Yeltsin

CHAPTER ONE Self-Reliance

The Urals, among the most ancient mountain ranges in the world, are the physiographic frontier between Europe and Asia. They rise 1,500 miles from the grasslands above the inland Caspian Sea, in present-day Kazakhstan, to the icebound coastal plain of the Arctic Ocean. Their creases push gelid northern air, and with it northern flora and fauna, southward. They are highest in the upper segment; in the lower segment, the Urals comprise parallel folds of hills and stony crests. The middle segment, which by convention runs from 55° 30’ to 61° north, consists largely of low plateaus trenched by ravines. Here are located most of the mountain belt’s deposits of ferrous and nonferrous metals, salt, gemstones, and bauxite. It was this subterranean bounty that, beginning in the 1550s, drew Russians in from the west and north. Metallurgy dominated the Urals economy by the eighteenth century—three-quarters of the Russian Empire’s iron and almost 100 percent of its copper were smelted there at century’s end—but regressed in the nineteenth under competition from the mills of the Donbass and Dnieper Valley, in southern Ukraine, where coal rather than wood was used for heat. Agrarian migrants also flocked to the mid-Urals’ lowlands, most of which bear a load of rich humus that responds well to the plow.

The sleepy community of Butka nestles just inside the southern and the eastern, Asiatic, margin of the middle Urals in undulating countryside mantled in birch, larch, red pine, and poplar. It lies at 56° 43’ north, the same line of latitude as the Alaska panhandle and Dundee, Scotland, and at 63° 46’ east, the approximate longitude of Herat, Afghanistan. It is 1,100 miles (two time zones) to the east of Moscow, 170 miles east of the continental divide, and 150 miles east of the largest Urals city, Yekaterinburg, known from 1924 to 1991 as Sverdlovsk. Butka is not as well-endowed agriculturally as many corners of the Urals, and there are few minerals nearby. The name means “porridge” in the languages of the Tatars and Bashkirs, the Turkic groups whose tribes, before their subjugation to the Russian crown, held sway in the swath of territory straddling the southern and central Urals. The reference is to the swampiness of the site, on the Belyakovka River.¹ The shallow and silty Belyakovka, less than fifty miles in length, curls southwest to northeast through Butka, where it was fifty feet wide in 1900; it is twenty or thirty feet wide there today. Through the Pyshma, it drains lazily into the Tobol, Irtysh, and Ob Rivers in west Siberia (the Irtysh and Ob form the world’s fourth longest river system) and on to tidewater at the Arctic 700 miles away.

Legend has it that the Russians who initially settled at Butka were deserters from the host of Yermak Timofeyevich, the Cossack buccaneer who carried Ivan the Terrible’s writ over the Urals in the 1580s. Be that as it may, we know from the state chronicle that on November 1, 1676, the governor of Tobol’sk, the Russian fort at the junction of the Tobol and the Irtysh, granted a petition by the peasants Ivashka Sylvenets and Tereshka Ivanov for leave to found a sloboda, a government-chartered village, at Butka. They were to survey the spot, construct a palisade against raiders, and “invite free and unattached people” to move there.² Built to secure Russia’s borderlands, villages of this type offered peasants arable land, tax exemptions, and a measure of self-government. Butka had expanded bit by bit to a hundred souls when the German naturalist and explorer Johann Georg Gmelin came upon it in 1746, and to 825 in the imperial census of 1897. The nearest towns of any size were Shadrinsk, the district seat, fifty miles to the south on the Iset River, and Talitsa, on the Pyshma, twenty miles north of Butka and astride the highway and railroad to Siberia. Transport to and from the village was either by water or, if by land, along a horse trail to Talitsa, which it took ten or eleven hours to cover most seasons of the year and twice as long during the vernal and autumnal muddy seasons.³

Unpretentious Butka in 1900 shared much with the habitat of most of the tsar’s subjects. It was now a regular village (selo), a category for a relatively large settlement with a parish church and some government offices. There was no trace of the palisade. One-story wood cabins, thatched and with hand-carved window frames, and heated by tiled clay stoves, hugged several main streets and the rutted byways that meandered off from them. Everyone kept a dairy cow and tilled the fields rimming the village and the potato and vegetable patches out their back doors. The average growing season in Butka being 150 days and the soil being saline, seldom did the surfeit for the market amount to much. The young and strong cut timber or worked in the sawmill opened in 1914, which had 100 employees. Handicraftsmen made barrels, pottery, coal-tar soap, boots, and fur hats and put together sledges, carts, and spinning wheels. Amenities were sparse. The Orthodox Church of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, built in stone around 1800, had a wood attic and a belfry adjacent. Water was taken from wells and roadside pumps, and women did their laundry by hand in the river. There was a small library as of 1908 but no school and no doctor. A few clerks were the only representation from government.

In other respects, Butka was uncharacteristic of Russian rural society. People in it and its rustic surroundings, going back to the order of 1676 and the welcome mat to the free and unattached, had been spared the serfdom that stultified most of European Russia from the sixteenth century until abolition in 1861. Like most agriculturalists in the Urals and Siberia, they were classified as “state peasants,” who were at liberty to change abode and marry as they wished, were judged in the civil courts, and owed a fixed rent to the government, not manorial service to a landlord’s estate. In mentality, they were more like pioneers than like the serfs, whose status differed little from the black slaves in the United States.⁴ Two pre-1914 ethnographic portraits of the Russians in these parts were fully applicable. “Our peasant,” wrote one, “is sturdy beyond belief,” toiling in the fields sunup to sundown, rain or shine, and “will not complain until things have become completely unbearable.”⁵ Said the other, “The population is bright and clear of mind and possesses accuracy of speech and an unflappable, playful sense of humor. While not devoid of the widely known [peasant] slyness, it is keen and imitative. It masters its favorite tasks and is good at accommodating itself to any kind of labor.”⁶ The asperity of the climate, rugged topography, isolation from central Russia, and low population density bred the virtue encapsulated in a noun resonant in Urals lore: samostoyatel’nost’, or self-reliance (self-rule in the group context), literally the ability to stand on one’s own feet. At river fords and crossroads that were the merest specks of light in a vacuity, nothing except gumption and hardiness under adversity stood between the colonists and extinction.

