Yeltsin: A Life

CHAPTER THREE Only Forward

In September 1949 Boris Yeltsin matriculated at the Urals Polytechnic Institute (UPI) in Sverdlovsk, a sixteen-hour train ride through Molotov (the once and future Perm) and over the ridge of the mountains toward Siberia. He went there because there was no technical college in Molotov province and Moscow and Leningrad, the centers of higher learning in the USSR, were more than he could aspire to.¹ Unlike his parents and his maternal grandparents, who went from Berezniki back to Butka, Boris accepted city life. He was to be a Sverdlovsker for thirty-six years, thrice the time he spent in Berezniki, and to go on from there to twenty-two years in Moscow.

Sverdlovsk was founded as Yekaterinburg and is called that once again. The city lies in the eastern foothills of the mid-Urals, on the banks of the Iset River, which the Russians dammed up to form reservoirs and ponds. It was set up in 1723 by the soldier and historian Vasilii Tatishchev, commissioned by Yeltsin’s hero Peter the Great to prospect for ores and to open mines and metalworks, and named Yekaterinburg in honor of Catherine I, Peter’s second wife. Before the 1917 revolution, it was a considerable place for mining (iron, gold, and gemstones), industry (foundries and machinery), transportation (the Trans-Siberian Railroad), education (the Urals Mining College), and administration but was overshadowed by the Urals guberniya seats of Perm, Orenburg, and Ufa. It was also where the last tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were executed in 1918. The new regime made Yekaterinburg capital of the Urals section in 1923, replacing Perm, which it considered a more bourgeois, backward-looking place.² In 1924 Yekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk, after Yakov Sverdlov, the Bolshevik based there before the revolution who authorized the killing of the Romanovs. A more compact Sverdlovsk oblast was demarcated in January 1934 and took its final contours with the severance of the Perm area in 1938. With the exception of a hump in the southwest, it was to the east of the spine of the Urals.

Local communists lobbied for state investment in the metallurgical sector and in 1930 put forward a Great Urals plan that would have had the Urals, and Sverdlovsk within it, displace the south of Ukraine as the powerhouse of Soviet heavy industry.³ The plan as such was never adopted, but its showpiece, the processing of Urals metals by means of coking coal transported from west Siberia and Kazakhstan, did come about. Joseph Stalin’s five-year plans stimulated growth. “It didn’t matter where you went,” Leonid Brezhnev, who was in those days a bureaucrat in Sverdlovsk province, was to recall, “all around you rose factory chimneys and plumes of smoke pouring out of them.”⁴ Up-to-date blast furnaces transformed the eighteenth-century Upper Iset Works in Sverdlovsk and the Demidov Works in Nizhnii Tagil, the province’s second city, into throbbing combines putting out pig iron and steel. New plants smelted copper, nickel, aluminum, and titanium. Uralmash, the Urals Heavy Machinery Works, opened in Sverdlovsk in 1933, was the largest of its kind in the USSR, a “factory of factories” making equipment for mining, oil extraction, manufacturing, and construction. The Urals Wagon Works in Nizhnii Tagil, opened in 1936, led the Soviet Union in the assembly of rolling stock. By the late 1930s, plants like Uralmash were changing over to the production of matériel for the armed forces. An influx of factories evacuated eastward from front-line cities in 1941–42 raised Sverdlovsk’s profile and gave its economy a more militarized cast.⁵ Urals Wagon, merged with an enterprise from Kharkov, Ukraine, was the top maker of tanks on Soviet territory, and Uralmash converted to tanks, howitzers, and self-propelled artillery. Urals Wagon, Uralmash, and the Tankograd Works in Chelyabinsk, south of Sverdlovsk oblast, made all of the Red Army’s heavy tanks in 1942–45 and 60 percent of the medium tanks. Conversion back to civilian uses after 1945 was halting. In the Cold War, branches of the military-industrial complex based on high technology, such as atomic energy and rocketry, took root, shielded from foreign eyes.

