Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  31 References to Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 18–19, 20, 26, 144.

  32 Andrei Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin: svet i teni (Boris Yeltsin: light and shadows), 2 vols. (Sverdlovsk: Klip, 1991), 1:5–6.

  33 See John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991), 32–33; Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 116–18; Timothy J. Colton, “Boris Yeltsin: Russia’s All-Thumbs Democrat,” in Colton and Robert C. Tucker, eds., Patterns in Post-Soviet Leadership (Boulder: Westview, 1995), 50–51, 71; Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 49–51; and Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), chap. 1, which has rather more up-to-date information than the others about Nikolai Yeltsin. Mikheyev mistakenly refers (51) to Yeltsin’s childhood as “difficult but devoid of atrocities and destruction.”

  34 For background, see Golfo Alexopolous, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). In the cities, the disenfranchised were denied ration cards, which did not apply in the countryside.

  35 A. I. Bedel’ and T. I. Slavko, eds., Sud’ba raskulachennykh spetspereselentsev na Urale, 1930–1936 gg. (The fate of the dekulakized special migrants in the Urals, 1930–36) (Yekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1994), 14.

  36 Gomzikova interview. Serafima Gomzikova, who was a young girl in 1930, recalled the scene. Her parents’ house was confiscated and local communists demanded that her father divorce her mother, Mariya (Ignatii’s only daughter), which he refused to do. If Anna Yeltsina’s name has been left out of previous accounts, the very existence of Mariya, who died in the 1950s, has not registered. Serafima is her surviving daughter.

  37 Statistics in Viktor Danilov et al., eds., Tragediya sovetskoi derevni: kollektivizatsiya i raskulachivaniye; dokumenty i materialy, 1927–1939 (The tragedy of the Soviet village: collectivization and dekulakization; documents and materials, 1927–39), 5 vols. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), 2:745; and Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 73. The peak number, about 484,000, was reached in early 1932; by a year from then, it was down to 366,000, mostly because of deaths (33,000) and flight (97,000). For perspective, see James R. Harris, “The Growth of the Gulag: Forced Labor in the Urals Region, 1929–31,” Russian Review 56 (April 1997), 265–80; Judith Pallot, “Russia’s Penal Peripheries: Space, Place, and Penalty in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (March 2005), 98–112; and Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). As Viola shows, the regional administration was originally against central efforts to make the Urals the prime locale for deportees from all over the Soviet Union.

  38 The Basmanovo council’s report on the family to the police in Kazan, in connection with the case against Ignatii’s son Nikolai, said Yeltsin senior was “on the run” (v begakh). The report was sent in February 1934. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 29.

  39 The age limit is noted in Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 64.

  40 Family details taken from Yumasheva communication. The severity of the restrictions suggests some unusual police animus toward the Yeltsins. Second-category kulaks were supposed to get shipment of thirty poods (about a half-ton) of baggage per family member. Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 80.

  41 Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 340.

  42 Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 94–95.

  43 The town took its name when founded in the 1890s from Nadezhda (Hope) Polovtsova, the owner of the local iron mine and the wife of a personal aide to the tsar. From 1934 to 1937, it was called Kabakovsk, after Ivan Kabakov, the first secretary of the Communist Party committee of Sverdlovsk province—the job to be held by Boris Yeltsin from 1976 to 1985. When Kabakov was purged in 1937, Kabakovsk reverted to Nadezhdinsk. In 1939 it was named after Anatolii Serov, a Soviet aviator and hero of the Spanish Civil War.

  44 No one can be sure today, but the likely trigger for Ignatii’s blindness was a stroke. His son Nikolai, Boris’s father, was to die of stroke in the 1970s.

  45 Yumasheva communication. Taibbi, in his unpublished “Butka,” is the only analyst to have suggested that Yeltsin’s maternal grandfather was sent to the north. He tracked down no other details.

  46 Second Yeltsin interview. The only way to reach Serov, just 130 miles northeast of Berezniki as the crow flies, was a laborious U-shaped train route, taking two days of travel.

