Yeltsin: A Life

CHAPTER TWO Scripts

Nikolai and Klavdiya Yeltsin, their vagabondage over, settled down in Berezniki, as did Nikolai’s three brothers. Boris lived with his parents there until he headed for Sverdlovsk and a higher education in 1949.

Berezniki was the second city of Perm oblast’, the principal Soviet term for province after 1929. At 59° 24’ north, it is set in taiga of spruce, silver fir, and the spindly birches that lend it its name (bereznik or bereznyak is birch wood), and has only 100 to 110 frost-free days a year. In population, it was 65,000 in 1939, not counting internees, and maybe 80,000 in 1950. The Perm area, having been part of a region centered in Sverdlovsk since 1923, was made an oblast in 1938, the last section of the Urals freed from the control of Sverdlovsk. From 1940 to 1957, it and its capital would bear the name Molotov, after Stalin henchman Vyacheslav Molotov.

The enveloping forest has a pellucid, rustling beauty, and every June and July it has “white nights” as enchanting as those of St. Petersburg or Stockholm. But as factory towns go it would be hard to think of one much bleaker than Berezniki when the Yeltsins made their way there. Decades before, an 1890 travelogue, describing an approach by vessel up the Kama from Perm, drew a panorama of man-made desolation: “The closer you get to Usol’e, the grimmer and more mournful the riverbanks. You no longer see forest; the fields are without greenery…. On both banks… you find salt barns, linked by dark, cold tunnels. Great black saltworks stand out against the pewter sky and create an impression of gloom.”¹ By the 1930s the new city’s factories were turning out soda, mineral fertilizers, dyes, and pesticides. Its residential center was built about five miles inland, to keep travel time to the workplaces there to a minimum. During World War II (the Great Patriotic War of 1941 to 1945, as the Russians knew it), a magnesium and titanium mill was added to the chemical works. Berezniki was awash in refugees and wounded servicemen, several schools served as rehab hospitals, and evacuated factory machinery was stored in mine shafts and chutes. In addition to gunpowder and conventional explosives, Berezniki was one of five cities in the Soviet Union to produce toxic compounds for chemical weapons. Workers made mustard gas, lewisite, hydrogen cyanide, and adamsite and decanted thousands of tons of them into canisters for the army and air force. The ecological byproducts were horrendous. Contaminants spewed unfiltered into the water, atmosphere, and soil; puddles of brine and effluent pockmarked the townscape; tailings coughed up by the mines, ashes, and chemicals all sprawled in windblown dunes up to 250 feet high; houses and factories could sink into karsts and mining cavities. All these years later, Berezniki is one of the most polluted cities in Russia. Industrial smoke and fumes still foul the air. A containment pond for liquid wastes, built next to the Kama after the war, glows an iridescent green and does not ice over in wintertime. Berezniki’s children have abnormal rates of morbidity and are eight times likelier to have blood ailments than those in other urban centers.²

Never far away in the Yeltsins’ allotted hometown were the barbed wire, watchtowers, and guard dogs of the Gulag. A stockade for 11,000 German and Axis prisoners of war was set up in 1943. A new strict-labor camp for Soviet convicts came in 1946 to expand a chemical plant, and to build another in 1950, when its workforce capped off at 4,500. Across the Kama artery in Usol’e lay a camp specializing in lumbering (with 24,900 inmates in 1940 and 3,600 in 1953). Twenty miles upriver at Solikamsk, the location of the Stroganovs’ first salt pit, was a small camp for building a pulp and paper mill (4,300 inmates in 1938) and a big one for lumbering (32,700 in 1938); at Kizel, forty miles south, captives logged and built hydro dams in two waves (with peaks at 7,700 in 1946 and 21,300 in 1953).³ Taken together, this unfree labor dwarfed the legally free workforce of Berezniki.⁴

Soviet cities were cauldrons for social change and for the conversion of peasants into proletarians. But the size of the inflow from the villages, the tenacity of agrarian identities, and the systematic underinvestment in urban infrastructure meant that the cities themselves were substantially peasantized in the 1930s and 1940s.⁵ When the Yeltsins first walked its streets, Berezniki had almost no pavement, no sewage system, and no public transit. It had some asphalt and sewage mains by 1950, though still no buses or streetcars. And yet, Berezniki had been laid out by planners from Leningrad as a “socialist city,” and there was some attention to culture and leisure: the Avangard cinema, a live theater, a museum, several stadiums, a park and arboretum on Stalin Prospect (Lenin Prospect today). Postwar apartment houses had “elements of the classical orders, immense window apertures reminiscent of Roman triumphal arches,” and “obelisk-like turrets in memory of those who had fallen” in the crusade against fascism.⁶

Nikolai Yeltsin made the best of the situation. He bootstrapped himself during and after the war from woodworker at the bench to foreman, work superintendent, dispatcher, planner, and head of several technical bureaus at Sevuraltyazhstroi. In wartime Klavdiya Yeltsina did twelve-hour shifts as a dressmaker. After 1945 she was that rarity in the urban USSR, a housewife who worked wholly in the home. She reared their two sons and a daughter, Valentina, born in July 1944, took in sewing to pad out Nikolai’s income, and cared for her parents, who did not work once they were out of exile.