Religion backed up legal categories and geography. Many Slavic settlers in the Urals were disciples of the Old Belief, the purist sect that seceded from Russian Orthodoxy in the 1650s in a schism over liturgical practices. There was an eschatological streak to the Old Believers; a spirit of outback resistance to the absolutist state and its bailiffs, foresters, and military recruiters; and a line of self-willed martyrs, “men who could keep silent no longer” in the face of ungodliness and injustice.⁷ Their reserve, frugality, and diligence in all things economic were “to a certain extent… reminiscent of the Protestant ethic” in the West.⁸ In all of the guberniya (province) of Perm, the largest in the Urals in the late tsarist period, the Shadrinsk district was one of the three with the heaviest concentration of dissidents.⁹ There were pious and not-so-pious Old Believers up and down the Belyakovka Valley. They prayed with their brethren in peasant houses, there being no chapels or ordained clergy for them, and often participated in Orthodox parishes.¹⁰

The Yeltsin surname derives from yel’, Russian for “fir tree,” and is a fairly common one in the region.¹¹ The ancestors of Boris Yeltsin were age-long inhabitants of the Urals and adjoining parts of Russia’s north, probably since the fifteenth century. They are thought to have migrated from Novgorod, the principality opening out to the Baltic and distinguished by its local assembly, private property, and trade with Scandinavia and the Hanseatic League; Novgorod was devoured by Muscovy in 1478. Courtesy of the archivist Dmitrii Panov, there is a genealogy on the father’s side spreading back eight generations to one Sergei Yeltsin, a state peasant registered at the start of the eighteenth century in the village of Basmanovo, or Basmanovskoye. Basmanovo was half again as big as Butka (its 1897 population was 1,307) and is located eight miles south, upriver on the Belyakovka. The connotations of the name were better than those of Butka. Basman, imported from the Tatar, refers to a loaf of bread baked for the royal court and stamped with its badge.¹² Sergei’s son Anika made his home in Butka, his grandson Pëtr in Basmanovo, and his great-grandson Ivan in Beregovaya, two miles downriver from Butka. Commencing with Boris Yeltsin’s great-great-grandfather, Savva, whose year of birth was 1807, and his great-grandfather, Yekim, born the fifth of Savva’s eight children in 1841, the family hearth was in Basmanovo.¹³ Another branch of the Yeltsins hailed from the hamlet of Konovalovaya, on a tributary of the Belyakovka fifteen miles to Butka’s east. Except for the odd soldier (an Ivan Yeltsin fought against Napoleon at Borodino in 1812, in the Yekaterinburg Regiment), the menfolk did not stray from the Basmanovo-Butka-Beregovaya-Konovalovaya quadrangle.¹⁴ The Basmanovo subgroup originally spelled the name “Yeltsyn,” and in Konovalovaya it was “Yel’tsyn.” The name was standardized to “Yel’tsin” after 1900. (I use the anglicized “Yeltsin.”)

Yekim Yeltsin had three sons, and Ignatii Yekimovich Yeltsin, evidently the oldest of them, born in Basmanovo in 1875, was to be Boris Yeltsin’s paternal grandfather. His paternal grandmother, the future Anna Dmitriyevna Yeltsina, was born there in 1877.¹⁵ Ignatii’s religious pedigree, it can be established secondhand, was Old Believer.¹⁶ The family’s dissidence had dimmed with time, as he was baptized Orthodox and worshiped in the Holy Trinity Orthodox congregation in Basmanovo (some say he was a deacon). But the telltale asceticism and industriousness of the sect endured. Wiry and bearded, Ignatii Yeltsin was a self-made man, a backwoods capitalist who, by Urals and Russian standards, prospered before the 1917 revolution. Shortly after marrying Anna in 1900 or 1901, he built a sizable framed house, trimmed in white, on the left bank of the Belyakovka; it stands to this day, a TV antenna jutting up between it and the toolshed. On twelve hectares (thirty acres) leased from the local land commune, he planted rye, wheat, and fodder. He had about five farmhands and owned a combine harvester, a thresher, five horses, four milk cows, and sheep and goats. In an outbuilding to his house, Ignatii worked as the Basmanovo blacksmith, shoeing horses, forging farm implements, and repairing mechanical equipment. He was also the proprietor of a water-powered flour mill on the Belyakovka and a larger windmill on the brow of the hill above the Yeltsin homestead. He was firm in the belief that, as one of his daughter-in-laws—Boris Yeltsin’s mother—was to put it after his death, good land and good economic results in this world fell to those who earned them: “People who worked lived well. And then there were lazybones and drinkers; they lived poorly.”¹⁷

A half-decade of accumulation was sacrificed to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and Russia’s civil war, when platoons of Red and White troops marauded through Basmanovo and Butka and helped themselves to horses and loot. Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak’s anti-Bolshevik cavalry were driven from the middle Urals in late 1919. The requisitioning of grain by Moscow under War Communism eased off in 1920, although food was in short supply in 1921–22. Resilient Ignatii picked up where he had left off. By terms of the liberalized New Economic Policy enacted by Vladimir Lenin in 1921, which let private entrepreneurs operate in farming, light industry, and commerce, he cultivated twelve acres and rehabilitated the windmill. Doubled over time from four to eight sails, the mill was the only one that peasants for miles around could use to process grain. To minimize envy and taxation, Ignatii Yeltsin relied on family members for manpower and in 1924 divvied up title to many of his assets among his three oldest sons.¹⁸