  47 About 70,000 banished peasants in the Urals were called up into the army during the war and qualified for release that way. Others were allowed to leave in dribs and drabs before the war. By January 1946 the number of peasant exiles in the Urals was down to 138,000 and by January 1954 it was less than 10,000. By that last date, though, the total number of banished people in all categories in the Soviet Union as a whole was still very high—2,720,000. Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 145–46.

  48 Details again from Yumasheva communication.

  49 Neverov, “Otets prezidenta.”

  50 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 18–19, describes Nikolai as present for his baptism. He could not possibly have remembered who attended, but it is a fair guess that Klavdiya would have let it be known if Nikolai had missed the event. A Spanish journalist heard from Yeltsin relations in 1991 that Nikolai around this time worked on the construction of the Butka-Talitsa road (Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 16), but the project went on from 1934 to 1936, so the timing seems off. It is possible that another one of the brothers worked on the road.

  51 Klavdiya Yeltsina told an American visitor in 1991 that the three of them did exactly that (she used the name Serov for their destination). Gwendolyn Elizabeth Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT: Democratization, Suverenizatsiia, and Boris Yeltsin in the Breakup of the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995), 78–79.

  52 Eventually known as the Gorbunov Works, the plant was over the years to make reconnaissance planes, Blackjack strategic bombers, and civil airliners. The nearby Kazan Helicopter Works built the Mi-8 helicopter that Boris Yeltsin flew as president of post-Soviet Russia.

  53 This was his claim in his 1950s autobiography: Neverov, “Otets prezidenta.”

  54 This is by later assertion of Klavdiya Yeltsina (Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:5). The trips ended, she said, when her brother-in-law Ivan left Butka for Berezniki, which was in 1935.

  55 Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 26. Litvin dug out Nikolai’s OGPU file from the Kazan archive of the KGB and gave it to Boris Yeltsin, who included excerpts in his second book of memoirs. The file also provided information on the dekulakization of Ignatii. English-language readers can find some details in Boris Yeltsin, The Struggle for Russia, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Times Books, 1994), 94–98, which translates Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 121–25.

  56 The secret police arrested 4,721 people in Tatariya in 1931 and shot 252 of them. None of the 887 arrested in 1934 was shot. In the last four months of 1937, some 4,750 individuals were arrested and 2,510 of them shot. Altogether, from 1929 through 1938 more than 20,000 were arrested in the republic and about 4,000 were executed. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 18, 47, 49–50.

  57 Ibid., 27.

  58 Ibid., 38.

  59 This is also the take of Boris Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Yumasheva, who perused the OGPU dossier in 1993. “He was not expressing insolent ideas,” she said of her grandfather. “He never spoke that way. He was simply trying to get them [his crewmen] to work, and they wanted to react for themselves.” Remarks by Yumasheva during second Yeltsin interview.

  60 Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 45.

  61 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 124.

  62 Rimma Akhmirova, “Prezidenta nyanchil tovarishch Sukhov” (Comrade Sukhov took care of the president), Komsomol’skaya pravda, September 4, 1999; and, for Klavdiya’s l
iteracy class, Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT,” 79.

  63 The only public reference Yeltsin ever made to kindergarten in Kazan was on his last visit there, in 2006. Vera Postnova, “Yel’tsin nazval Shaimiyeva samymsamym” (Yeltsin called Shaimiyev the best of the best), Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 26, 2006. But family members say he spoke of the kindergarten with them as well.

  64 Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 88.

  65 Ibid., 55.

  66 His autobiographical statement from the 1950s (in Neverov, “Otets prezidenta”) said that in 1936 or 1937 he was discharged from work “and left the third year of the tekhnikum by my own wish.” But the statement did not mention his arrest or time served in Gulag, so this information is of questionable value.

  67 Akhmirova, “Prezidenta nyanchil tovarishch Sukhov”; and Yevgenii Ukhov, “Imennaya ‘dvushka’” (An inscribed “two-roomer”), Trud, April 25, 2007.