Debarking in 1937, the family found lodgings for several months in Usol’e, from where Nikolai commuted to work by ferry (there was no bridge over the Kama until the 1950s). After about a year shoehorned with three other households into a scruffy timber cottage in Berezniki, they were given one of the twenty rooms in a new two-story wood barracks, in the adjacent Zhdanovo Fields section of town. It had outdoor plumbing (privies and a well) and was so leaky and drafty that the children huddled on winter nights with a nanny goat. The animal, Polya, was also a source of fresh milk. In Confession on an Assigned Theme, Yeltsin fastened on the auditory porousness of the thin walls. Were any tenant to mark a name day, birthday, or wedding, someone would put on the windup gramophone “and the whole barracks would be singing…. Quarrels, conversations, scandals, secrets, mirth—the entire barracks could hear, everyone knew everything. It could be that is why I still remember the barracks with such revulsion.”⁷ Across the street was the city’s only public bathhouse, where a weekly soaping and soaking could be had for pennies. Next to it was the bustling farmers’ bazaar, one of the thousands in Soviet towns where peasants since 1935 had been allowed to sell, at unregulated prices, food they grew in plots behind their homes. On another side were sheds for the barracks dwellers’ goats, chickens, and geese, while cattle grazed in the unbuilt portion of Zhdanovo Fields. The log house and the barracks have long since been torn down.⁸

In 1944, in anticipation of Valentina’s birth, Nikolai used his construction skills and tools and, it may be hazarded, his connections with materials suppliers to erect a private house, as was permissible under Soviet legislation. It was in brick and stood on a parcel of land known as the Seventh Block, facing First Pond, the water reservoir for the old Stroganov mine. The home’s four rooms and a kitchen were enough to accommodate the Starygins comfortably when they arrived from Serov in 1945. Boris Yeltsin did not note this change of circumstances in his autobiography, saying only that they lived in the Berezniki barracks for ten years (the actual figure was about six) and passing over how they were housed after that. More than likely, he feared some readers would impute the family’s acquisition of such an asset to greed or privilege. A private house (but not the land beneath it, which was owned by the state) was a valuable nest egg, and protection against the inflation that ate into cash savings.⁹

A decade and a half after dekulakization, the Yeltsin house, which is still in use, was palpable betterment, and it spoke well of the esteem Nikolai was earning in the urban world. Ironically, it also re-created the rural ambience the family had lost and felt the need of. Grandfather and grandmother Starygin having moved in, the three generations cohabited, much as they would have in the Russian village, where they would have shared a house or lived within walking distance. Out in the yard were a woodpile, a vegetable garden, some poultry—and the small steambath Boris built for Vasilii Starygin in 1949. But the village continued to tug at the family’s heartstrings. In 1955 Nikolai was asked to act as chairman of a Urals collective farm—in the village of Urol, Molotov oblast—during an all-USSR campaign to recruit urban specialists for positions in the agrarian economy. He accepted, but the experiment failed, and he took back his technical job in the Sevuraltyazhstroi construction trust in two months.¹⁰ In 1959 he was sent to represent the trust at the USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements, the trade fair and amusement park in Moscow lorded over by Vera Mukhina’s steel statue of a brawny male worker and a peasant woman holding aloft a hammer and a sickle. When he received the invitation to the capital, which he had never laid eyes on, he could not believe his good fortune: “He read it out, grabbed his head, and bounded off to the office [to check it], although by the standards of those years he cut a figure that corresponded [to the honor].”¹¹ But the bright lights were not really for him. In 1962 Nikolai was to take a pension and, after a thirty-year absence, to repatriate to Butka with his wife, turning the wheel full circle. Klavdiya’s aging parents made the move with them. The sale of the Berezniki home allowed them to purchase a cozy cabin at 1 Korotkii Lane with cash.¹²

The family’s mores were rooted in communism and in the austerity of the Urals countryside and of their Old Believer and Russian Orthodox forerunners there. While Klavdiya was “devoutly religious” from first to the last, the Yeltsins, in the land of official atheism, were not observant. Churchgoing was impossible in Berezniki, as the only Orthodox temple, the Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist, was closed by the government in 1937 and did not open again for worship until 1992. Valentina Yeltsina, unlike her brothers, was not christened as a babe in 1944. A layman could have administered the sacrament, or the Yeltsins could have gone to a village church outside of Berezniki, but they took neither option. The living room of the home had no icons on display, although the Starygins did keep icons in their bedroom and Klavdiya Vasil’evna prayed before a miniature icon she hid from prying eyes.¹³ Boris grew up with no religious beliefs and developed a regard for Christianity only in the 1980s and 1990s.¹⁴

Nikolai and Klavdiya, she said in 1991, two years before her death, agreed that it was a big job “raising a good person who does not run around the streets like a waif or come into bad company.”¹⁵ None of the siblings smoked, played cards or dice, used smutty language, or touched liquor. Any trespass on this code would have been condemned in the classroom as well as in the home. Teachers at the schoolhouse where Boris studied after the war would order the pupils to shun for an entire month any pupil with the odor of tobacco on his or her breath; for the smell of alcohol, the penalty was a one-week suspension from classes and a stern note to the parents. At the age of sixteen, Yeltsin intercepted another adolescent in the act of buying a glassful of vodka at a roadside stand; he prudishly poured the liquid on the sidewalk, paid the vendor for it, and walked off. Unlike cigarettes, gambling, and swearing, drinking was one thing in which he would indulge in later life. His old classmate Sergei Molchanov, who lived in Berezniki until his death in 2006, was sure that the first alcohol that Yeltsin ever touched was the glass of champagne he was given to sip at his secondary-school graduation party in 1949.¹⁶