The population of the oblast capital, powered by the boom in smokestack industry and armaments, roared from 150,000 in 1929 to 426,000 in 1939 and 600,000 by midcentury. The deracinated peasants who were the majority of Sverdlovskers lived in factory housing toward the city limits, as higgledy-piggledy as Berezniki’s. Downtown was a different sliver of Soviet reality. An Australian-born American historian who visited as it was opening up to Westerners in 1990 said that, never mind the industrial wasteland in the outlying areas, the center of Sverdlovsk was citified and a lot like Victorian Melbourne—“solid, civic, self-respecting.”⁶ When Yeltsin detrained in 1949, he saw landmarks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, avant-garde Constructivist creations from the 1920s, pompous government buildings, and the accessories of urbanity—an opera and ballet house, a philharmonic hall, a movie studio, Urals State University, a unit of the USSR Academy of Sciences. A clutter of cultural and research establishments from central Russia sat out the war in Sverdlovsk. Many artists, performers, and scientists settled there, and partly for that reason the Jewish community was one of the largest in Russia.⁷ For a country lad a few years out of the barracks on the Zhdanovo Fields, it was a far richer environment than any he had known.

Created in 1920 and with 5,000 undergraduates in 1949, UPI was the best school of its type in the Urals and one of the better ones in the Soviet Union. It educated specialists for civilian and for classified, defense-related tasks.⁸ The construction division was located in the institute’s Stalin-Gothic headquarters on Lenin Prospect, on a hilly campus, Vtuzgorodok (Technical College Town), in the east end of Sverdlovsk. The division prepared construction engineers, architects, and town planners. The students into the 1930s were manual workers selected by party cells and trade unions without regard for educational attainment; some were unversed in arithmetic. During the war, many UPI men and women were rushed to the front or to munitions factories without graduating, and a clinic and quarters for army wounded took up part of the main dormitory. Come the postwar years, entrants were chosen by examination, were required to have passed high school mathematics and science, and completed their diplomas without interruption. Professors were encouraged to take up scientific research and supervise postgraduate dissertations. Several hundred students from the new Soviet bloc in Europe and East Asia were in each UPI cohort.⁹

The qualifying examinations Yeltsin took in August 1949 were considered relatively easy, as a chemistry portion was not required for the construction division—many students had not taken it in secondary school, although Yeltsin had. He had to pass a twenty-five-meter swimming test and a timed 100-meter run, neither of which gave him difficulty. Originally in the class of 1953, he was to finish the industrial- and civil-engineering stream in June of 1955, one of forty-nine (thirty-three men, sixteen women) to get out that year. The course of study was lengthened by one year in 1951, as the education ministry, wanting to improve engineering cadres, upped the time spent in all Soviet technical institutes from four years to five. Yeltsin lost more ground in the spring of 1952 when tonsillitis and rheumatic fever caused him to drop out of his third year; he was readmitted that fall and completed the year’s courses in 1952–53. The construction curriculum emphasized mathematics, physics, materials and soil science, and draftsmanship. The seven or eight hours of lectures per day were mandatory, as was a diploma project.

The polytechnic’s boarding students got by on measly stipends of 280 rubles a month—the price of a pair of men’s shoes—but there was no tuition and the residence halls, in a first for Yeltsin, had tap water and flush toilets. The canteen food was edible; if you had the rubles to spare, you could dine in a smart café where young women waited on the tables in starched white aprons and peaked caps. The discontinuation of wartime rationing and the efflorescence of “the spirit of victory” over Germany, a reminder of which was the POWs slaving away on the Sverdlovsk streets, kindled optimism in the student body. “There was confidence in the future, confidence that things would work out okay,” a schoolfellow of Yeltsin’s recounted. “We were not that demanding toward life, that is, it took little to satisfy us.”¹⁰ Fifteen percent of the students’ time was earmarked for military drills (Yeltsin’s specialty was tank operator) and 20 percent for instruction in the recondite science of Marxism-Leninism. Yeltsin met the foreign-language requirement by continuing to study German. It had little effect: He was to write in his Communist Party file that he read German and translated it with a dictionary, but in conversation he could not tell it and English apart.¹¹

Although national politics did not seep much into the student life at UPI, this was not always so. In 1949–50 Stalin’s xenophobic propaganda campaign against “rootless cosmopolitan”—read, Jewish—influence made a stir, and several students of Jewish descent were expelled from UPI or forced out of dormitories.¹² In 1953 the police arrested a twenty-year-old UPI student and Komsomol member, V. L. Okulov, for making disrespectful comments about Stalin. He was found guilty of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda in April 1953 and imprisoned for a year.¹³ March 9, 1953, the day of Stalin’s funeral, was a day of mourning at UPI. Classes were canceled and students and faculty, many of them weeping, gathered in front of the main building to hear eulogies.¹⁴ UPI students had one outlet for sometimes fairly risqué expression, BOKS (Boyevoi organ komsomol’skoi satiry, Battle Organ of Komsomol Satire), a wall newspaper by Komsomol members that printed uncensored spoofs and limericks.