  68 Historical sketch of the city at http://www.berezniki.ru/topic/gorod. The Gulag directorate allocated 4,000 convicts to the Berezniki camp in 1929. The writer Varlam Shalamov, one of the prisoners, said in his memoirs it had 10,000 workers in 1930. Vladimir Mikhailyuk, Ne odin pud soli: Berezniki v sud’be Rossii (Not one pood of salt: Berezniki in the fate of Russia) (Perm: Pushka, 1997), 238–40. The Vishera camp itself began as a branch of the detention camp at Solovki monastery, on an island in the White Sea, set up in 1921. It peaked at 37,800 inmates in 1931 and was closed in July 1934. A lumbering camp was opened at Nyrob, on a branch of the Kama north of Vishera, in 1945 and held 24,800 prisoners as of 1952.

  69 The family details here come from Tatyana Yumasheva. On Nikolai Yeltsin’s rehabilitation (and Andrian’s, also posthumously), see Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 60.

  70 Yeltsin’s handwritten self-description when he was admitted to the party, in 1961, said he moved with his parents to Kazan in 1935 and to Berezniki in 1937. It is reproduced in Grigorii Kaëta, Boris Yel’tsin: Ural’skii period zhizni (Boris Yeltsin: the Urals period of his life) (Yekaterinburg: TsDOOSO, 1996), 32. Later essays in the archive gave other dates but always referred to Kazan.

  71 Valentin Yumashev, who as a journalist helped Yeltsin edit tape recordings into the first volume (and later volumes) of his memoirs, was not aware that the family had lived in Kazan, although he doubts Yeltsin (who became his father-in-law in 2001) made a conscious effort to suppress this fact. In Ispoved’, 19, Yeltsin said the family went straight from Butka to Berezniki when his father heard there was work at the potash combine, and that they took a horse and cart to the train station, disposing of surplus belongings as they went. Either he was being mendacious—and I cannot begin to think why he would—or his memory was playing tricks on him. The family moved to Berezniki from Kazan, not from Butka, and Kazan is a large city with its own station. It is highly unlikely Yeltsin was describing their departure from Butka to Kazan in 1932, when he was twenty-two months old.

  72 Sixty years later, Yeltsin still wanted to prove (Zapiski, 123) that his father was not a bad hat in Kazan: “By the way, the [OGPU] file contains no especially pointed statements on my father’s part. His brother and the other ‘participants’ did most of the talking.” In his second interview with me, he stressed that Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin, before being expropriated in 1930, were in accordance with the law because they did not hire wage labor. “They were hard workers. They walked behind the wood plow and the metal plow, they did the work themselves, without hired laborers, they worked on their own in the village, as a family.”

  73 Glebov interview.

  74 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 124; second Yeltsin interview.

  75 As already indicated, the statement (in Neverov, “Otets prezidenta”) had him spending 1930 to 1932 in Nadezhdinsk and 1932 to 1936 in Kazan, carpentering at Works No. 124 and studying in the tekhnikum. It then has him departing for Berezniki in 1937, leaving only one year unaccounted for.

  76 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:5.

  77 Second Yeltsin interview.

  78 This sentence appears only in the English-language edition of the memoir (Yeltsin, Struggle for Russia, 98), not in the Russian original.

  79 Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 354, where it is noted that, of the 8 million residents of the Urals, 900,000 were convicted of crimes in the 1930s, many of them of a political nature. Stalinist fears of sedition from without were not entirely based on fantasy. There were in fact attempts by émigrés and others to smuggle anti-Soviet materials into the country, the main effect of which was to intensify police attacks on real and imagined oppositionists.

  80 Source: the Perm branch of the Memorial Society. See http://www.pmem.ru/index.php?mode=rpm&exmod=rpm/12, which has a list of the 6,553 known victims.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1 Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko, Kama i Ural (ocherki i vpechatleniya) (The Kama and the Urals [Essays and impressions]) (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya A. S. Suvorina, 1890), 170–71.

  2 Figure on blood diseases from Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 101. Chemical-weapons making and pollution in Berezniki are documented at http://www.pollutedplaces.org/region/e_europe/russia/berez.shtml; http://www.ourplanet.com/imgversn/86/sakan.html; http://neespi.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/NEESPI_SP_chapters/SB_Appendix_Ch_3.pdf; and http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/kfile/russiaenviro.pdf.