The growing boy had his mother’s square physiognomy. To her, whom he had all to himself during Nikolai’s interlude in the Gulag and then frequent stays at construction jobs, were his warmest attachments. “My mother,” he said in a judgment echoed by everyone who knew her, “was a very kind woman, tender and caressing.” “I… loved her considerably more than my father,” he added.¹⁷ In disposition, Boris Yeltsin always stressed how much he took after the man of the house: “My father’s character was gruff [krutoi], like my grandfather’s, and I suppose this was passed on to me.” The context indicates the grandfather referred to here is Ignatii Yeltsin (Nikolai’s father), but Vasilii Starygin (Klavdiya’s father), whom Boris Yeltsin knew far longer and better, did not give up much to Ignatii in the gruffness department. In the late 1940s, he was “an imposing codger with a long beard and an original mind,” Yeltsin wrote, and as “unregenerate and obstinate” as they come.¹⁸ In a press interview on turning seventy-five in 2006, Boris Yeltsin attributed “my emotionalism and explosive character” to Starygin: “This was inborn. It was handed on to me from my grandfather [Starygin]. My grandmother was afraid to cross him.”¹⁹

Between father and son, Nikolai and Boris, bullheadedness on both sides and a rivalry for Klavdiya’s affection, aggravated by Nikolai’s absences, by his binge drinking, and by the wide spacing of the children, made for a fraught relationship. In his first memoir volume, Yeltsin tells of Nikolai strapping him with a leather belt and of the arguments this kicked up between his parents. He would endure it mutely—and his father for his part would also say nothing—until his mother, “my constant protector,” came to the rescue and shooed Nikolai away.²⁰ In one theory about the beatings, Yeltsin’s submission is said to point to masochism in his makeup.²¹ It is a cockamamie theory: Russian peasant boys took corporal punishment without a murmur; girls could cry, but not boys. Yeltsin took no joy in it and finally pushed back. At fourteen or fifteen, he demanded that Nikolai refrain from pummeling him and leave him in charge of his own character formation. “We are not in the time of the tsars,” Klavdiya remembered him saying to his father, “when it was all right to thrash people with birch rods.” It was then that Nikolai stopped the beatings.²² There is no way to know how often these whippings were administered or at what age they began. Boris Yeltsin’s account says his father brought him into the bedroom, closed the door, and laid him on the bed as he pulled out the strap. This would have had to be in the family house, built in 1944, since in the barracks they had only one room. One might infer from this that the punishment did not begin until the boy was around the age of puberty and did not last more than a year or two.

While the nurturing Klavdiya Vasil’evna took his side against her husband, she should not be turned into a cardboard saint. A boyhood friend, Vladimir Zhdanov, told a reporter in 2001 that Auntie Klava, as the local children called her, had teeth beneath the smile and did not coddle her son: “She was very strong-willed and strict…. [He] could not disobey her on anything. If she said, ‘Do your lessons,’ he sat right down and did them.”²³ The mature Boris was to take a similar stance toward non–family members subordinate to him.

Nor did everything with Nikolai Ignat’evich have a sharp edge. There was an imaginative side to him, which Boris admired. Here is how he puts it in Confession:

My father was always trying to invent something. One of his dreams was to come up with an automated machine that would lay bricks. He would sketch it out, do drawings, think it over, make calculations, and then produce another set of drawings. It was a kind of phantom for him. Alas, no one has ever invented such a gizmo, although even now whole research institutes rack their brains over it. He would describe to me what his machine would be like and how it would work: how it would mix the mortar, put down the bricks, clean off the excess, and move along. He had worked it all out in his head and had drawn the general plan for it, but never realized the idea in metal.²⁴

Nikolai bequeathed to his son this restlessness, his work ethic, a knowledge of carpentry, and the art of the folk percussion instrument, the wood spoons (lozhki), played by slapping one spoon against another and against the bended knee. He also handed the boy a love of the banya, the wet steambath that alternates sweating with cooling in fresh water or a pool and cleanses the skin, relaxes the mind, and, as Russians see it, strengthens the organism and prepares the bather for life’s trials. The bath is often taken in single-sex groups and in the culture can be conducive to male bonding, as it was at various times for Boris Yeltsin.