Nikolai Ignat’evich Yeltsin, the father of Boris Yeltsin, was born in Basmanovo in June 1906. He was the middle of the five offspring Ignatii and Anna produced between 1902 and 1912. From eldest to youngest, the others were Mariya, Ivan, Dmitrii, and Andrian. Nikolai was schooled in reading, writing, and arithmetic for four years—Basmanovo, unlike Butka, had a one-room school—and went into the Yeltsin businesses about 1920. Of the four sons, he and Andrian did carpentry and odd jobs, Ivan worked as a blacksmith with his father, and Dmitrii tended to the windmill on the hill. With an ear for music and a dulcet voice, Nikolai sang in the church choir with his father and brothers and played the harmonica and accordion in the evenings. He appears to have tried to assist with the Communist Party–sponsored government in Basmanovo; according to an autobiographical essay written in the 1950s, he worked from 1924 to 1928 “in an elective post attached to the village soviet [council].” In that same text, he said he “worked as a carpenter in a district workshop” in 1928 and 1929.¹⁹ But both these positions, so far as one can tell, were accessorial to his base activity, which was to labor with his father and brothers in the private sector.

In early 1928, bowing to Ignatii’s wish that he terminate a dalliance with a married woman,²⁰ Nikolai wed the nineteen-year-old daughter of a family of lesser means, which had been farming in Basmanovo since the 1670s. The bride’s name was Klavdiya Vasil’evna Starygina. Unschooled, she and her younger sister had been relegated to spinning, sewing, and field chores while waiting for husbands. “My mama would say,” she once told a journalist, “‘For what does a maiden need to be literate? To write letters to boys? She needs to think about getting married.’”²¹ Klavdiya, who was not much over five feet tall and had braided hair down to her waist, had known Nikolai since age fifteen. When he came courting, they decided to tie the knot immediately, during the Christmas season, and did without a church wedding. She was gladdened to enter the Yeltsin family, with its “golden hands” and property, but her people were not penniless. Vasilii Yegorovich Starygin, her father (born in 1877), was an accomplished carpenter and cabinetmaker who built houses in Basmanovo with the aid of relatives and wage workers; Afanasiya Kirillovna Starygina, her mother (born in 1881), was a needleworker of local acclaim.²²

Nikolai could afford a matrimonial home in Basmanovo, which Klavdiya festooned with tablecloths and other hand-crafted textiles. It was across the lane from Ignatii’s and from the humbler cabin built by Nikolai’s brother Ivan. (Dmitrii’s place was on another street, and Mariya and husband Yakov lived with her in-laws, the Gomzikovs.) Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin saw the light of day on February 1, 1931—in Butka. Nikolai and Klavdiya’s firstborn was brown-haired and had his mother’s sparkling blue eyes. In the Russian folk calendar, it was the time of the “Epiphany frosts” (kreshchenskiye morozy), the nippiest of the winter. Why a child conceived in Basmanovo was born in Butka—and why in an overcrowded little house, on marshy land on the far side of the Belyakovka from the village green—I shall explain shortly.²³ As his mother told him, and as he retold in his first autobiographical volume, Confession on an Assigned Theme, the baby all but drowned at christening when the priest, bibulous on homebrew, let him drop to the bottom of the font. Hearing the gurgles, Klavdiya retrieved him from the water, and the cleric proposed he be named Boris, from the same root etymologically as “struggle” and “fighter” (and also the name of one of Russia’s first two saints and one of its earliest tsars).²⁴ The family domicile in Butka, about fifteen feet by twenty, was filled to the rafters by a ménage of a dozen Yeltsins in three generations, most of whom slept on straw mattresses and overgarments. It still rests crookedly beneath a rusting iron roof at 22 Toilers Street. No plaque or sign immortalizes Yeltsin or his birth. When I ferreted out the house in September 2005, some denizens of the street did not know that the family had ever lived there.²⁵

At this juncture, the clan’s luck had taken a calamitous turn. In 1928 Stalin and his allies applied pressure on the Soviet peasantry to increase deliveries to government granaries. In 1929–30 they unleashed a social revolution in town and country, swinging from the market-oriented New Economic Policy to breakneck, state-led industrialization. In village Russia, the communists set neighbor against neighbor, divested well-to-do peasants, the kulaks, of their property, and corraled independent growers into kolkhozes and sovkhozes, bureaucratized collective and state farms.

Collectivization did not go unopposed. The young Leonid Brezhnev, who was to lead the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982, worked in the 1920s as a land surveyor and organizer of collective farms in Bisert district, to the west of Sverdlovsk; he became a probationary member of the party there in 1929. In his memoirs, he wrote that irate farmers “railed at us with ropes, pitchforks, malicious notes, and stones heaved through the window”—prompting government agents to “lead the onslaught against the hated kulaks” with ever more fervor.²⁶ It was an unequal contest and one in which, toward the end of 1929, the ruling party pressed its advantage with fury. If 1 percent of peasant households in the unified Urals region were collectivized in May 1928, that ratio went up to 7 percent in October 1929, 19 percent by late November 1929, and 67 percent by March 1930; many of the new collectives fell apart in 1930 and had to be reorganized in 1931 and 1932.²⁷

In Yeltsin’s birthplace, as at many a Urals address, symbols of the past came thudding down: The Church of the Presentation, shorn of its icons and its seven-point Orthodox cross, and the bronze bells in its belfry melted down, was converted into the district House of Culture and, in the 1950s, into a movie theater.²⁸ In 1932 and 1933, the leanest years, when crops failed and many peasants slaughtered their livestock, residents say there was cannibalism in Butka.²⁹ The population stagnated, coming to 1,007 in the Soviet census of 1939, only 182 more than in 1897. Lenin had envisioned communism in an amaranthine slogan as “Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country.” Butka was to be wired into the national electric grid only in 1946, after World War II. The first macadam road to Talitsa came in 1936 (asphalting waited until 1976), the first Butka school in 1937, and a spur line from the railroad, laid by corvée labor, in 1949.

