Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  22 Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov.”

  23 Oksana Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody Borisa Yel’tsina” (The school years of Boris Yeltsin), http://www.aif.ru/online/sv/1181/11_01.

  24 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 20. This picture is supported by workmates. See in particular Neverov, “Otets prezidenta,” which mentions Nikolai trying to invent a machine for unloading railroad freight cars.

  25 Yeltsina communication.

  26 Zhdanov does mention (Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody Borisa Yel’tsina”) a friendship at School No. 95 with one Svetlana Zhemchuzhnikova, an evacuee from Leningrad, “very pretty” and somewhat of a tomboy. When she broke her leg in an accident, Boris talked his pals into visiting her at home.

  27 Stalin made most Soviet schools single-sex schools during and after the war; they reverted to coeducation in 1954.

  28 See Michael Ellman and S. Maksudov, “Soviets Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note,” Europe-Asia Studies 46 (July 1994), 671–80; and more generally on gender roles Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

  29 Quotation from Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 155.

  30 I use scripts in the sense that some biographers use phrases such as inner myths and private self-concepts. See James E. Veninga, “Biography: Self and Sacred Canopy,” in Veninga, ed., The Biographer’s Gift: Life Histories and Humanism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983), 59–79; and Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographia (New York: Norton, 1984), 159–73.

  31 Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.” Details about the schools come from my interviews with Sergei Molchanov and with Viktor Tsipushtanov (September 8, 2005).

  32 Indicative are the food supplies allocated to the town of Solikamsk, just up the Kama, for the year 1938. For each resident, they provided 1.1 kilograms of meat (less than 2½ pounds), 2.4 kilos of sausage, 3.9 kilos of fish, one jar of preserves, 100 grams of cheese, and 2.6 kilos of macaroni. The worst years were 1932–33, when rationing was in effect and the Urals norms for urban laborers were a pound of bread or bread surrogate, a pound of potatoes, and a glass of milk per day. I. S. Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala s drevneishikh vremën do nashikh dnei (History of the Urals from ancient times to our day) (Yekaterinburg: Sokrat, 2003), 341.

  33 Andrei Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin: svet i teni (Boris Yeltsin: light and shadows), 2 vols. (Sverdlovsk: Klip, 1991), 1:8. Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana does not find the story of the siblings being sent to the restaurant a credible one, and surmises that Goryun misunderstood Klavdiya Yeltsina in their interview. Tatyana heard many stories about hardship from her grandparents but never this one. Asking neighbors for help would have been much more acceptable conduct. Tatyana Yumasheva, second interview with the author (September 11, 2006). Since Valentina Yeltsina was born only in 1944, she could not have been active in the search for food during the war years.

  34 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 21. The hay mowing was one of many behavioral ties to village life. Fifty years later, as president of Russia, Yeltsin still owned two scythes (Den’ v sem’e prezidenta).

  35 Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov.”

  36 See Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: Norton, 1969), 125. I learned about Nikolai’s mistreatment of his wife from a number of interviews. Tatyana Yumasheva, his granddaughter, confirmed it in my second interview with her.

  37 Second Yeltsin interview.

  38 Irina Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi, yemu vidnei” (Boris is a big shot, he knows better), Moskovskii komsomolets, January 31, 2007. Moskovskii komsomolets has over the years made it a specialty to present unflattering and often untrue information about Boris Yeltsin and his family. In this case, the sentiment expressed by Boris Andrianovich seems to have been accurately reported.

  39 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:6.

  40 Neverov, “Otets prezidenta,” says Nikolai’s personnel file contained references to twenty-eight official punishments he had meted out to workers under his supervision—for poor bricklaying, negligence, and falsifying records. But, “He was always orderly and smart in his appearance, and I cannot remember him ever raising his voice or losing his temper.” Neverov says, without providing details, that he and Nikolai were both disciplined in January 1961 for exceeding the wage fund.

  41 Second Yeltsin interview.

  42 Yeltsin’s participation in approved youth activities was strongly borne out in my interview with Sergei Molchanov: “Yeltsin was in the active group.” He took part in Komsomol meetings, asked questions, and made comments.