Yeltsin’s exegesis of the years in Berezniki is the most novelistic section of his memoirs, yet it skimps on details and is not always reliable. Two years, 1937 to 1939, were inactive, a respite from education, at home with his mother and baby brother, after the kindergarten in Kazan.²⁵ Six years, 1939 to 1945, were passed at Railway School No. 95, an elementary school operated by the transport ministry (Yeltsin does not name the school), and four, 1945 through 1949, at the municipal Secondary School No. 1, or the Pushkin School (this one he does name), which offered ten years of instruction. The company Boris kept was almost exclusively male. Many of his friends in the first school were the sons of army officers stationed at a military college moved to safety in Berezniki from Leningrad.²⁶ The Pushkin School, under Soviet policy, was converted to an all-boys school in 1946, his second year there.²⁷ Above him, though, at school as at home—and more widely in a society where tens of millions of able-bodied men were in military service or had given their lives in it—those in authority were often female. Of 26 to 27 million Soviet deaths in the war, about 20 million were male. In 1946 women in their twenties outnumbered men by about 50 percent. Two million soldiers from the Urals served in the war and more than 600,000 died.²⁸

Yeltsin as memoirist vouched for the importance to him of the formative phase of his life—of “childhood, out of which come all the models that the person assimilates firmly and forever.”²⁹ It is at this labile time that we find him evincing what I think of as his personal scripts, characteristic bunches of attitudes and behaviors that recur in his adult life.³⁰ He acted out five of them, turning on survival, duty, success, testing of his powers, and rebellion.

Grinding poverty, acquaintance with oppression, and a punitory father all dictated that Boris Yeltsin take care of brute survival and the basics of life. From the outbreak of war with Germany in 1941 until 1947, Berezniki schools had no central heating, only stoves fed with firewood, and the inkwells froze in the winter months. Like the other pupils, Yeltsin frequently wrote his lessons on scissored-up paper wrappings. The family “made ends meet as best they could,” his friend Zhdanov remembers.³¹ The phasing out of food rationing in the mid-1930s went with a slight improvement in supply in Berezniki, although to levels below the experience of most Westerners.³² Rationing was reimposed during the war. His mother would say much later:

One can see how every drop of Polya’s warm milk was precious to the Yeltsins. Boris and his mother mowed hay in the summers, sold their half of the harvest to whoever wanted it, and bought bread with the proceeds. The year he was twelve, he herded sheep on a local farm. He carried pails of water, cooked, and darned his own socks and underwear. “My childhood went by rather cheerlessly,” he says in summary. “There weren’t delights or delicacies, nothing like that. We just wanted to survive, survive, and survive.”³⁴

The second, closely related script the boy lived by revolved around duties. In the family setting, he was a devoted son, especially in relation to his mother. A half-century after the fact, Klavdiya Yeltsina was to tell a journalist about the thirteen-year-old Boris—not Nikolai—coming to see her in the maternity ward after she gave birth to Valentina, bringing her tasty meals and embroidering a rug with a goldfish theme for her homecoming. When they planted their family garden with potatoes, “My older son would go to hill it and hoe it, without ever having to be reminded.”³⁵ Yeltsin also provided protection to his mother in the home. As he and his mother withheld from the published accounts, Nikolai, who beat Boris, also struck Klavdiya Yeltsina. When his mother was the victim, it was Boris’s turn to stand guard over her. He precociously took moral responsibility for a parent, following a pattern detectable in the younger years of many leading individuals.³⁶

In wider context, Soviet society swaddled its members, young and old, and taught them to put collective over individual needs. Not to do so was to woo disaster. Boris Yeltsin cites his father as his role model in dutifulness. Fragmentary remarks and body language implied that Nikolai Yeltsin had no use for those who had inflicted such pain on him and his. As Boris pictured it in an interview, choosing his words with care:

For the father, then, being “principled” meant, on the one hand, never praising those who had done you wrong. On the other hand, it meant bearing one’s cross stoically, a moral he had set aside in Kazan. And it meant abiding by the established rules and giving society and the Soviet behemoth their due. Nikolai Yeltsin did not wear a soldier’s uniform in the war; he most likely was needed more in Berezniki. His brother, Boris’s uncle Andrian, did serve and was killed at the front; brother Dmitrii was invalided home to Berezniki with an amputated leg and died of complications in the 1950s. Hard feelings from some of these events lingered for decades. Andrian’s son (Boris Andrianovich Yeltsin), who has spent all his life in Berezniki, said to a journalist shortly before Boris Nikolayevich’s death that Nikolai “used tricks to get out of going to the front, at the same time as my father died in battle.” Because they were ashamed, he claimed, Nikolai and his family turned their back on Andrian’s widow and son afterward.³⁸ Despite the strikes against him politically, Nikolai, the inventor manqué, did not back down in work-related disagreements. In the early 1940s, he paid from his own wages for specialists to take the train from Moscow to check a factory design he said was unsound; the outsiders bore him out. “He held his ground…. He risked his neck, even though, in the case of success, he had nothing to gain.”³⁹ At the construction site, he was a taskmaster, intolerant of the unproductive and the unpunctual, though never profane or screaming.⁴⁰

Boris Yeltsin knew about the iniquities of communism, which might in principle have turned him away from the Soviet dictatorship in toto. Asked in retirement about whether this was so, he said point-blank that it was not:

Far from bucking the system, the adolescent Yeltsin was an amenable cog in it. He enlisted in the red-scarved Young Pioneers, the official Soviet organization for building character in young children, in 1939 or 1940, and in the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, after his fourteenth birthday in 1945. He participated energetically in Pioneer and Komsomol assemblies and hobby circles, without taking a leadership position in either organization.⁴² When war broke out, he and his buddies “wanted to go to the front but, of course, we were not allowed.” So they played soldier games, making faux pistols, rifles, and cannon to act out their patriotic fantasies.⁴³