In Confession on an Assigned Theme, composed hurriedly in 1989 and published in still-Soviet Russia in 1990, Boris Yeltsin sketched the Butka scene in one solitary page and without proper names, identifying individuals only by their position in the line of descent (father, mother, grandfather). He writes of “dekulakization” (as nasty a word as any in the Soviet lexicon) of “one and all”;³⁰ of bread and seed grain running out; of armed brigands roving the village; of his grandfather, seeing the family’s last cow and horse starve, installing home stoves for cash in 1935.

Some paragraphs down, we read how the teenaged Yeltsin decided in 1949 to get his grandfather’s blessing for his plans to study construction engineering in Sverdlovsk. Grandpa had the boy build a home steambath single-handedly as a show of his commitment. As for Nikolai, the word was that in 1935, “to save the family,” he fled Butka with them to drudge in construction in the city of Berezniki, which is in the vicinity of Perm, on the western, European incline of the Urals. Later in the memoir, Boris referred in a single disarming sentence to an arrest in the 1930s. “I well remember when my father was taken away in the night, and I was six years old,” which would date it in 1937.³¹ The Sverdlovsk journalist Andrei Goryun, who had conversations with Yeltsin’s mother, quoted her in 1991 as saying her father-in-law, Ignatii, going on eighty, was “sent away to certain death” on the northern taiga in 1931 and made it for only several months. Goryun also quoted a statement by Boris Yeltsin at a news conference in Sverdlovsk in 1989 that his father sat “several months in prison” in 1937.³²

Hamstrung by incomplete data and by Yeltsin’s taciturnity, analysts long recited these bits and pieces as gospel truth. Unwittingly, they misstated and understated the family’s tribulations.³³ Some shards, it transpires, were correct and some were not. Even in the accounts as of 1990, there were gaps and discrepancies. Ignatii Yeltsin could not have been eighty in 1931; if so, he would have been fifty when he sired his first child, most unlikely in a peasant family. Boris Yeltsin speaks in Confession of his grandfather surviving wraithlike in Butka until 1934–35, while his mother has him deported in 1931. Yeltsin describes meeting with his grandfather in 1949, almost two decades after he reputedly died in the north, and gives his age then as “over seventy,” another inconsistency. Yeltsin also states that both grandfathers got into their nineties, which would belie what his mother said about Ignatii Yekimovich. And nothing was ever said about what befell Anna Dmitriyevna Yeltsina—her very name was missing from the narrative.

The missing links in the chain of events can now be filled in, thanks to informational nuggets from family members and, for Nikolai Yeltsin, his unpublished autobiographical note and the forensic research of Aleksei Litvin, a historian from Kazan State University. The fate of the Yeltsin paterfamilias and his spouse was as harsh as Klavdiya Yeltsina presented it to Goryun, though different in some of the particulars. The die was cast when the Basmanovo village council in 1928 or 1929 slapped a punitive tax on Ignatii Yeltsin and disenfranchised him under a clause in the Soviet Russian constitution of 1918. The elections in which he had lost the right to vote were by now bogus affairs without competition; the real penalty was being fixed a member of a social category hostile to the regime and ineligible for all state benefits and services.³⁴ In 1930 the authorities officially branded Ignatii a kulak. He was triply vulnerable, as a profit-making cultivator, a mill owner, and a blacksmith—all of them in the regime’s black book.

Dekulakization scarred one and all indirectly but a substring of the rural population directly and viciously. A decision of the party Politburo, in Moscow, in January 1930 delineated three categories of kulak. The first were the “counterrevolutionary kulak activists,” persons who had been in the White armies or were against the regime; they were to be arrested and sent to concentration camps. Category two was “rich” kulaks, who had property but had not committed political offenses; their punishment was to be sent to boreal exile in “special settlements.” Ignatii was slotted into the third, smallest, and least nefarious category. Third-class kulaks were to be expropriated and resettled, serflike, on inferior land in their home districts, and could keep some of their farm tools and possessions on the say-so of the local government. The boundaries between the three categories of kulak were indistinct, as was the line between kulaks and the “middle peasants” below. The typical dekulakized family in the Urals owned a house, one cow, and three domestic fowl, worked five to eight acres of land, and was “far from prosperous.”³⁵ These assets were considerably less than Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin had had in the 1920s and much less than they had before 1917, so they were at risk for being put into the second category. But the third category was bad enough. In August or September of 1930, at harvest time, the village leaders impounded Ignatii’s farmstead and ran him, Anna, and his sons and daughters-in-law (one of them the pregnant Klavdiya Yeltsina) out of the community and sent them to Butka, which had been made the district seat for the area in the early 1920s. As he was put on a horse-drawn cart for the ride to Butka, the heartsick Ignatii wept and wrung his hands. He asked his daughter, Mariya, the only one of his progeny to stay behind, to pray for him: “Why am I being forced to go? For what I built with my own hands!”³⁶ His windmill and smithy would quickly fall into ruin, their remnants hauled off for scrap by neighbors.

This was the act of spoliation, expulsion, and spite that drove the Yeltsins to rent the rough-hewn, poorly situated cottage in Butka from an elderly widow. It was a lacerating demotion from their four houses and assorted farm buildings in Basmanovo. They were among the 4,200 Urals families, or roughly 21,000 people, subjected to local deportation in 1930; 100,000 people were put in camps or sent to the north. The upper Urals by January 1932 held almost a half million deported peasants, about one in three of the USSR total.³⁷ In Butka, Ivan, Nikolai, Dmitrii, and Andrian Yeltsin were admitted to the new Red May kolkhoz; Ignatii was not. For a year or two, like many Soviet peasants in his position, he went on the lam, hiding out with relatives and scavenging for handyman’s jobs to earn his keep.³⁸ With the stress and despair this begat, Klavdiya Vasil’evna could well have remembered him as eighty years old.