The costume Yeltsin donned almost every day of his first several years at the institute bespoke his origins: waterproofed canvas boots, hirsute wool trousers, and a velveteen jacket. He got an irregular allowance from his parents and potatoes and vegetables from their garden plot. Only once a month could he treat himself to the café. For pocket money, he unloaded railcars and did other menial jobs; during most summer breaks, he took paid internships. The puritanism breathed in at Berezniki had begun to mellow. Yeltsin entered into wagers about not cussing for a year at a time, and always collected, but he now drank beer and vodka in moderation. A fun-loving companion, he was disposed to gestures and the gifts his budget allowed. He was a practical joker and the life of the party at the “Komsomol weddings” into which many Soviet students, barely out of their teens, entered in the year or two before graduation. To impress a group of acquaintances, he dove clothed into a swimming pool. On a students’ steamer cruise on the Kama, he led three of his male friends in a knockabout Swan Lake ballet, all of them splendiferous in white women’s slips, tutus made of towels, and gauze headgear.¹⁵

The UPI students bunked eight to a room in the first year and five to a room in the upper classes. Coeducation brought close contact with the opposite sex. Yeltsin had a crush on Margarita Yerina, a student from Berezniki and a figure skater. Yeltsin, the story goes, requested that an acquaintance of both from home, Mikhail Ustinov, help Yerina with a work assignment. “Misha carried out his friend’s request so enthusiastically that he took up with Rita himself and beat Boris to the punch.” One thing led to another and the two married early in the 1952–53 school year. “Boris was invited to the wedding. Congratulating them, he half-jokingly said to Ustinov, ‘So this is the kind of friend you are! I got you to watch over Rita and look what you did!’”¹⁶

In November 1952 Yeltsin and five roommates and neighbors (three females and two males) pooled resources to form a self-help collective that they facetiously called the Troublemaker (Shkodnik) Kolkhoz. Yeltsin, who had suggested it, chaired the group, and each member assumed some responsibility. In the “charter” they signed, the friends agreed to sub for one another in lectures, buy and cook food jointly, go to the movies or to a sports event weekly, visit the bathhouse once a week (where the boys were to drink beer and the girls champagne), and celebrate holidays and birthdays together. With several substitutions, the sextet stayed together until graduation. All were from towns and villages quite remote from Sverdlovsk, and so from parents’ gardens, and much of Shkodnik’s activity focused on food. To save money, the members skipped breakfast, used coupons to buy a cheap lunch, and gathered for a supper cooked on a hotplate in the kitchen cubicle on the residence floor, the ingredients bought by contributions from their stipends.¹⁷

In charge of “sanitation” in the group was Naina Iosifovna Girina, a female student born on March 14, 1932, who had enrolled in the hydraulics department of the construction division in 1950. Naina, baptized Anastasiya and nicknamed Naya, was from the city of Orenburg in the south Urals hills, the eldest of six children of a Cossack family in which some Russian Orthodox religious practices had survived. Her mother kept small icons and every Easter prepared ritual foods (painted eggs and kulich and paskha cakes) and lit candles; from her grandmother she learned two prayers which she memorized and would recite thereafter at times of distress. Naina had wanted to enter medicine, an impecunious and feminized profession in the Soviet Union, but chose engineering, higher-status work in which males were prevalent. She came to UPI not much better clad than Yeltsin: All she owned was two dresses and a flannel track suit hand-sewn by her mother.¹⁸ In 1951–52, the year Yeltsin had to take medical leave, he and Girina had been in a group that took waltz, tango, and foxtrot lessons together. They began a courtship in 1953. Girina “was distinguished by her amicability, affability, and cleanliness. It was impossible to break her composure, and she was able to put out all conflicts in the female collective…. She was always neatly dressed and coiffed and was willing to sacrifice an hour of lectures in the institute for a more attractive undertaking.”¹⁹

Yeltsin took away idyllic memories of the camaraderie and “giddy romanticism” shared at the polytechnic. “Never since can I remember feeling such fabulous energy, and against the background of a half-starving, Spartan, almost garrison-like existence.”²⁰ Besides finding his future wife, he made friends there for the duration. The schoolmates were to do a summer journey with their families in 1960 and every five years after that.