About male child Yeltsin and the received wisdom, the most that can be said is that he was youthfully inquisitive and entertained half-formed representations of abuse. He purchased at a bookstore and borrowed from the Berezniki town library volumes out of the collected papers of Lenin—of whom there was (and is) a life-sized statue in the courtyard of the Pushkin School—so as to understand for himself the revolution of 1917. He had found the answers in the textbooks unsatisfying and was thrown by citations in Lenin of revolutionaries who were nonpersons under Stalin. He did not read the sterilized, Stalin-edited Short Course of party history: “I understood I would not find the answers there. I wanted to get an answer from Lenin.” He gave his notebooks to brother Mikhail when he left for college.⁴⁴ Boris’s concern with Lenin fit with the general style of a Stalinist political education, which “was based on devotion not so much to ideas as to specific leaders who were identified with them.”⁴⁵

It was at this point that a political demigod not in the Marxist-Leninist pantheon enthralled him. That was Peter I, or Peter the Great, the tsar who reigned from 1682 to 1725, built St. Petersburg (Leningrad in the Soviet period), and brought Russia into the community of European powers. Yeltsin read Aleksei Tolstoy’s historical novel Peter I, which was studied in all Soviet schools, and saw the film based on it, directed by Vladimir Petrov and starring Nikolai Simonov, which came out in two parts in 1937–38. Peter, Yeltsin said in 2002, for him wore a halo and was “one of my teachers by example” in school.⁴⁶

Along with bare-bones survivalism and compliance with duty, Yeltsin was responding to a third script—for personal success through the development and assertion of self. In his memoirs, he writes of his prowess in the classroom: “I stood out among the other youngsters for my activism and vigor. From first grade to tenth… I was always elected class monitor [starosta]. I always did well at my studies and got 5s,” the highest mark on the five-point Russian scale.⁴⁷ Vladimir Zhdanov, his fellow pupil in the railway school, concurs:

The awakening to his own talents, coalescing with awareness that others benefited from the stratified Soviet order more than he and his parents, spurred a desire in Yeltsin to gain standing in the system. Klavdiya Yeltsina gave Andrei Goryun the telling vignette of her son learning in the war years, before he was old enough to shave, that the store where they exchanged their ration coupons for food had a closed subdivision for “the upper echelons” in the town. Borya found his way in and gawked at the white bread, cheese, and American canned spam on the shelves. “This was when I heard him say, ‘Mama, no matter what, I’m going to be a boss.’ Yes, yes, ‘boss’ [nachal’nik], I remember it well.”⁴⁹ In another version, Boris tells Klavdiya he wants to become an engineer when he grows up.⁵⁰

The rub was that Railway School No. 95 was an unsatisfactory springboard for any youth’s career. Built of logs near the Berezniki train station, it was founded in 1906 to bestow literacy on the sons and daughters of railroad workers; after 1917 its clientele widened to the children of all blue-collar workers, but the mission stayed the same. It became a seven-year school only in 1932. Most graduates went either into a trade school or into manual labor for the railroad or the saltworks. It says a lot about the Yeltsins’ tenuous status that in 1939, two years out of kindergarten, Boris was assigned to School No. 95, on Vainer Street, a twenty-minute walk from their barracks, and not to School No. 1, which was on Shkol’naya Street five minutes away.

School No. 1, where Yeltsin moved in 1945, was better known by the second name, Pushkin School, appended to it in 1937 in observance of the centenary of the death of the national poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Built by the potash combine in 1931–32 as a “model” (obraztsovaya) school for Churtan village, it was donated to the city when Berezniki was established. This was the school for the city’s best and brightest youngsters, and admittance was by examination. Its physical plant, in brick and with indoor plumbing and a gymnasium, outclassed the railway school’s. The teachers exacted more at Pushkin, it had a student orchestra and after-school activities, and it had an evening branch and a boarding unit for village children. Doing well was promoted by staff and at meetings between students and parents, where World War II veterans “spoke about the usefulness of being educated.”⁵¹ Punning on the name, the Pushkin School boys were spoken of as pushkari—“gunners” or, as we might say, hotshots. Girls from Berezniki’s two ten-year institutions for females, the Gorky and Ostrovsky Schools, “counted it pure happiness to stroll with the gunners along the local Broadway,” the well-lit stretch of Stalin Prospect near the Berëzka café.⁵² Pushkin graduates could qualify for a post-secondary education and entry into white-collar employment. First they needed the diploma, and that was no sure thing. In 1948–49, Yeltsin’s final year, there were 660 boys in first through fourth grades, 214 in fifth through seventh grades, seventy-two in eighth and ninth, and a mere nineteen left in tenth grade. Five of the twenty-six pupils in his ninth-year class were not promoted to tenth grade, and two of the remaining twenty-one did not enroll in September 1948.⁵³

In this bracing environment, Boris Yeltsin thrived. Antonina Khonina, the young literature instructor who was his homeroom teacher in eighth through tenth grades, was a demanding educator who “treated all of us like adults” and would hear of no alibis for uncompleted assignments. She took a shine to Yeltsin, and he was one of her stars.⁵⁴ In ninth grade, he split seven 5s with seven 4s. In tenth, he improved to eight 5s and six 4s: 5s in the three math subjects (algebra, geometry, and trigonometry) and in biology, “The Constitution of the USSR,” geography, astronomy, and German language; 4s in Russian language, literature, Soviet history, world history, physics, and chemistry.⁵⁵

