Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  13 Kozlov and Mironenko, 58-10, 41. Okulov was arrested on March 5, 1953, as Stalin lay dying in Moscow.

  14 A. Ye. Pavlova, a Yeltsin classmate, is quoted in a recent book of reminiscences: “We were inculcated with faith in Stalin. We deified him from afar. When he spoke on the radio, we would run to listen—on our own, no one had to force us to do it. And, when he died, we cried out loud. It seemed to us that all was lost and nothing good would happen in future.” Vladimir Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii” (Boris Yeltsin and UPI), http://www.ural-yeltsin.ru/knigi/knigi_elcina/document427.

  15 Details from Andrei Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin: svet i teni (Boris Yeltsin: light and shadows), 2 vols. (Sverdlovsk: Klip, 1991), 1:8–10; Irina Bobrova, “Yel’tsiny tozhe plachut” (The Yeltsins also cry), Moskovskii komsomolets, February 18, 2000; and Ol’kov and Solomoniya interviews.

  16 Anatolii Yuzhaninov, quoted in Anna Veligzhanina, “Pervaya lyubov’ Borisa Yel’tsina” (Boris Yeltsin’s first love), Komsomol’skaya pravda, April 26, 2007. Yerina and Ustinov moved back to Berezniki and soon divorced.

  17 Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.”

  18 Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007); Bobrova, “Yel’tsiny tozhe plachut.” Naina was born in the village of Titovka, outside Orenburg, but grew up in the city. She also spent some of her childhood in Kazakhstan, the nearest republic in Central Asia.

  19 Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.”

  20 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 252. The dance lessons are described in Natal’ya Konstantinova, Zhenskii vzglyad na kremlëvskuyu zhizn’ (A woman’s view of Kremlin life) (Moscow: Geleos, 1999), 105.

  21 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:9.

  22 Interview with Ol’kov, who also described Yeltsin participating in polite petitions to the rectorate about students’ workload. On the petitions, see also Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 127–28.

  23 “Otduvalsya v dekanate za Borisa tozhe” (I answered at the dean’s office for Boris, too), http://gazeta.ru/politics/yeltsin/1621092.shtml.

  24 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 29; Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.” Rogitskii headed the department until 1965. The official history of the construction division (Stroitel’nyi fakul’tet UGTU–UPI, 21) describes him as a gifted engineer and a humane teacher, but also absent-minded.

  25 On the UPI Komsomol committee, Galina Stepanova of the Sverdlovsk/ Yekaterinburg Communist Party archive, interview with the author (September 7, 2004). In his second interview with me (February 9, 2002), Yeltsin volunteered that he avoided participation: “In general I was a leader, a guide. But not in the Pioneers and Komsomol. I was little concerned with that.”

  26 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 23.

  27 Ol’kov interview. Even in Berezniki, Yeltsin had the best spike on his school team.

  28 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 29–30; Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.”

  29 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 29.

  30 The principal’s order discharging Yeltsin is dated March 27, 1952; he applied for re-admission on August 30; the request was granted in mid-September. See Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 17.

  31 Ol’kov interview.

  32 Ibid.; Stroitel’nyi fakul’tet UGTU–UPI, 21.

  33 Ol’kov interview.

  34 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 27. In 2006, while on a visit to Kazan, Yeltsin referred to one such incident. He said it happened in Kazan and he told the police he was going to see his aunt; he spent some time in the brig. Anna Akhmadeyeva, “Boris Yel’tsin priznalsya v lyubvi k Kazani” (Boris Yeltsin professed his love for Kazan), http://www.viperson.ru/wind.php?ID=276299&soch=1.

  35 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 29. The Norwegian version of the memoir recounts further risky ventures in Moscow, including a party with female students and a brawl with criminals. See Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:27–30.

  36 Aleksandr Kil’chevskii, 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. Yeltsin in retirement referred to a similar-sounding incident with the team in Kazan. He said he “fell in love with some paintings” at an exhibition, missed the train, and then got to Tbilisi in a freight train. Akhmadeyeva, “Boris Yel’tsin.”

  37 Quotation from Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 29 (italics added). Coach Kil’chevskii, though, interviewed by Kiselëv almost forty years later, still remembered Yeltsin’s summer outing with deep disapproval.

  38 N. A. Vilesova, quoted in Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.”

  39 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 30. The certificate for the diploma project, dating his defense on June 20, 1955, was on exhibit in the school’s museum when I was there in 2005, and the description shows it was a design for a bucket line. Next to the document in the display case was a wood abacus of the kind a UPI student in the 1950s would have used to do the math.

  40 Three schemes that Yeltsin drew for the bucket line towers are stored in the institute’s archive (copy shared with the author by Sergei Skrobov of Yekaterinburg). One of them is an ink sketch of a lattice steel pylon, 325 feet high, that bears some likeness to a tower for a television transmitter. It is possible that while dictating his memoirs Yeltsin was forgetful of the original project, saw a copy of the sketch, and mistook it for a television tower.

  41 Local mountaineers began to scale the tower’s exterior wall with their climbing gear, which could take hours or even days. Several people staged parachute jumps from the platform. After two accidental deaths and one suicide, city workers in 1998 cut off the outside ladder and welded the entrance door shut. See http://tau.ur.ru/tower/etower.asp.