Four years later—and this Boris Yeltsin never acknowledged openly—the noose was tightened. Sometime in 1934, Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin were rounded up in Butka and banished again. It is unclear why, since the mass deportation of peasants ended in 1931. The Soviet norm was for third-category kulaks to work in supervised crews doing heavy labor the government valued, especially in woodcutting and construction. There was no such work at Butka, which perhaps drew official attention to the Yeltsins. Ignatii’s refusal to report to the police may have provoked them to act, and there could possibly have been a connection with the problems his son Nikolai was having that spring in the city (see below). One guesses that Ignatii, beggared in 1930, was reclassified in 1934 as a second-category kulak. Even that device would have created an anomaly. The regulations in effect in the Urals exempted from deportation kulak families that did not include an able-bodied male younger than fifty, and in 1934 Ignatii Yeltsin was fifty-nine.³⁹

Whatever the pretext, what came next was a long journey in convoy to the verge of nowhere: the uninviting and unfarmable environs of Nadezhdinsk, an ironworking center in the far north of Sverdlovsk province (1939 population 65,000), on the Kakva River 400 miles below the Arctic Circle. The Yeltsins and the ten or twelve other households removed with them could each bring only several sacks of belongings; tools and most of their cash and clothing, peasants’ sheepskin coats (tulupy) included, were taken away.⁴⁰ In the special settlements, exiles worked under police oversight and had 15 percent of their wages garnisheed to maintain the guard force. The outstations used people up: “The [housing]… was unfit for habitation. The lack of food and medical care consigned people to malnourishment and wasting away. Unsanitary conditions spread infections and epidemics of typhus, scarlet fever, and scurvy. All of this led to high mortality rates among the settlers.”⁴¹ In the worst years, 1932 and 1933, peasants in some remote northern places had to eat fallen draft animals, moss, and birch leaves.⁴²

Nadezhdinsk, which in a cruel jest means City of Hope in Russian (it was assigned the name Serov in 1939), held out not an iota of hope to the Yeltsins.⁴³ The outcasts subsisted in a dugout (zemlyanka), a concavity scooped out in the earth, with a wood coal fire for heat and a twig blind against the elements. The only organized industries in the virgin land around Nadezhdinsk were forestry and mining, which Ignatii was too old and arthritic to do. By grace of the police, he was given a few trips back to Butka to fix farm machinery for the kolkhoz. That was his only comfort. Destitute and distraught, he lost his sight and went into mental collapse. Ignatii Yekimovich died a broken man in 1936, at the age of sixty-one, far short of ninety. His widow was let out of the area in 1936 and moved to Berezniki to live with her eldest son, Ivan, and died there before her time in 1941.⁴⁴

The story did not end with the deaths of Ignatii and Anna. The gruesome truth is that all four of Yeltsin’s grandparents were victims in their own way of the terror. Vasilii Starygin had hired workmen in his homebuilding business, which was enough for him, too, to be dekulakized and deposited in Butka in 1930. In 1934, the same year the Yeltsins were transported north, the OGPU (the appellation of the Soviet political police in the first half of the 1930s) marooned Vasilii and Afanasiya Starygin in the selfsame subarctic precinct. At Nadezhdinsk/Serov they eked out a threadbare existence for eleven years. They apparently had some contact with the elder Yeltsins in the two years Ignatii and Anna spent in the area. A little younger and in better health, the Starygins were more adaptable than their relations by marriage. Vasilii built himself and his wife an above-ground cabin. He kept his sanity and kept afloat economically by making furniture and cabinets and selling them locally.⁴⁵ Boris Yeltsin and his mother, he was to say in an interview, paid calls on the grandparents in the summertime and helped out with the gardening.⁴⁶

The riddle of how the grandfather could die in the 1930s and miraculously reappear in the 1940s is thus solved: The first grandfather in Yeltsin’s transcription is his father’s father, Ignatii Yeltsin; the second is his mother’s father, Vasilii Starygin. Starygin was the master carpenter, not the blacksmith and mill owner, which would explain why his opinion would have been so treasured by Boris Yeltsin as he pondered going into construction and why Starygin would have wanted his grandson to prove himself with the steambath project. Dekulakized peasants and many administrative deportees in the Soviet Union were allowed out of their places of servitude after the war, especially if a close relative had fought in it; the rest were to be freed after Stalin breathed his last in 1953.⁴⁷ Possibly since several family members had been in the army, the Starygins, both of them still spry, were discharged in 1945. Nikolai and Klavdiya Yeltsin fetched her parents in Serov and brought them to Berezniki to share quarters with them and their children. They were to live to the ripe old age of ninety-one (for Vasilii Yegorovich, who would die in 1968) and eighty-nine (for Afanasiya Kirillovna, who died in 1970). From the same peasant stock and locale as Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin, they outlasted them by three decades.⁴⁸

Another bolt of lightning hit Boris Yeltsin’s parents. Nikolai, while admitted to the Butka kolkhoz, was looking even before his son’s birth for something better. This search led him to Nadezhdinsk, of all places, the little town near which his parents were to land in 1934. There he joined the great wave of peasants in quest of work in the new factories burgeoning in the Soviet Union’s first five-year plan. His 1950s autobiography tells us he “worked from 1930 to 1932 as a foreman” in Nadezhdinsk, presumably in the construction of a factory there.⁴⁹ His presence in Nadezhdinsk could not have been continuous. He was in Basmanovo to father Boris Nikolayevich in May or June of 1930, he was in Butka for the baptism in February or March of 1931, and he was attached to the Butka kolkhoz after Boris’s birth.⁵⁰ Spotty evidence suggests that Nikolai, Klavdiya, and their newborn spent the winter of 1931–32 in Nadezhdinsk and returned to the village after that.⁵¹ In December 1932 the kolkhoz chairman let Nikolai and his kid brother, Andrian, go somewhere else. The train they boarded was not to Nadezhdinsk or to Berezniki, as Yeltsin’s first book of memoirs says, but to Kazan, the polyglot capital of the republic of Tatariya, on the Volga River equidistant from Sverdlovsk and Moscow.