In the railway school, Yeltsin had been gangly and often sick, with nagging throat and ear problems for which his mother wound his neck in a coarse bandage. As an upperclassman at the Pushkin School, he was broadshouldered, hale, and the tallest in class by a head. He was long-waisted, to boot, possessing a torso that accentuated his height when seated. To some of the younger Pushkin boys, he was a ruffian. One who started first grade in 1948 remembers Yeltsin uncivilly barring him from the second-floor lavatory, which was unofficially reserved for the big boys.⁵⁶ Boris had grown interested in sports and especially in volleyball, a game in which Soviet athletes excelled. He was captain of the school squad, which played against students and adults. He and a cluster of friends bought their own volleyball and net and practiced serves and rallies in the schoolyard after hours. On the court, he was forward-leaning (napadayushchii), always scouting for opportunities to attack.⁵⁷ The team were city champions in 1948 and were all presented with wristwatches as prizes. “For postwar boys this was the same as if pupils today were given automobiles.”⁵⁸ Yeltsin in future, perhaps inspired by this generosity, was to make it a practice of giving wristwatches away.

Yeltsin’s influence with the others had only increased since the early grades. Khonina has left an affectionate cameo stressing this point:

Khonina was not the only member of the faculty to hold him in warm regard. In April 1948 Yeltsin was one of but two pupils, out of a total of more than nine hundred, to be selected by headmaster Mikhail Zalesov to sit on the teachers’ committee organizing the assembly for the May Day holiday. Classmates Robert Zaidel and Viktor Nikolin, the other boy named to the May Day committee, qualified for the school’s gold medal in 1949, with straight 5s in tenth grade. Yeltsin was a tier down, in a cohort that was mobile into social strata closed to the older generation. The adult occupations of thirteen members of the Pushkin class of 1949 are known. Among them were seven engineers—one of them Yeltsin—a physicist (Zaidel), a professor of engineering (Nikolin), an architect, an agronomist, an army officer, and a dentist.⁶⁰

Yeltsin was rambunctious as well as proficient and a striver. In his brief reminiscences with me about Berezniki, fifty-odd years afterward, he said it was into his relations with the educational system that such discomfort as he had with Soviet reality spilled over:

In Confession on an Assigned Theme—a title suggestive of a student or employee who departs from the appointed ways and owns up to it—Yeltsin waxed more eloquent about being the ringleader (zavodila) behind group hijinks than about being the class monitor or an exemplary pupil. The text chronicles no fewer than eight pranks and acts of derring-do:

And there unquestionably were others, as Yeltsin said to me in an interview. Sergei Molchanov has recounted how the two of them lit a sooty wood fire in a home steambath in their neighborhood; Sergei left for dinner, and Boris blacked out from inhaling the fumes.⁶⁴

Three of the bravado incidents described by Yeltsin resulted in injury or illness: the thumb and index finger (and tip of the middle finger) of his left hand blown off by a grenade fuse (he hit it with a hammer while his partners in crime looked on from a safe distance), and surgery to stop the spread of gangrene; a broken, crooked nose from a fight; and three months in the hospital to cure typhoid fever from drinking impure water on the hike. In retrospect, many were death-defying feats. After all, the hand grenade could just as well have sprayed its hunks of steel into his skull as into his left hand. In a medical system with no antibiotics, one in five typhus patients dies, and unchecked gangrene can also be fatal. The scramble across the logs could have drowned the frisky boys. In the nose-breaking fight, he was whacked by a cart axle and thought he was done for—“But I came to, pulled myself together, and was carried home.”⁶⁵ Molchanov saw smoke engulfing the steambath, ran back, and pulled Yeltsin unconscious into the open air—saving his friend’s life, he says. In Yeltsin’s account, four actions incurred disciplinary penalties at school: grades of 2 out of 5 on the day for going out the window; a reprimand for the phonograph needles; suspension of his elementary-school diploma for the graduation philippic; and the refusal to register him for tenth grade following his recovery from the typhoid infection.

These events follow a two-pronged logic. The river race and the trio ending in bodily harm (and the steambath fire as a marginal case) bespeak what we can term a testing script. Here Yeltsin willingly underwent the risks for no reason other than the thrill of it and to demonstrate his mettle—urges for which pubescent hormones were surely responsible in part. In the tests detailed in Confession, the adversary is nature or his compeers and he narrowly deflects crippling wounds or death. In the literally most stomach-churning test, Boris and schoolmates set out up the western foothills of the Urals, in scorching heat, to find the headwaters of the Yaiva River, a feeder of the Kama; they carried neither an accurate map nor provisions enough to last the trip. The sulphurous spring at the river’s source found, the lads traded their gear for a dinghy, roughed it and straggled aimlessly for a week, and floated in delirium downriver toward Berezniki. Yeltsin docked the boat beneath a railroad trestle before passing out. That and other footloose moments were more unsettling to his mother than to his father, maybe because Nikolai Yeltsin was so frequently away and she dreaded being left alone. As a friend of Klavdiya’s later years noted, since Nikolai was often gone, and since Boris was his mother’s defender upon Nikolai’s return, “A heavy burden was laid on Boris. He helped his mother out at this time but was always trying to get away, run off, vanish, cavort, even in his youngest years…. She would say [to me], ‘Why did he do such things, to get some kind of revenge?’ She was always asking this question.”⁶⁶