  42 See, for example, Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:36; and Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka” (Sverdlovsk upstart), part 2, Politicheskii klass, March 2006, 85.

  43 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 35.

  44 Blair A. Ruble, “From Khrushchëby to Korobki,” in William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble, eds., Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 232–70.

  45 Second Yeltsina interview. Yeltsin’s career moves are conveniently summarized in handwriting in his “Lichnyi listok,” 4.

  46 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 269.

  47 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 74. Yeltsin was so sure their second child would be a boy that he had already purchased a blue blanket and a toy truck. “Yelena Yel’tsina chut’ ne zadushila sestru v koryte” (Yelena Yeltsina almost smothered her sister in the trough), http://www.allrus.info/obj/main.php?ID=217454&arc_new=1.

  48 Second Yeltsina interview and author’s third interview with Tatyana Yumasheva (January 25, 2007).

  49 Most details about housing are taken from ibid. The point about the shared washing machine is from an interview with Lyudmila Chinyakova in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 2.

  50 Interview on Ekho Moskvy radio, March 1, 1997, http://echo.msk.ru/guests/1775. In several other interviews, Naina said she always knotted Boris’s necktie and that he never learned how to do it himself. This was an overstatement. Boris may have preferred to let his wife knot his tie at breakfast, but he knew how to do so himself.

  51 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 74. The story of the school diaries, attributed to Naina Yeltsina, is in Vladimir Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy” (Entourage), part 3, Rabochaya tribuna, March 28, 1995.

  52 “Naina Yel’tsina: Boris Nikolayevich na menya vorchit, a mne nravitsya . . .” (Naina Yeltsina: Boris Nikolayevich grumbles, but that is fine with me), Komsomol’skaya pravda, February 2, 2006; and “Naina Yel’tsina: ya nikogda ne vmeshivalas’ v dela svoyego muzha” (Na
ina Yeltsina: I never interfered in my husband’s business), Izvestiya, June 28, 1996.

  53 Third Yumasheva interview.

  54 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 251.

  55 Al’bert Tsioma, a Butka neighbor of the neighbors, interview with the author (September 11, 2005). Butka’s population got to about 3,500 in the 1970s and about 4,000 today. Basmanovo leveled out at less than 2,000.

  56 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 40–41.

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

  58 A good control group would be the 115 regional CPSU leaders selected full or candidate members of the party Central Committee with Yeltsin in 1981. Their average age of admission to the CPSU was 24.5. Specialists in ideological and control functions had joined earlier (at an average age of 22.5), but even among those whose careers were mostly in the economic realm, like Yeltsin, the average was 25.6. Only four of the 115 were admitted at an older age than he—two who were thirty-one and two who were thirty-two. Calculated from biographies in the 1981 yearbook of the Bol’shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya (Great Soviet encyclopedia).

  59 “In 1956 the party authorities were shaken by the bold statements by students in a number of Sverdlovsk institutions, demanding ‘freedom to criticize,’ ‘free speech,’ and democracy. Harsh measures were taken against them.” Several were put on trial and sent off to labor camps or psychiatric prisons. A Sverdlovsk group favoring an anti-communist revolution, headed by factory technician L. G. Shefer, was broken up in April 1963. A. D. Kirillov and N. N. Popov, Ural: vek dvadtsatyi (The Urals: the twentieth century) (Yekaterinburg: Ural’skii rabochii, 2000), 175–76; Kozlov and Mironenko, 58-10, 631.

  60 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:6.

  61 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 43.

  62 Leon Aron, who interviewed some coworkers, goes into informative detail on such practices (Yeltsin, chap. 2). See also Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT,” 87–95.

  63 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:11.

  64 Svetlana Zinov’eva, quoted in Vadim Lipatnikov, “Boris Yel’tsin i DSK” (Boris Yeltsin and the DSK), http://www.ural-yeltsin.ru/knigi/knigi_elcina/document639.

  65 On the model brigade, see Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:11; Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 42–43; and Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:40. Aron (Yeltsin, 36–37) views the incident in a more favorable light.

  66 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 43.

  67 Aron, Yeltsin, 40.

  68 The fullest account is in Yakov Ryabov, Moi XX vek: zapiski byvshego sekretarya TsK KPSS (My 20th century: notes of a former secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU) (Moscow: Russkii biograficheskii institut, 2000), 33. The reprimand is at TsDOOSO, fund 161, register 39, file 9, 22–24.

  69 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 32.

  70 See Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:11.

  71 Third Yumasheva interview. It must be said that for all of Yeltsin’s life some people saw him in such terms as well.

  72 Andrei Karaulov, Vokrug Kremlya: kniga politicheskikh dialogov (Around the Kremlin: a book of political dialogues) (Moscow: Novosti, 1990), 98.

  73 Yakov Ryabov, interview in files of Central Committee Interview Project, University of Glasgow (transcript supplied by Stephen White). He recalled discussing the need to replace Nikolayev with Brezhnev and Ivan Kapitonov of the Secretariat, but did not mention Kirilenko.