Ivan the Terrible conquered the Volga Tatar khanate at Kazan in 1552, annexed its territories, and opened it to Russian settlers and to Orthodoxy (the Tatars are Sunni Muslims). Lenin lived there for a few months in 1887 and was expelled from the local university for revolutionary activity. The population was a quarter million in 1932. The Yeltsin men signed on as woodworkers in Aviastroi, the syndicate constructing Works No. 124, an aviation plant, at the hamlet of Karavayevo, five miles north of the Kazan kremlin. The works was going to produce gleaming military aircraft designed by the illustrious aeronautical engineer Andrei Tupolev.⁵² Those who put it up were limited to pick and shovel, flatbed trucks, and hand tools. Nikolai was promoted to leader of a crew that built housing, an equipment depot, and a workshop in the assembly hangar. He also, it would seem, studied in the evenings in a technical school (tekhnikum) for construction personnel.⁵³ Klavdiya and her toddler lived with him in Barracks No. 8 in the settlement of Sukhaya River. A Russian “barracks” (barak) is a ramshackle wood shack, either unpartitioned or ranging bedrooms off of a long corridor; the Sukhaya River building had the latter plan. Nikolai and his wife and son had an unadorned family room to themselves; Andrian’s bachelor room was one door down. “Like nomads,” Klavdiya and Boris again flitted to Butka in the spring and back to Kazan when the snow flew. They kept up their shuttling between village and city, which was commonplace in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia, for several years.⁵⁴

On April 27, 1934—not in 1937—the young family’s world was turned topsy-turvy. OGPU officers, let in by the barracks commandant, collared Nikolai and Andrian Yeltsin and took them off in a “black crow” paddy wagon to the Kazan political prison. The arrest report said all their rooms contained were sticks of furniture and a smattering of letters and identification papers.⁵⁵ Six Aviastroi workers from Urals and Volga farm families had been under observation since January 1934. In conspiratorial mode, the OGPU gave them the code name Odnosel’chane, Countrymen, implying that they were from the same village or district. But they were not. Besides the two Yeltsins, there were Prokofii Gavrilov and his son Ivan, ethnic Russians from another part of the Urals, plus Vasilii Vakhrushev, whose nationality was Udmurt, a Finno-Ugric minority, and who was from Udmurtiya, and Ivan Sokolov, a Russian from Tatariya. The file bulged with materials from their home villages and the Kazan workforce. Three weeks of bullyragging led to accusations of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” a crime under the infamous Article 58, Section 10 of the Russian penal code. On May 23 an OGPU tribunal, ruling on Case No. 5644, found them guilty as charged and sentenced five of the six (the Yeltsins, the Gavrilovs, and Vakhrushev) to three years in a forced-labor camp, minus one month for time served; Sokolov, fingered as the inciter, got five years. If they had come into the police’s clutches in 1930 or 1931 or after 1935, they would have been much more liable to be tortured or put to death.⁵⁶

The investigation and summary trial were a travesty, a paranoid era in microcosm. It is plain from Aleksei Litvin’s sleuthing, though, that the defendants had “an ill-concealed dissatisfaction with conditions at the construction site.”⁵⁷ This provided the OGPU with ammunition for prosecution as a deterrent to their coworkers. The six, the formal indictment alleged, had underhandedly preyed on “the actual difficulties” with food and supplies at the factory. They grumbled about scarcity of their rationed provisions, soup made from rancid meat, a ban on solemnizing Orthodox Easter, and deductions from their pay packets for state bonds and to make donations to communists imprisoned in Austria. OGPU interrogators trolled for more political articulations, dragooning a laborer from Basmanovo, Sergei Kudrinskii, into testifying under oath to the Yeltsins’ kulak origins and to the twenty-two-year-old Andrian having said the people would be better off if a war broke out and the Soviet government was toppled. For Nikolai Yeltsin, no such words were hit upon, although his and Klavdiya’s bedroom in the tumbledown Barracks No. 8 was where the most inculpating conversations were said to have taken place. The canard that most occupied the inquisitors was offered by Maksim Otletayev, a Tatar carpenter, who gave information that Nikolai had prevented the workers from reading Soviet newspapers out loud at the Aviastroi site. The dossier shows the presiding officer staging an in-person meeting between Nikolai and Otletayev and peppering Yeltsin with queries on this and other venial offenses:

These equivocations and a steadfast denial of any lawbreaking, recorded in his signature on the indictment, were the best Nikolai Yeltsin could do in the OGPU snake pit. That he felt disaffection with the Soviet regime in 1934 is beyond question. It was anchored in the ravages of collectivization and forced-draft urbanization and in the lot of the Yeltsin and Starygin families. But it was his grousing about Aviastroi that got him into the police’s bad books. He faulted the newspaper readings mostly as a drag on productivity, as tallies with his crusty personality.⁵⁹ He and his brother, unlike many Soviets in Stalin’s time, begged off collusion with the police. When the OGPU approached them, the reed they grabbed was the same artifice of peasant simple-mindedness that Nikolai had pleaded in his interrogation. The OGPU papers sent to the camp specified they were “not subject to recruitment” as stool pigeons and were to be watched with special vigilance.⁶⁰