  43 Quotation from Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 24. Materials in the museum of the Pushkin School, to which Yeltsin transferred in 1945, show that thirteen of twenty-three who finished the school in June 1941 (including two girls) went straight to the army from their graduation ball. Three teachers also shipped out.

  44 Quotation from second Yeltsin interview. His interest and the notebooks are reported in Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:7, from a conversation with Mikhail Yeltsin. None of this ever made Boris Yeltsin a great expert on the history of the revolution. When an American journalist tried in the late 1980s to engage him in conversation about the Mensheviks and other non-Bolshevik factions, Yeltsin was not familiar with the groups and the names of their leaders. Jonathan Sanders, interview with the author (January 21, 2004).

  45 Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 374 (italics added).

  46 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002). Aleksei Tolstoy (1883–1945), a distant cousin of Leo Tolstoy, published his novel in three parts between 1929 and 1945. Yeltsin may also have been familiar with the 1910 silent-film classic Peter the Great, directed by Vasilii Goncharov, which was often shown in Soviet cinemas with the Petrov movie. His admiration for Peter put him at odds with the Old Believer tradition, in which Russia’s first emperor was seen as the Antichrist.

  47 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 21.

  48 Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.”

  49 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:8.

  50 Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov.”

  51 In “Istoriya shkoly No. 1” (History of School No. 1), typescript, museum of Pushkin School, 9.

  52 Unpublished bulletin for class reunion by Tatyana Babiyan, in the school museum.

  53 Facts and figures from the school museum and the Berezniki Museum of the History of Education.

  54 Quotation from Molchanov interview. Khonina is the only teacher Yeltsin gave by name in Ispoved’ (23), where he called her a “marvelous” mentor.

  55 School records, including Yeltsin’s school-leaving certificate (attestat zrelosti). Soviet schools at the time assigned daily and weekly grades in each subject, which were then aggregated into quarterly and full-year grades. Khonina’s log for 1947–48, ninth grade for Yeltsin, contains a fair number of one-day and one-week 3s, but none lower than that. The log for 1948–49 was destroyed in a basement flood at the school. Yeltsin (Ispoved’, 25–26) misremembered his last year’s grades, saying he received only two 4s and got 5s in the rest.

  56 Tsipushtanov interview.

  57 Molchanov interview. The railway school, as was not uncommon in the Soviet provinces, had no athletics. “The teacher would lead out the class single file into the corridor for ‘free calisthenics.’ You would wave your hands, and that was the whole sports program.” Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.”

  58 Ol’ga Yevtyukhova and Yelena Zaitseva, “Rovesniki moi” (They were the same age as me), 1999 essay in the Pushkin School museum.

  59 “Istoriya shkoly No. 1,” 9.

  60 Aleksandr Abramov, the current Pushkin headmaster, showed me the 1948 directive in my interview with him (September 8, 2005). The class photograph and notes about future occupations are in the archive of the Berezniki Museum of History and Ar
t.

  61 Second Yeltsin interview.

  62 Marietta Chudakova, interview with the author (April 14, 2003).

  63 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 21–26. His book dates most of these incidents, but not the one with the grenades, where the source is Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:8.

  64 Second Yeltsin interview; Molchanov interview. The bath was of the “black” variety, in which smoke from the fire escapes the steam room through a hole in the ceiling. (In a Russian “white” steambath, such as Boris Yeltsin built in his family’s yard, smoke exits through a stovepipe.) In Ispoved’, 24, Yeltsin mentions long rural hikes and a climb up the Denezhkin Stone, a scenic Urals massif north of Berezniki.

  65 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 22.

  66 Alya Tanachëva, interview with the author (June 22, 2004).

  67 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 22–23.

  68 Ibid., 25. When he fought the school’s decision on tenth-grade registration, he repeated the cycle: “The path was already familiar.” He was by then known to some city officials because of his success as an athlete.

  69 Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.”