  3 M. M. Zagorul’ko, ed., Voyennoplennyye v SSSR, 1939–1956: dokumenty i materialy (Prisoners of war in the USSR, 1939–56: documents and materials) (Moscow: Logos, 2000), 104, 112; Obshchestvo “Memorial” and Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, 1923–1940: spravochnik (The USSR’s system of corrective-labor camps, 1923–40: a reference book) (Moscow: Zven’ya: 1998), 275–76, 291–92, 451–52, 456–57, 491–92, 493–94, 514. A detailed map of Gulag in the Perm area is available at http://pmem.ru/rpm/map/Rus06.htm. Gulag inmates in the Urals totaled 330,000 in 1938, excluding the 530,000 exiles in special settlements and not confined to camps. At war’s end, there were about 300,000 German POWs in camps in Sverdlovsk province alone.

  4 In Molotov province as a whole in 1940–41, convict crews came to 30 percent of the total industrial labor force. Ol’ga Malova, “Gulag Permskoi oblasti” (The Gulag of Perm oblast), http://perm.psu.ru/school136/1945/antifashist/newspaper/malova.htm. But Gulag labor was concentrated in the Berezniki and Vishera areas, where its proportion was considerably higher.

  5 This was so even in the largest Soviet cities. See David L. Hoffman, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

  6 Larisa Korzhavkina, Berezniki (Berezniki) (Perm: Permskoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 2002), 76–77.

  7 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 20. Yeltsin told an interviewer in the 1990s that a sixth person, a male Kazakh worker, shared the barracks room with them for some time during the war. Den’ v sem’e prezidenta (A day in the president’s family), interviews of the Yeltsin family by El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, April 20, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya). Polya’s name is not given in Yeltsin’s memoirs, but his mother mentioned it to acquaintances later.

  8 Klavdiya Pashikhina, interview with the author (September 7, 2005). House, barracks, and fields were located just west and just east of where today’s Berezniki Street meets Five-Year-Plan Street.

  9 Details on the house from author’s second interview with Naina Yeltsina (September 18, 2007). She says conversations in the 1950s suggested that the family had lived in a small rented house for a short time before moving into their private home.

  10 Igor Neverov, “Otets prezidenta” (The president’s father), fragment of an unpublished manuscript by Neverov, “Nikomu ne otdam svoyu biografiyu” (We won’t give anyone our biography), 1998 (copy given to the author in September 2005 by the Museum of History and Art, Berezniki); and Naina Yeltsina, personal communication to the author, July 29,
2007. Mrs. Yeltsin checked the particulars with Boris Yeltsin’s brother and sister.

  11 Igor Neverov, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 1.

  12 Tatyana Yumasheva, personal communication to the author, March 4, 2005. In Butka Nikolai was to supplement his pension by working part-time for a Talitsabased building organization. One of his projects was to supervise construction of a new village school.

  13 The quotation and the description of Klavdiya’s hidden icon are from Muzhskoi razgovor (Male conversation), interview of Yeltsin by El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, November 7, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya). Other details from the author’s interviews.

  14 Yeltsin said shamefacedly in 1993 (Muzhskoi razgovor) that he chided his mother for praying in the 1960s, after he joined the Communist Party, but she ignored him.

  15 Izabella Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov ot Belogo doma” (Thousands of kilometers from the White House), Vechernyaya Moskva, October 2, 1991.

  16 Details from ibid., and my interviews with Sergei Molchanov (September 8, 2005) and Klavdiya Pashikhina.

  17 Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2002).

  18 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 20, 26.

  19 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya khotel, chtoby lyudi byli svobodny” (Boris Yeltsin: I wanted people to be free), Izvestiya, February 1, 2006.

  20 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 20. The drinking was a delicate subject in the family. One relative who knew Nikolai well in Butka in the 1960s said in an interview that he hid bottles of vodka from his wife in the cellar of their house.

  21 “In a way they were a match: if the father was a sadist, then the son showed an early masochistic bent.” Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 120; also 128–29, where it is claimed he showed the same attitude at college in Sverdlovsk. Cf. Oleg Davydov, “Prezidentskii kolovorot” (Presidential brace), in A. N. Starkov, ed., Rossiiskaya elita: psikhologicheskiye portrety (The Russian elite: psychological portraits) (Moscow: Ladomir, 2000), 81–92, for an Oedipal interpretation.