A slug of the energy Yeltsin felt was injected into his studies, in which he got almost all 4s and 5s, the honors grades. He was known for a fire-and-ice pattern of work, cramming for exams and handing in assignments in the nick of time. “He studied in quite a strange way—by snatches, convulsively, whatever you want to call it. For the days when the most intense exercises or examinations were scheduled, he would manage to master a mound of information. Then he would take a long break, which did not appeal in the slightest to his teachers.”²¹ It foreshadowed his style as president of Russia four decades later.

The frolicking and jousting with classroom instructors that were so frequent in Berezniki tailed off. Yeltsin’s tiff with a lecturer in political economy, a dour communist by the name of Savel’ëva (the students nicknamed her Sova, the Owl), was trivial by comparison. He was turned off more by her unbending pedagogy than by the conservatism of her lectures. His grade of 3 in the course barred him from graduating with distinction, and he waived the chance to retake the exam and try for a higher grade.²² Yeltsin cut classes in favor of athletic and other interests, but his friend, group monitor Yurii Poluzadov, who filled out attendance sheets with the dean’s office, covered for him. Poluzadov and Yeltsin both had their stipends docked one September for late filing of their reports on summer activities.²³ Yeltsin allows in Confession on an Assigned Theme that some of his teachers were hard on him out of disapproval of the time he put into athletics. The example he gives is not Savel’ëva but Stanislav Rogitskii, the head of the department of construction mechanics. In a course on elasticity, Rogitskii once gave him a snap quiz, saying that a great athlete like him would need no preparation, and did not let him use the formulas recorded in his notebook. Yeltsin was not up to the exercise, and the two “fought for a long time.” One day, though, Yeltsin found the solution to a mathematical problem set by the professor, which, he said, had baffled students for ten years. Rogitskii worked up “a true affection” for Yeltsin—repaid in Yeltsin’s memoirs—but still gave him a grade of 4, not the 5 Yeltsin expected. As with Savel’ëva, Yeltsin refused an offer to retake the final exam.²⁴

Yeltsin shunned all political topics and involvements at Urals Polytechnic and did not talk about the regime’s maltreatment of his family. His attitude makes for a ringing contrast with his rival-to-be, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev, a Komsomol organizer in his village school, served as a Komsomol secretary in the Moscow State University law division and took out full membership in the governing party in 1952, in his second year of study. Yeltsin gave wide berth to the UPI committee of the Komsomol, in which participation was necessary for anyone intending to work in the guilds of the Communist Party apparatus and the Soviet security services. Committee documents cite his name but two or three times, in connection with his favorite extracurricular activity: sports, and specifically volleyball.²⁵

Games sublimated Yeltsin’s need to prove himself, at an age when boyish capers were no longer appropriate. At the Pushkin School in Berezniki, he had conditioned muscles and nerves to compensate for the gash in his left hand and to get firmer control of the all-white leather sphere. His love for volleyball was quasi political: “I liked the way the ball obeyed me, the way I could pounce on it and return the most awesome of volleys.”²⁶ That he was tall and strong helped. He also liked volleyball’s cooperative dimension. In the other games he tried out (cross-country skiing, decathlon, gymnastics, boxing, and wrestling), the competitors were individuals; only this was a team endeavor, with six per side and a need for synchronization on the compact playing surface. Versatility and waiting one’s turn were required, since volleyball players rotate through the positions. Yeltsin’s favorite move was the downward “spike” of the ball over the net after it had been set on a high flight. Impatient with waiting, he had the squad work out maneuvers that let him spike from the back court as well as the normal location, the two hitter’s places in the front row.²⁷ He made the divisional and institute-wide teams his freshman year, captaining both and coaching several other teams for extra income. He gleefully noted in his memoirs that he logged six hours at the gymnasium daily and, between that and homework, pared his sleeping time to four hours a night—a figure confirmed by contemporaries.