Boris Yeltsin cried himself to sleep the night his father was taken into custody. He was too young to follow it but “could see my mother was sobbing and how petrified she was.”⁶¹ The two were imperiled when the Aviastroi barracks prepared to kick them out after Nikolai’s sentencing. A Good Samaritan—Vasilii Petrov, a sixty-year-old medical orderly and World War I veteran who was Nikolai’s cell mate as they awaited trial—took pity on them and asked his wife, Yelizaveta, and young daughter, Nina, to help out. Help they did. They came upon mother and child crouched in the hallway, locked out of their room, and gave them sanctuary in the Petrov cottage on Sixth Union Street. Klavdiya Vasil’evna would scrape by, working as a seamstress at a Kazan garment factory, where she learned to read and write in an evening class, and as a baker’s helper at Bread Factory No. 2. The boy, Nina said in the 1990s, was “skinny, calm, and obedient.” “When his mama would say to him, ‘I’m going to work, sit here quietly,’ he did not fuss…. The only toy he had was a doll. He wasn’t to touch it, only to look at it. But kids will be kids. Borya played with little pyramids he made out of pieces of wood. In the winter he and I loved to go on toboggan rides.”⁶² In 1936–37 Boris attended a kindergarten in Kazan, perhaps one attached to the bakery.⁶³

Nikolai Ignat’evich did his time at the Dmitrov camp on the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Suez-size dig to open up the capital to Volga water and shipping, which was the most pharaonic project in Stalin’s Gulag. The work, as a bearer and carpenter, was backbreaking and hellishly unsafe. Death rates among the canal’s almost 200,000 inmates were high. One in six was claimed by exposure, accidents, and disease in 1933 alone, so Nikolai’s chances of making it through three years were maybe fifty-fifty.⁶⁴ He did make it, however, and was released seven months early. Aleksei Litvin is convinced there was an explicit deal for him to do post-Gulag work duty in Berezniki, and his discharge form from the Dmitrov camp did say he was bound for Berezniki.⁶⁵ This, though, would not explain why Nikolai did not go there directly.

In October 1936 Nikolai Ignat’evich was restored to his wife and son at the Petrovs’ in Kazan. His registration papers said he was unemployed, that is, not formally signed up at a state workplace, in 1936–37. He must have found some work in the informal sector to put bread on the table. He may also have re-enrolled at the construction tekhnikum where he had taken classes before his arrest.⁶⁶ Further reason to tarry in Kazan was Klavdiya’s pregnancy with their second child. Mikhail Yeltsin was born in July 1937. The six-year-old Boris was godfather at his christening. Right after, on July 31, the four pulled up stakes for Berezniki and the Urals, trundling their every possession in a wood laminate trunk. Vasilii Petrov was released from captivity and died in late 1937; his wife lived until 1966 and Nina until 2002. Klavdiya Yeltsina and the Petrovs corresponded and then lost track of one another during the war. As a mark of gratitude, Boris Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, bought Nina and her family a two-room apartment in Kazan in 1999, using Yeltsin’s book royalties; in 2006, on a visit to the city, she laid flowers on Nina’s grave.⁶⁷

The Yeltsins’ destination in 1937 was on the upper Kama River, some 400 miles northeast of Kazan (which is near where the Kama, flowing south, empties into the Volga) and 100 miles north of the major city of Perm. Berezniki lay over the proverbial Russian salt mines. First at the mouth of the small Zyryanka River on the left bank and later in the right-bank town of Usol’e, the Stroganovs, a monied merchant family from Novgorod, had begun in the sixteenth century to extricate unpurified sodium chloride out of the ground and refine it through desiccation and boiling. The saltworks went into decline in the eighteenth century, undersold by product from the Volga basin. In the nineteenth century, admixtures of calcium and magnesium chlorides were discovered in the local brine; these could be separated out through ammonia treatment and used as ingredients for fertilizers, industrial chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. The Belgian company Solvay and a Russian shipbuilder, Ivan Lyubimov, constructed a soda plant in the village of Churtan in 1883. Communist planners were taken with the area’s potential after 1917, and opened Russia’s first radium mill there in the 1920s. In the first five-year plan, they made it the epicenter of the Soviet chemical industry—a “republic of chemistry,” in a shibboleth of the day. The municipality of Berezniki was formed in March 1932 as an amalgamation of Churtan, the other four villages over the salt beds on the left bank of the Kama, and Usol’e, which was to be severed from it in 1940.

As a sign of the times, the city had its own penal colony, an arm of the camp complex at the conflux of the Kama and the Vishera, the first Gulag outpost in the Urals. The encampment on Adamova Hill, assigned in May 1929 to build the Berezniki Potash Combine on log piles driven into a bog, had as many as ten thousand workers in the early 1930s. Convicts were needed because free laborers did not want to go to Berezniki, which was short of housing and food and had had an outbreak of typhus in 1930. As the OGPU (renamed the NKVD in 1934) reassigned the prisoners to new building sites, other workers, many of them former inmates or indigent deportees under police restrictions, took their place. “The mass of the builders of the city were exiles and resettled people—dekulakized peasants from central Russia, Tatariya, and Ukraine, politically unreliable elements, counterrevolutionaries, intellectuals, and so forth. Later [during World War II] they would be joined by [deported] Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, et cetera.”⁶⁸ Berezniki was a venue for the dregs of society, as those who ruled Soviet society defined it.