The remaining stunts were juvenile protests against authority figures, with hormones as impetus and maybe politics as subtext. In this rebellion script, the lines are tidily drawn and have the schoolboy clashing with callous pedagogues and educational bureaucrats. The most glaring case of hooliganism, as drawn by Yeltsin, is the speech at his graduation from elementary school. He asked for the floor, spoke courteous words about several of his teachers, and then surprised the audience by lighting into his homeroom teacher as “not fit to be a teacher and a rearer of children.” “I went at her hammer and tongs,” giving examples of her insensitivity such as the requirement that boys and girls gather food scraps for her pet pig. “Fury, uproar—the whole event was sullied. The next day the teachers’ council sent for my father and told him my diploma was being canceled.”⁶⁷ In Yeltsin’s retelling, the enemy mostly crumpled under the force of his salvos. The 2 grades were annulled; his diploma was reinstated and the obnoxious homeroom teacher retired; and he took his tenth-grade finals at the Pushkin School after completing four semesters of course work in two on home study (his pals were not given this privilege). Only the teacher of German, perforated though not seriously injured, did not cave. The crises roped in his father, not his mother, as enforcer of decorum; it was during the graduation ruckus, when Boris would have been fifteen (if his memoir account is correct), that Nikolai last tried to beat his son with a strap. And they gave Yeltsin his first contact with political actors. To resolve the dispute over his diploma, he did an end run around his new headmaster, Vasilii Zanin, to the municipal school directorate and then to the arbiter of all things in Berezniki, the Communist Party apparatus: “That was when I first came to know what the gorkom [city committee] of the party was.”⁶⁸

The tales of puckishness and delinquency from Confession are required reading for anyone seeking to comprehend Yeltsin’s life, but he was not above embellishing them. The Zyryanka, dammed to form First Pond, is about the width of a city street downstream (where it is five minutes down the hill from John the Baptist church). Even in the annual snow melt, it is not the raging torrent Yeltsin depicts—which is not to rule out jousting on the logs. Vladimir Zhdanov has no remembrance of the fifth graders going out the window; the railway school, he points out, was all on one floor, and it would have been easier to play hooky than to follow a showoff outside. Some of Yeltsin’s defiance of his teachers may have been more impish than impudent. When Zhdanov was asked by the reporter if teachers had tonguelashed Yeltsin for passing his problem sets around, he replied, “They are only finding out about it now.”⁶⁹ For some events, memoirist Yeltsin mistakes the fine points yet not the main meaning. The jump out the window seems indeed to have occurred, but at the Pushkin School, which has two stories and where Yeltsin’s homeroom (which I saw in 2005) was on the second floor.⁷⁰ While the mean trick on his elementary school German teacher is uncorroborated, again there appears to have been such an incident with a chair at the Pushkin School. A boxer’s nose and a maimed hand, about which he was always self-conscious, were fleshly mementos of his adventures. Conversations in 2005 with clergy and parishioners at the reopened Church of the Beheading of John the Baptist substantiated that it was used as a furniture factory and munitions warehouse during the war, and that a daredevil could have slipped in and made off with small projectiles. None doubted that Yeltsin had done so. For the wilderness trek and the infection in 1948, we have verification by a fellow pupil.⁷¹

The episode that remains mysterious is the one to which Yeltsin gives the most import: the stand against his oafish teacher at School No. 95 and the struggle for exculpation that followed. Yeltsin’s own account does not quite add up. He writes that after the fracas he “decided not to return” to the school and to enroll at Pushkin, the place that was to open doors for him. But School No. 95 offered seven years of classes only, and so he would have had no choice but to move on to a secondary school had he finished the seventh grade there; the one secondary school in Berezniki that accepted boys was School No. 1, the Pushkin School. Muddying the waters is a prosaic detail: Pushkin School records, and the commemorative plaque outside, show Boris Yeltsin to have transferred there in 1945—in the second half of or at the end of sixth grade or in the first half of seventh grade—and not, as he says, after seventh grade, which would have been in mid-1946.⁷² The acting up with his teacher, if it happened, could not have been at his graduation, since he never passed out of School No. 95.⁷³ But something got Yeltsin in hot water there. His mother told relatives later that he left his first school because of a disagreement with a female teacher. It was unheard-of for a pupil to quit a Soviet elementary school without completing the sequence of instruction in it. Teachers at the Pushkin School believed that the decision was mutual, that friction over behavior such as the theft of the grenades had coiled to a level where young Boris was happy to go and the exasperated staff of School No. 95 was relieved to see the last of him.⁷⁴

A bloodline in the free and religious peasantry, a proud and individualistic family, the confiscation of hard-earned property, the arbitrary arrest and loss of loved ones, a closet anti-communist of a father—any one ingredient would have shortened the odds that Yeltsin would eventually strike out on another road. He was not unique in any one of these respects, and not in the millstone of hardship he carried. Other Soviet leaders had poverty and politically driven private tragedies in their blood. For Yeltsin, it is not the particulars but the gestalt that commands our attention.