But the schedule took its toll. In 1952 overexertion made Yeltsin ill. It cost him a year in the program and “nearly put me in the grave” at the age of twenty-one. An untreated streptococcal infection of the throat grew into inflammation of his tonsils, joints, and coronary valves. It would have responded to penicillin; there is no mention of an antibiotic or any drug in Yeltsin’s writeup. By his account, he went to the hospital only when his temperature surged to 104 degrees and his pulse to 150 beats per minute. The physician prescribed four months in sick bay to allow his heart to recover. Still feverish, says Yeltsin, he skipped out several days later—lowering himself out the window on a cable of knotted bed sheets—and went to his parents’ house in Berezniki. Fellow students have recollected that Yeltsin had earlier sneaked out of his sickroom to play in a big game, then returned to the hospital before making his final escape. After shinnying down the sheets to leave for home, he was given a sendoff by teammates and friends. “Our room consoled him and promised to write him letters. And we kept our word. Each day one of the eight of us took a turn and wrote him.”²⁸

When not reading his mail, Yeltsin soon started taking volleyball serves in the Berezniki gym:

While not every detail may be dead-on here, Yeltsin’s illness and furlough were real and were entered into his student file.³⁰ The scene with the doctor testifies to openness to risk and neglect of his health, patterns that were to recur.

Sports brought out another talent in Yeltsin, according to his lifelong friend Yakov Ol’kov:

As a side venture, Yeltsin organized his study group’s participation in the UPI relay race held every May. To get the students out of bed for calisthenics on spring mornings, he had a professor of geology, Nikolai Mazurov, go to the dormitory hall with his trumpet and blow reveille. Boris Furmanov, a freshman in the construction division in the spring of 1955 and later a Russian government minister, remembered Yeltsin jabbering before his class about past victories in the relay and about “the need to stick up for the division’s honor.” “Not just anyone, when you first hear and see him, manages to make a mark on ‘the multitude’ (there were one hundred of us), compel you to believe him, and then influence you in accord with his will.”³²

As with the mischief-maker in Berezniki, the athlete and cheerleader at UPI attested to qualities Yeltsin would later apply to political causes. For now, the applications were exclusively apolitical, and those who knew him assumed his interests would keep it that way. As Ol’kov put it, “To say that he was going to be a political boss or someone like that would have seemed quite unreal to me. We simply could not have foreseen it.”³³

Yeltsin’s biggest self-reported adventure came to pass on summer vacation in 1953. It was a two-and-a-half-month hobo’s tour of the Volga and central Russia (taking him to Kazan for the first time since 1937), Belorussia, Ukraine, and Georgia. A UPI friend who had agreed to tag along bailed out after one day on the road. Yeltsin, in his telling, stowed away on trains, scrounged for meals, and played strip poker with ex-convicts. Several times policemen took him off the train and asked him where he was going. “I would say something along the lines of, I am on my way to Simferopol [in Crimea] to see my grandmother. They would ask me what street she lived on. I knew there was a Lenin Street in every Soviet city, so I would give that answer every time. And they would let me go.”³⁴ Yeltsin’s poker mates, imprisoned for common criminal offenses, had been released from jails and camps in the amnesty after Stalin’s death. They were banned from Moscow, so he went on his own to see Red Square and the mausoleum holding Lenin’s body (and Stalin’s, which was to be removed in 1961 and buried in the ground behind the mausoleum) and the walls and towers of the Kremlin, which, because it was closed to nonofficials until 1955, he could not enter. Yeltsin writes that in Zaporozh’e, a steel town on the Dnieper River in Ukraine, he earned his keep by teaching a one-week course in mathematics to an army colonel who wanted to enter a local polytechnic—with twenty hours of drill a day. He got word at the next stop that his tutee had won a place in the institute.³⁵

In the fall of 1954, Yeltsin had a mini-adventure on a trip with the UPI volleyballers. To procure some food for his famished teammates, he set down at the station in Lozovaya, near the big Ukrainian city of Kharkov. He did not make it back to the train on time, and his coach gave him up for lost and sent a telegram to that effect back to UPI. Their next stop was Tbilisi, Georgia. Two days after the team got there, Yeltsin rapped on the door of the coach’s hotel room, bushy-tailed but bearing two shopping bags laden with provisions. Fearing that his cargo would be pilfered, he had come from Lozovaya to Tbilisi, about 700 miles, on the roof of one of the passenger cars.³⁶

