risk, because my heart could have been ruined. But there was no point feeling self-pity. No, I was better off loading myself up and letting like cure like.29
While not every detail may be dead-on here, Yeltsin’s illness and furlough were real and were entered into his student file.30 The scene with the doctor testifies to openness to risk and neglect of his health, patterns that were to recur.
Sports brought out another talent in Yeltsin, according to his lifelong friend Yakov Ol’kov:
Captaincy of the [UPI] team was his first manifestation of leadership qualities. It was a small team, but a team. . . . He was a good organizer. He knew how to stir people up. As we would use the term today, he had charisma. . . . He was quite an impulsive organizer. He was able to draw people in and get results. . . . He knew how to make decisions on the run that would push the cause forward. And if a loss was threatened, then he would come up with something that would catch everybody on fire.31
As a side venture, Yeltsin organized his study group’s participation in the UPI relay race held every May. To get the students out of bed for calisthenics on spring mornings, he had a professor of geology, Nikolai Mazurov, go to the dormitory hall with his trumpet and blow reveille. Boris Furmanov, a freshman in the construction division in the spring of 1955 and later a Russian government minister, remembered Yeltsin jabbering before his class about past victories in the relay and about “the need to stick up for the division’s honor.” “Not just anyone, when you first hear and see him, manages to make a mark on ‘the multitude’ (there were one hundred of us), compel you to believe him, and then influence you in accord with his will.”32
As with the mischief-maker in Berezniki, the athlete and cheerleader at UPI attested to qualities Yeltsin would later apply to political causes. For now, the applications were exclusively apolitical, and those who knew him assumed his interests would keep it that way. As Ol’kov put it, “To say that he was going to be a political boss or someone like that would have seemed quite unreal to me. We
simply could not have foreseen it.”33
Yeltsin’s biggest self-reported adventure came to pass on summer vacation in 1953. It was a two-and-a-half-month hobo’s tour of the Volga and central Russia (taking him to Kazan for the first time since 1937), Belorussia, Ukraine, and Georgia. A UPI friend who had agreed to tag along bailed out after one day on the road. Yeltsin, in his telling, stowed away on trains, scrounged for meals, and played strip poker with ex-convicts. Several times policemen took him off the train and asked him where he was going. “I would say something along the lines of, I am on my way to Simferopol [in Crimea] to see my grandmother. They would ask me what street she lived on. I knew there was a Lenin Street in every Soviet city, so I would give that answer every time. And they would let me go.”34 Yeltsin’s poker mates, imprisoned for common criminal offenses, had been released from jails and camps in the amnesty after Stalin’s death. They were banned from Moscow, so he went on his own to see Red Square and the mausoleum holding Lenin’s body (and Stalin’s, which was to be removed in 1961 and buried in the ground behind the mausoleum) and the walls and towers of the Kremlin, which, because it was closed to nonofficials until 1955, he could not enter. Yeltsin writes that in Zaporozh’e, a steel town on the Dnieper River in Ukraine, he earned his keep by teaching a one-week course in mathematics to an army colonel who wanted to enter a local polytechnic—with twenty hours of drill a day. He got word at the next stop that his tutee had won a place in the institute.35
In the fall of 1954, Yeltsin had a mini-adventure on a trip with the UPI volleyballers. To procure some food for his famished teammates, he set down at the station in Lozovaya, near the big Ukrainian city of Kharkov. He did not make it back to the train on time, and his coach gave him up for lost and sent a telegram to that effect back to UPI. Their next stop was Tbilisi, Georgia. Two days after the team got there, Yeltsin rapped on the door of the coach’s hotel room, bushy-tailed but bearing two shopping bags laden with provisions. Fearing that his cargo would be pilfered, he had come from Lozovaya to Tbilisi, about 700 miles, on the roof of one of the passenger cars.36
Upon reading Yeltsin’s prose about the main conflictual episodes at UPI, one cannot but see the progression in his ego and attitude toward authority. When he gives short shrift to his studies and fences with Rogitskii, he engages in the mildest of rebellions, checked by his respect for the learned professor. A point of pride in the narration of his illness is when he pulls the wool over the physician’s eyes—he did not lie to her but did not act to correct her misconception, either—and so outfoxes authority rather than defy it. In the summer of 1953 he rides the rails with the ex-cons, only to turn the student’s role on its head and become a source of knowledge in the crash course with the Ukrainian officer twice his age: “The colonel had his doubts: Would we be able to do it? I told him there was no other way to get ready in one week. [He showed himself to be] a person of perseverance, with a character that kept the pace of the lessons I gave him.”37 To be able to give lessons and hold up in a competitive world, Yeltsin worked at learning self-restraint and mental toughness. “Boris Nikolayevich worked a lot, consciously, on his character. At first it seemed to contain a good deal of personal sensitivity, but he did much to counter this, saying he had to squeeze the flabbiness out of himself. If he felt sorry for someone, he would express it in reverse—he would say words of support yet, intentionally, in a harsh fashion.”38