  70 Interviews with Abramov (jump out of the window) and Pashikhina (needles on the teacher’s chair).

  71 Molchanov interview. Molchanov was an unusually reliable source, since, he said, he never read Yeltsin’s published account. In his memoirs, Yeltsin’s memories of his years at the Pushkin School are generally clearer than those of School No. 95. His studies at Pushkin were less remote in time and the school is still a going concern, whereas School No. 95 was converted into a trade school in 1964 and shut down in 1971 (a fragment of the building remains). Yeltsin, by this time Communist Party boss of Sverdlovsk province, sent a sculpture of semiprecious Urals stone for the fiftieth anniversary of the Pushkin School in 1982. He had planned to attend the celebration but could not because his opposite number in Perm, Boris Konoplëv, would not make the time to accompany him, as protocol required. His gift for the sixtieth anniversary in 1992, on display in the school museum in 2005, was a book inscribed “With thanks for the foundation.” In the 1990s Yeltsin had discretionary funds from the president’s office donated to the schools for repairs and renovations. His foundation also provided assistance to the school after his retirement.

  72 His school-leaving certificate dates his entry to the school in 1945, without giving the month.

  73 Zhdanov remembers nothing about pupils being required to collect scraps for the teacher’s pig or about Yeltsin attacking her at a public ceremony. When he read these things in Yeltsin’s memoirs, “I even wanted to phone him up and ask, ‘Where did you come up with that?’” Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.” Conversion of the three secondary schools in town into single-sex schools was completed only in 1946, but in 1945, when Yeltsin transferred, the Pushkin School was already the only one to admit boys.

  74 Interviews with Stanislav Glebov (September 11, 2005) and Abramov. Yarns pop up every now and then about Yeltsin doing some dastardly deed around this time. One of the silliest is to the effect that in the hand-grenade incident he threw the weapon at a group of his friends and killed two of them. It can be found in Yurii Mukhin’s screed Kod Yel’tsina (The Yeltsin code) (Moscow: Yauza, 2005), 51.

  75 The family’s pain is undeniable. Gorbachev did not speak about it publicly until 1990. Both of his grandfathers were arrested in the 1930s, his paternal grandfather (who joined the kolkhoz only in 1935) spent a year in Siberia, and several relatives died in the collectivization-induced famine. Grandfather Gopkalo, arrested in 1937, was released in 1938 and restored as a party member and as head of the kolkhoz. Raisa Gorbacheva’s maternal grandfather was shot in 1937. See Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:31–58.

  76 The essay is not mentioned in Gorbachev’s memoirs but came out in a discussion in the Politburo in 1986. Gorbachev told his colleagues (including Yeltsin) that he preferred to have someone else meet with Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who had defected to the West in 1967, returned to the USSR in 1984, and now sought permission to leave again (which she eventually received). Offended by letters in which she criticized her father, Gorbachev said, “If you ask me, it is necessary to place a high value on Stalin, Stalingrad, et cetera. I myself am from such a family. My uncle wrecked his health [building the kolkhoz]. My mother and her four sisters were from an impoverished family. I received a medal for a composition on the theme, ‘Stalin Is Our Glory, Stalin Is the Delight of Our Youth.’” Politburo transcript for March 20, 1986, in Volkogonov Archive (Project on Cold War Studies, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University), 41. “Stalin Is Our Glory, Stalin Is the Delight of Our Youth” was the title of a prewar song by Matvei Blanter and Aleksei Surkov.

  77 Interviewed by a journalist in 2000 (see http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/gor0int-1), Gorbachev recalled that “the party’s slogans appealed to me, they made quite an impression on me. It was very seductive, very attractive, and I took it all on faith.”

  78 Molchanov interview.

  79 Arnold M. Ludwig, King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 448. Thirty-two percent of the leaders in Ludwig’s sample were outgoing in the group and 29 percent were solitary. Again, Yeltsin manifested both of these traits at different times. Yeltsin’s avid readership of books was shared by 39 percent of Ludwig’s subjects, but his athletic skills by only 15 percent, his very close relationship with his mother by 11 percent, and his at times hostile relationship with his father by 21 percent.

  80 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 155.