Nikolai Yeltsin’s older brother, Ivan, was already in Berezniki, having been sent to involuntary labor there in 1935 for “subverting” grain procurement in Butka (he could not meet his quota despite selling all he had to make up the difference); he checked in with the NKVD but was not in lockup. Before 1936 was out, Nikolai and Ivan’s bereaved mother, Anna, had come to be with Ivan after burying her husband at Nadezhdinsk. Dmitrii and Andrian Yeltsin were soon to join them from Butka and Dmitrov. Nikolai got work in 1937 at Sevuraltyazhstroi, the North Urals Heavy Industry Construction Trust, and was assigned to the potash combine project. As an ex-convict, he would be banned until the mid-1950s from residing in Perm, Sverdlovsk, and the USSR’s principal cities and from membership in the Communist Party. Within those limits, he and his family lived a humdrum Soviet life unmolested. Only on July 15, 1989, was he to be exonerated of the 1934 charges, twelve years after his death, by a Gorbachevera commission.⁶⁹

Boris Yeltsin’s reaction to this palimpsest of misery is more important to his development than the raw facts are. Until the glasnost’ of the 1980s, censorship and political conformism bottled up many neuralgic truths about the Soviet past. The removal of restraints on the exterior did not do away with restraints on the interior. Klavdiya Yeltsina, replying to Andrei Goryun at the highwater mark of revelations about Soviet history, clammed up about the detention of her husband and their sojourn in Kazan. More astounding, she did not mention her parents’ loss or their stolen decade at Nadezhdinsk/ Serov. The years may have dulled an old woman’s memory; it is hard to believe that she did not remember the plight of, and her separation from, her mother and father. Boris Yeltsin cannot be blamed a half-century later for mistaking his age upon the jailing of his father for six rather than three. But a person could not as easily forget that the parent’s sentence, and time out of the nest, was measured in years and not in months. Yeltsin did not say anything about Kazan in Confession on an Assigned Theme; in autobiographical forms dating from the 1960s and 1970s, stored in the Communist Party archive, he had listed it as a place of residence.⁷⁰ Later, in the second volume of his memoirs, Notes of a President, and in visits to the city in the 1990s and in retirement, he was to recount having lived there.⁷¹ He had only fuzzy memories of Ignatii Yekimovich, although he did know Anna Dmitriyevna, who died in Berezniki when he was ten. Whatever he retained about his paternal grandparents, he knew that his maternal grandparents had been uprooted from Basmanovo and Butka and languished in the penumbra of the Gulag until moving to Berezniki and into his parents’ house in 1945. Yeltsin skirted the subject in Confession even though the book was rushed into print in time for his campaign for a seat in the Russian parliament in 1990 and word of his family would have been electorally useful. He still shied away from making known his grandparents’ fate in Notes of a President, which went to press in post-Soviet 1994. (Volume three, Presidential Marathon, was all about the 1990s.) For him, as for his mother, recall was selective and not only blurred.

Why the amnesia? A misplaced shame about trouble with the powers-thatbe, implanted in the Yeltsins by Soviet education and propaganda, was surely part of it.⁷² A sense of proportion, a mental barometer of sorrow, was also involved. For Klavdiya Yeltsina, having let Goryun in on her father-in-law’s wretched death, it would have been indecent to speak in the same breath about her parents, who got through their purgatory alive. Another dampener, symptomatic of the times, was a conspiracy of silence inside the nuclear family. A nephew of Nikolai and Klavdiya’s from Butka who boarded with them in Berezniki for two years in the late 1950s never heard them refer to Nikolai’s arrest, and in an interview with me in 2005, in Butka, swore that it was a fiction.⁷³ About the incarceration, Yeltsin wrote in Notes: “My father never spoke with me about it. He erased this piece of his life from his memory as if it had never been. The family was forbidden to talk about the subject.” When I asked him about it, he repeated these words almost verbatim.⁷⁴ The autobiographical note Nikolai wrote in Berezniki did not mention the OGPU and the Gulag.⁷⁵ Klavdiya Yeltsina was more loquacious and more agitated. Goryun concludes on the basis of his contact with her that she “felt herself innocently wronged” and “could not have failed to tell her children… about the tragic occurrences of the 1930s.”⁷⁶ To my question in 2002 about whether his mother was more unforgiving of the family’s pain than her husband, Yeltsin nodded yes but did not go into detail. And he indicated his familiarity with the Yeltsins and Starygins having been pauperized and stigmatized: “I did not approve of dekulakization, I did not support it. I was hurt for my grandfather [Starygin], whom I loved, and for my father and mother.”⁷⁷ But being hurt and verbalizing the source of the hurt were two different responses.

We can take Yeltsin at his word that until he held Nikolai Yeltsin’s OGPU interrogation file in his hand in the 1990s he was uninformed about many details of the victimization of his family. He also says in Notes that, if he had come by this information earlier, he would have understood the “banal horror” of Stalinism and his life might have “taken a different turn.”⁷⁸ This is more problematic, in that Yeltsin was not unaware of the police state and knew generally how it had impinged on his kin. A different political turn in the Soviet 1930s or 1940s would have been impossible. The Urals, like Russia and the USSR as a whole, were bombarded with word of the misdeeds of saboteurs and spies. The Urals party leadership under Ivan Kabakov was purged by Stalin in 1937 as a “right-wing and Trotskyite center,” and officials, intellectuals, and factory directors were arrested by the thousands. Agitprop encouraged citizens to pass on to the police anonymous tips about loose talk. “People had to answer for it if they made remiss statements about Soviet reality or maintained relations with friends or relatives who had been condemned as ‘enemies of the people.’”⁷⁹ In 1937 and the first nine months of 1938, when the Perm area was still part of Sverdlovsk region, most political prisoners under sentence of death were convoyed to the provincial capital for execution. At a killing field just west of Sverdlovsk, some seven thousand men and women from places like Perm and Berezniki were shot in those twenty-one months, an average of eleven a day. A memorial cross was put up there in the 1990s.⁸⁰

For those who came of age in the shadow of such barbarism, Yeltsin among them, putting a lid on the recapitulation of terror was a psychological defense mechanism and insurance against repercussions from babbling about it. The trouble was that over the years and the decades the repression fed on itself. The later the sufferings of the elders were owned up to, the more the silence had to be explained, which in turn raised the cost of making a clean breast of it and finally moving on.