Already his life’s plotline diverged from that of his future ally and antagonist, Mikhail Gorbachev. Although the Gorbachevs of Privol’noye, Stavropol province, had their share of tears, the family had been dirt poor and supported the collectivization drive that was at its climax when Gorbachev and Yeltsin were born in 1931. Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather, Pantelei Gopkalo, was a communist, the organizer of a peasant cooperative in the 1920s, and the first chairman of the local kolkhoz; his father, Sergei, to whom he was close, joined the party at the front during World War II.⁷⁵ While still in Privol’noye, in 1948, young Gorbachev was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, one of the USSR’s highest laurels, for his norm-busting work at bringing in the harvest (Sergei, a tractor driver, won the Order of Lenin), and won a medal in school for a hagiographic essay about Stalin.⁷⁶ Yeltsin, the son and grandson of kulaks, would be torn from the village by collectivization, grew up in a city, had a twinge of doubt about Stalin, had strained relations with his father, and would wait until 1971 to win his first Order of the Red Banner. In 1950, still a teenager and about to leave Privol’noye for university in Moscow, Gorbachev applied for the Communist Party and was made a probationary member; he was promoted to full membership in 1952, with Stalin still in the Kremlin.⁷⁷ Yeltsin was to take out probationary membership ten years after Gorbachev and full membership nine years after him.

To deal with the demands of his provincial youth, Boris Yeltsin developed a repertoire of life scripts. They were not mere coming-of-age stereotypes but were to be of ongoing relevance in later life. The scripts implied various relationships with the social environment. Survival was for the lonely individual, and the few others he trusted, to achieve, leaving nothing to chance and saying not a word more about it than needed to be said. Duty was about conforming to conditions and meeting the standards of family, equals, and superiors. Success was earned in contestation with others, not primarily through the pursuit of security at all costs or through cooperation. Testing was also a comparative exercise, though more about the capability of acting than the doing. And rebellion, in the confines of the Soviet system, required a break with convention and with lines of subordination. Artistry in one role did not negate the next. The boy with the mathematical cast of mind also had a Tom Sawyer–like taste for adventure. Yeltsin could give teacher Khonina the sense that he “never violated” the rules, and get faculty approval as class monitor year after year, while showing her a “fiery temperament” and coming on to the other young people as someone who could contravene the rules to his and sometimes their benefit. As his friend Sergei Molchanov put it, “He stood out, without a doubt. He… was someone who made things a little dangerous.”⁷⁸ As both propagator of and occasional scoffer at the constituted ways, he was more than a face in the crowd. One comparative study of modern rulers finds that as youths 61 percent of them tended to conform to authority and 16 percent were nonconformists. Yeltsin in a sense was these two things together.⁷⁹

The common denominator in all five scripts is the ethos of flinty self-sufficiency and willpower that suffuses the vibrant subculture of the Urals. As Yeltsin commented, he was a person “who incessantly needs to prove his strength and ability to overcome, to breathe deep… to load himself up to total exhaustion.” Until his health nosedived in the 1990s, he was what Russians call a morzh, a walrus—a devotee of swimming in icy water. Healthy and unhealthy, he started his day’s regimen with a cold shower. He yoked this passion to his rural beginnings and the reflexes nourished there: “My childhood was tied to the village, to physical burdens and labor. If you don’t develop your strength there, you fall by the wayside.”⁸⁰ To stay alive, meet filial and societal obligations, impose one’s ego on others, demonstrate one’s abilities, and hit back at unfeeling authority, one had to be strong and appear to be strong. Physical power and the ability to overcome would in most societies be typecast as masculine traits. But it should not be forgotten that family realities and the demographics of gender imbalance in the Soviet Union put women disproportionately in positions of authority over the young Yeltsin. Of the abilities he was to manifest in politics, the greatest—the intuition for grasping a situation holistically, as he was learning to do in Berezniki—is one we normally categorize as feminine.

In 1949 Yeltsin prepared to leave town for manhood and a higher education in Sverdlovsk. He had stargazed about shipbuilding—his beau ideal, Peter the Great, worked for some time as a shipwright in Holland in the 1690s—but changed the plan in order to follow his father’s footsteps into the construction industry, only at a higher level of expertise, influence, and remuneration. His mother’s father gave Boris his curmudgeonly lesson in the self-reliance of the uralets, the man of the Urals—the job of putting up a backyard steambath for the family, which uncoupled them from the city’s collective bathhouse and went farther to reproduce village living conditions. Vasilii Starygin was well cut out to teach the lesson, as his ability to live hand to mouth in northern exile had spared him and his wife the sad end of Yeltsin’s paternal grandparents. Boris Yeltsin related without criticism how he did Starygin’s bidding. “You must build it yourself from beginning to end,” the graybeard said to him, “and I will not come near you.” Beyond getting approval from the Berezniki timber trust for his grandson to fell some conifers, Vasilii did not lift a finger. Boris cut the logs, hauled them two miles to their yard, dried them, sawed boards, dug footings, fitted the frame, roofed the structure and caulked it with moss, and added a porch. He was at it the whole summer long. “At the finish, my grandfather said gravely that I had passed the test and had his full permission to enter the construction division” in the polytechnic across the mountains. Yeltsin’s mother did not object. “Oh how I cried,” she told a woman friend forty years later, “but he had to learn.”⁸¹