  81 Quotations from Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 26; and Tanachëva interview.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1 A mining institute opened in Molotov (Perm) in 1953 and was upgraded to a polytechnic in 1960. According to a passage in Yeltsin’s first memoir book not printed in the Russian edition, he saw the new campus of Moscow State University on the Lenin Hills while on his first visit to Moscow in the summer of 1953, shortly after Gulag laborers completed it. He was taken by the magnificence of the buildings and regretted that he had not applied for admission in 1949. But then he thought to himself he probably would have failed the entrance test and, as the Russian proverb goes, “Better a sparrow in the hand than a blue titmouse in the sky.” Nikolai Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin: raznyye zhizni (Boris Yeltsin: various lives), 2 vols. (Moscow: OLMA, 2001), 1:27–28 (quoting from the Norwegian-language edition of Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu).

  2 Perm was founded in the same year as Yekaterinburg, 1723, but was the only large Russian city other than St. Petersburg to be laid out rectilinearly. It had more cultural and educational institutions than Yekaterinburg and was made capital of the Urals region in 1781. During the revolution and civil war, Perm was more supportive of the White forces.

  3 James R. Harris, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

  4 Leonid Brezhnev, Vospominaniya (Memoirs) (Moscow: Politizdat, 1983), 29.

  5 A partial list of evacuated plants may be found at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/harrison/vpk/history/part1/list.txt .

  6 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “A Closed City and Its Secret Archives: Notes on a Journey to the Urals,” Journal of Modern History 62 (December 1990), 776.

  7 The American Jewish Handbook for 1980 was to estimate the Jewish population of Sverdlovsk that year to be 40,000. The 1989 census officially recorded 14,300 persons of Jewish nationality in Sverdlovsk oblast, fifth place in the Russian republic of the USSR. (Jewish was listed as nationality—that is, ethnicity—on Soviet passports.) Due mostly to emigration, the number declined to 6,900 in 2002, when it was fourth in the country.

  8 The institute began as part of the new Urals State University in 1920 and for most of the time from 1925 to 1948 was called the Urals Industrial Institute. Its construction division, formed in 1929, functioned as a separate in
stitute from 1934 to 1948. UPI was to be renamed Urals State Technical University (UGTU) in 1992 and now has 23,000 students.

  9 Stroitel’nyi fakul’tet UGTU–UPI: istoriya, sovremennost’ (The construction division of UGTU–UPI: history and current situation) (Yekaterinburg: Real-Media, 2004), 12–20.

  10 Yakov Ol’kov, interview with the author (September 12, 2004). In Sverdlovsk Germans built a firemen’s school, the central stadium, and housing, paved roads, and refaced city hall. The last prisoners were returned in 1955.

  11 The claim about reading German with a dictionary is in “Lichnyi listok po uchëtu kadrov” (Personal certificate for the register of cadres) for Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, dated June 16, 1975; in TsDOOSO (Documentation Center for the Public Organizations of Sverdlovsk Oblast, Yekaterinburg), fund (fond) 4, register (opis’) 116, file (delo) 283, 4. The Documentation Center is the official title of the Sverdlovsk archive of the CPSU. According to a usually reliable source, a Russian journalist who covered him as president in the 1990s, Yeltsin was unable to distinguish the languages at that time. See Boris Grishchenko, Postoronnyi v Kremle: reportazhi iz “osoboi zony” (A stranger in the Kremlin: reportage from “the special zone”) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2004), 159–60.

  12 Lidiya Solomoniya, interview with the author (September 11, 2004); Aleksandr Yuzefovich, Komanda molodosti nashei: zapiski stroitelya (Team of our youth: notes of a builder) (Perm: Fond podderzhki pervogo Prezidenta Rossii, 1997), 35, 49. Yakov Sverdlov, who died in 1919, was Jewish, but officials never got around to changing the name of the city in the late Stalin period. It persisted until September 1991, when Sverdlovsk reverted to the original Yekaterinburg; the province is still called Sverdlovsk oblast. In July 1957 three Sverdlovskers, already expelled from the party, were arrested for distributing anti-Semitic letters; they were released in 1964. One of their proposals was that the city be renamed. See V. A. Kozlov and S. V. Mironenko, eds., 58-10: nadzornyye proizvodstva Prokuratury SSSR po delam ob antisovetskoi agitatsii i propagande (Mart 1953–1991), annotirovannyi katalog (Article 58, section 10: the supervisory files of the USSR Procuracy about cases of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda [March 1953–1991], an annotated catalogue) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiya,” 1999), 345.