Upon reading Yeltsin’s prose about the main conflictual episodes at UPI, one cannot but see the progression in his ego and attitude toward authority. When he gives short shrift to his studies and fences with Rogitskii, he engages in the mildest of rebellions, checked by his respect for the learned professor. A point of pride in the narration of his illness is when he pulls the wool over the physician’s eyes—he did not lie to her but did not act to correct her misconception, either—and so outfoxes authority rather than defy it. In the summer of 1953 he rides the rails with the ex-cons, only to turn the student’s role on its head and become a source of knowledge in the crash course with the Ukrainian officer twice his age: “The colonel had his doubts: Would we be able to do it? I told him there was no other way to get ready in one week. [He showed himself to be] a person of perseverance, with a character that kept the pace of the lessons I gave him.”³⁷ To be able to give lessons and hold up in a competitive world, Yeltsin worked at learning self-restraint and mental toughness. “Boris Nikolayevich worked a lot, consciously, on his character. At first it seemed to contain a good deal of personal sensitivity, but he did much to counter this, saying he had to squeeze the flabbiness out of himself. If he felt sorry for someone, he would express it in reverse—he would say words of support yet, intentionally, in a harsh fashion.”³⁸

Yeltsin’s diploma assignment had to be carried out in one month rather than the allotted five, since he had blown a semester on traveling with the volleyball team. “I still can’t figure out how I did it,” he burbles in Confession. “It was unreal how much of a mental and physical effort I had to make.” His project was an undistinguished design for an overhead bucket line to transfer waste materials out of a coal mine. In the memoir, he was to misrepresent it as a plan for a television tower, so avant-garde that assistance from faculty and students was out of the question and only Urals self-reliance would save the day. “Until then there were almost no [towers] around, and so I had to sort everything out myself…. No one… could help me with this new and unknown theme. I had to do the drawings myself, do the calculations myself, do everything from beginning to end myself.”³⁹ Whether this was a fib or an inadvertency,⁴⁰ Yeltsin was attracted to futuristic undertakings and to the emerging medium of television, which was to play a big part in his political life. One of his pet projects as leader of the province’s party organization in the 1980s was to build a TV transmission tower at the midpoint of the Sverdlovsk skyline, not far from the city’s large circus building. Only the conical concrete column of the structure, and not the planned restaurant and metal spire, was up when work stopped around 1990. It is 725 feet high. The plan was for the tower to soar up to 1,300 feet, which would have made it the sixth or seventh tallest in the world.⁴¹

Graduates of Soviet universities and institutes were assigned to their first jobs by the educational bureaucracy and were free to seek other employment after two or three years. The year Yeltsin graduated was the last in which many young civil engineers, including UPI students, were ordered to projects in the Gulag, which was liquidated by 1956. He was fortunate not to have drawn such an assignment. Before getting into the work world, he spent ten weeks after graduation in June 1955 playing with UPI’s varsity volleyball team at tournaments in Tbilisi, Leningrad, and Riga, Latvia. He presented himself at the Lower Iset Construction Directorate in Sverdlovsk in September. The appointment augured well. Reacting against decades in which construction was a backwater of makeshift methods and unqualified, often convict, labor, the post-Stalin leadership was determined to give it a trained proletarian workforce, effective supervision, and the capital investment to press ahead with building factories and cities. The industry was to flourish under Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

His UPI pedigree gave Yeltsin the right to go straightaway to project foreman. Instead, he chose to work for a year as a trainee in the building trades with the men and women he would later oversee. Several analysts have reasoned that it was a financial decision, since junior-grade engineers in the Soviet Union were paid less than construction workers.⁴² They are mistaken: Yeltsin’s wage as an apprentice worker was lower than what he would have gotten starting as a foreman. The decisive motivation was self-sufficiency. Some of the book knowledge from UPI would have been a dim guide to “the real life of the workplace.” Worse would be dependence on other people’s judgment. “I was certain that it would be very rocky for me if any crew leader [brigadir] could consciously or unconsciously wrap me around his finger because his practical knowledge of the job outstripped mine.”⁴³ Yeltsin waded through twelve hard-hat specialties—carpenter, plasterer, stonemason, painter, crane operator, and the like—and secured a rudimentary competence in each. He helped build factory workshops, apartments, and schools. The job sites were filthy and hazardous, and he did not shy away from danger in Sverdlovsk any more than he had as a youth in Berezniki. In Confession on an Assigned Theme, he tells of a fall from scaffolding, a locomotive just missing him as he sat in a stalled truck, and having to secure a runaway crane.