Yeltsin’s diploma assignment had to be carried out in one month rather than the allotted five, since he had blown a semester on traveling with the volleyball team. “I still can’t figure out how I did it,” he burbles in Confession. “It was unreal how much of a mental and physical effort I had to make.” His project was an undistinguished design for an overhead bucket line to transfer waste materials out of a coal mine. In the memoir, he was to misrepresent it as a plan for a television tower, so avant-garde that assistance from faculty and students was out of the question and only Urals self-reliance would save the day. “Until then there were almost no [towers] around, and so I had to sort everything out myself. . . . No one . . . could help me with this new and unknown theme. I had to do the drawings myself, do the calculations myself, do everything from beginning to end myself.” 39 Whether this was a fib or an inadvertency,40 Yeltsin was attracted to futuristic undertakings and to the emerging medium of television, which was to play a big part in his political life. One of his pet projects as leader of the province’s party organization in the 1980s was to build a TV transmission tower at the midpoint of the Sverdlovsk skyline, not far from the city’s large circus building. Only the conical concrete column of the structure, and not the planned restaurant and metal spire, was up when work stopped around 1990. It is 725 feet high. The plan was for the tower to soar up to 1,300 feet, which would have made it the sixth or seventh tallest in the world.41
Graduates of Soviet universities and institutes were assigned to their first jobs by the educational bureaucracy and were free to seek other employment after two or three years. The year Yeltsin graduated was the last in which many young civil engineers, including UPI students, were ordered to projects in the Gulag, which was liquidated by 1956. He was fortunate not to have drawn such an assignment. Before getting into the work world, he spent ten weeks after graduation in June 1955 playing with UPI’s varsity volleyball team at tournaments in Tbilisi, Leningrad, and Riga, Latvia. He presented himself at the Lower Iset Construction Directorate in Sverdlovsk in September. The appointment augured well. Reacting against decades in which construction was a backwater of makeshift methods and unqualified, often convict, labor, the post-Stalin leadership was determined to give it a trained proletarian workforce, effective supervision, and the capital investment to press ahead with building factories and cities. The industry was to flourish under Khrushchev and Brezhnev.
His UPI pedigree gave Yeltsin the right to go straightaway to project foreman. Instead, he chose to work for a year as a trainee in the building trades with the men and women he would later oversee. Several analysts have reasoned that it was a financial decision, since junior-grade engineers in the Soviet Union were paid less than construction workers.42 They are mistaken: Yeltsin’s wage as an apprentice worker was lower than what he would have gotten starting as a foreman. The decisive motivation was self-sufficiency. Some of the book knowledge from UPI would have been a dim guide to “the real life of the workplace.” Worse would be dependence on other people’s judgment. “I was certain that it would be very rocky for me if any crew leader [brigadir] could consciously or unconsciously wrap me around his finger because his practical knowledge of the job outstripped mine.”43 Yeltsin waded through twelve hard-hat specialties—carpenter, plasterer, stonemason, painter, crane operator, and the like—and secured a rudimentary competence in each. He helped build factory workshops, apartments, and schools. The job sites were filthy and hazardous, and he did not shy away from danger in Sverdlovsk any more than he had as a youth in Berezniki. In Confession on an Assigned Theme, he tells of a fall from scaffolding, a locomotive just missing him as he sat in a stalled truck, and having to secure a runaway crane.
The Iset building trust took Yeltsin on as a foreman (master) in June 1956. From there, he climbed sure-footed up the organizational ladder, rung by rung: work superintendent (prorab) in June 1957, senior work superintendent (starshii prorab) in June 1958, head engineer (glavnyi inzhener) of SU-13 (Construction Directorate No. 13) in January 1960, and chief (nachal’nik) of the directorate in February 1962. The first project he completed, in time for the November 7 holiday in 1957, was a five-story apartment house on Griboyedov Street, which ran by Uralkhimmash, the Urals Chemical Machinery Works, on the southeastern extremity of Sverdlovsk. In 1957–58 he finished construction at a textile-mill project that had been incomplete for several years and had been ransacked by the workers. But he went back to residential construction. Housing was a political priority for Moscow, dictated by the need to gain favor with the populace.
Shelter for the
masses had gotten the short end of the stick under Stalin, whose preference was for office blocks and luxury apartments destined for elite groups. The war and the postwar military buildup had exacerbated the shortfall. Griboyedov Street was part of the first wave of the new consumerism in Soviet housing. The new self-contained flats in houses like this one, informally dubbed khrushchëby (a play on Khrushchev’s surname and trushchoba, an old Russian word for “slum”), were built to standardized designs. Minimalist as they were, they were a real step up from barracks and communal apartments and gave families spaces in which to store and improve possessions, and a kitchen where they could talk, laugh, and grieve in privacy. Five stories was the maximum that could be completed in one building season, and, under the regulations, could be commissioned with neither an elevator nor garbage chute. By the early 1960s a second wave of innovation was toward korobki, or “boxes,” much taller structures out of prefabricated reinforced-concrete slabs, generally on bulldozer-cleared outer areas of the cities. There was one production cycle for the lookalike product, from mixing the cement to fitting the doorknobs and the kitchen sink.44
In June 1963 Yeltsin was reassigned to the Sverdlovsk House-Building Combine, the high-profile enterprise for housing construction in the city, as head engineer. In December 1965 he was elevated to director of the combine. “He knew,” Naina Yeltsina remembers, “that it was time to move on when the [post] he was in had started to bore him. So when he was chief of the construction directorate, for example, he found it was getting repetitive, he had done everything he could, and he wanted more challenging work.”45 The need was satisfied temporarily, as Yeltsin now held Sverdlovsk’s most salient administrative post associated with popular welfare. “Being ‘first’ was probably always in my nature,” he was to observe in Notes of a President, “although I perhaps did not realize it in the early years.”46 Ten years after leaving the polytechnic, now that he was in his mid-thirties, he and everyone around him realized it.
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