  74 Oleg Podberëzin, formerly a Sverdlovsk party worker, interview with the author (September 9, 2004). Ryabov had been appointed party secretary of the turbine works in 1958 and of a district of Sverdlovsk city in 1960. He was active in Komsomol affairs from 1946 to the mid-1950s.

  75 TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 116, file 283, 14.

  76 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 44. As documented in the archive, he was “elected” to the Chkalov district soviet in 1963, the Sverdlovsk city soviet in 1965, and the city committee of the party in 1966. Once on the obkom staff, he joined the soviet and party committee of the oblast.

  77 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 34–35.

  78 Ibid., 35.

  79 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 44.

  80 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 253.

  81 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 41.

  82 Oleg Lobov, interview with the author (May 29, 2002).

  83 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 35.

  84 Aron, Yeltsin, 43–44.

  85 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 38.

  86 Details on motivations here from Ryabov interview (University of Glasgow).

  87 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 40.

  88 In ibid., 40–41, Ryabov reprints a five-point summary from his diary of a conversation in June 1976 in which he let into Yeltsin for sharply worded instructions, superciliousness, disrespect for fellow communists (“including members of the bureau of the obkom”), and taking criticism as an insult. Every time they had such a conversation, Ryabov says, Yeltsin protested that his rudeness was only out of zeal to get the job done and promised to be more correct in future. “This way Boris won me over and calmed me.”

  89 Ryabov interview (University of Glasgow).

  90 I heard about Ponomarëv’s attempt from a then member of the bureau who wishes to go unnamed. Confirmation of the Bobykin-Yeltsin rivalry may be found in the memoir by Viktor Manyukhin, a contemporary of Yeltsin’s in the Sverdlovsk party apparatus: Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 34–35. Some bureau members certainly preferred Yeltsin. Ryabov (interview, University of Glasgow) identifies Korovin, secretary N. M. Dudkin, the commander of the local military district, and the tradeunion chief as in favor and says that even in 1975 “several secretaries” preferred that Yeltsin be made second secretary, over Korovin’s head.

  91 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 54–55; Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 48–49. Yeltsin mentions Ryabov attending some of the meetings, but breathes not a word of his sponsorship.

  92 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 49–50.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1 “Law-and-order prefects” and “developmental prefects” (below) are taken from Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party Organs in Industrial Decision-Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 5.

  2 The instructions, signed by Yeltsin in November 1981 and stamped “Top Secret,” are in TsDOOSO (Documentation Center for the Public Organizations of Sverdlovsk Oblast, Yekaterinburg), fund 4, register 100, file 119, 135–36. On Yeltsin and Kornilov, see Viktor Manyukhin, Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 71–73.

  3 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 60.

  4 That figure, coming to 32.5 percent of industrial employment in the oblast, was inferred from classified data for 1985. It does not include personnel in R&D or defense-related tasks done in plants subordinated to civilian ministries (Uralmash, for example). Brenda Horrigan, “How Many People Worked in the Soviet Defense Industry?” RFE/RL Research Report 1 (August 21, 1992), 33–39.

  5 On Compound No. 19, see Anthony Rimmington, “From Military to Industrial Complex? The Conversion of Biological Weapons Facilities in the Russian Federation,” Contemporary Security Policy 17 (April 1996), 81–112; Jeanne Guillemin, Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Ken Alibek, with Stephen Handelman, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World (New York: Random House, 1999), chap. 7. Some analysts have charged the United States with making as much use of Japanese technology as the Soviets did. See Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover-Up, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2002).

  6 A. D. Kirillov and N. N. Popov, Ural: vek dvadtsatyi (The Urals: the twentieth century) (Yekaterinburg: Ural’skii rabochii, 2000), 180.

  7 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 55.

  8 Bobykin was transferred to a Central Committee department in 1978. He returned to Sverdlovsk as obkom first secretary in June 1988, when Yeltsin was
in political disfavor, and was removed in February 1990.

  9 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 32.

  10 Grigorii Kaëta, who at this point was an official in the obkom’s propaganda department, interview with the author (September 9, 2004). Mekhrentsev, a war veteran, had been a party member since 1946. He was a deputy in the Supreme Soviet and had been awarded two Orders of Lenin and a USSR State Prize. He died in January 1985 at the age of sixty and rated an obituary in Pravda. Yeltsin was one of the officials who signed it, as a mark of respect. Mekhrentsev’s replacement as chairman of the province’s government was Oleg Lobov.

  11 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 37–39.

  12 This last phenomenon is reported in Kaleriya Shadrina, “Yel’tsin byl krut: soratniki perezhidali yego gnev v spetsbol’nitse” (Yeltsin was gruff: his brothers-in-arms thought about his anger in the special hospital), Komsomol’skaya pravda, November 25, 1997.

  13 Pilar Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya: Boris Yel’tsin, provintsial v Kremle” (The impossible Russia: Boris Yeltsin, a provincial in the Kremlin), Ural, April 1994, 100. This incident seems to have happened in 1984.

  14 Rossel, 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. Rossel was appointed head of a more important building organization in 1981 and deputy head of the construction directorate for the oblast in 1983.