The Iset building trust took Yeltsin on as a foreman (master) in June 1956. From there, he climbed sure-footed up the organizational ladder, rung by rung: work superintendent (prorab) in June 1957, senior work superintendent (starshii prorab) in June 1958, head engineer (glavnyi inzhener) of SU-13 (Construction Directorate No. 13) in January 1960, and chief (nachal’nik) of the directorate in February 1962. The first project he completed, in time for the November 7 holiday in 1957, was a five-story apartment house on Griboyedov Street, which ran by Uralkhimmash, the Urals Chemical Machinery Works, on the southeastern extremity of Sverdlovsk. In 1957–58 he finished construction at a textile-mill project that had been incomplete for several years and had been ransacked by the workers. But he went back to residential construction. Housing was a political priority for Moscow, dictated by the need to gain favor with the populace.

Shelter for the masses had gotten the short end of the stick under Stalin, whose preference was for office blocks and luxury apartments destined for elite groups. The war and the postwar military buildup had exacerbated the shortfall. Griboyedov Street was part of the first wave of the new consumerism in Soviet housing. The new self-contained flats in houses like this one, informally dubbed khrushchëby (a play on Khrushchev’s surname and trushchoba, an old Russian word for “slum”), were built to standardized designs. Minimalist as they were, they were a real step up from barracks and communal apartments and gave families spaces in which to store and improve possessions, and a kitchen where they could talk, laugh, and grieve in privacy. Five stories was the maximum that could be completed in one building season, and, under the regulations, could be commissioned with neither an elevator nor garbage chute. By the early 1960s a second wave of innovation was toward korobki, or “boxes,” much taller structures out of prefabricated reinforced-concrete slabs, generally on bulldozer-cleared outer areas of the cities. There was one production cycle for the lookalike product, from mixing the cement to fitting the doorknobs and the kitchen sink.⁴⁴

In June 1963 Yeltsin was reassigned to the Sverdlovsk House-Building Combine, the high-profile enterprise for housing construction in the city, as head engineer. In December 1965 he was elevated to director of the combine. “He knew,” Naina Yeltsina remembers, “that it was time to move on when the [post] he was in had started to bore him. So when he was chief of the construction directorate, for example, he found it was getting repetitive, he had done everything he could, and he wanted more challenging work.”⁴⁵ The need was satisfied temporarily, as Yeltsin now held Sverdlovsk’s most salient administrative post associated with popular welfare. “Being ‘first’ was probably always in my nature,” he was to observe in Notes of a President, “although I perhaps did not realize it in the early years.”⁴⁶ Ten years after leaving the polytechnic, now that he was in his mid-thirties, he and everyone around him realized it.

Meantime, Yeltsin made shifts in his personal life. He stopped playing league volleyball in 1956, limiting himself to coaching a local women’s team. That year, he and his college sweetheart, Naina Girina, who had returned to Orenburg after graduation, were reunited in Sverdlovsk and married in a civil ceremony on September 28, 1956, celebrating the nuptials with 150 friends in a local reception hall. Boris had to borrow his grandfather Starygin’s copper wedding band to give Naina. He did not buy her a gold band until their fortieth anniversary in 1996.

The couple soon joined the Soviet baby boom, parents to Yelena (Lena, born in August 1957) and Tatyana (Tanya, born in January 1960). The son Boris earnestly hoped for never materialized. After the birth of Yelena, all the peasant prescriptions for conceiving a boy were followed, such as putting an axe and workman’s cap under the pillow: “My friends, experts on customs, told us that for sure we would now have a son. The verified methods were of no use.” The new arrival “was a prim, smiling child, who maybe took after her mother’s character, where our elder daughter takes after me.”⁴⁷ When they were still young girls, their maternal grandmother, Mariya Girina, had a priest secretly baptize them at a home chapel in Orenburg, there being no officially recognized Orthodox church in the vicinity. Their father was not informed about the procedure. Their mother not only approved but brought each child to Orenburg for the purpose. Naina Iosifovna, in her words, “lived all my life with God in my soul,” although active practice was impossible. Like Klavdiya Yeltsina, she owned several small icons, and stood one of them on her night table, a talisman of pre-Soviet ways and beliefs.⁴⁸

The Yeltsins’ first connubial home was a space in a dormitory owned by Uralkhimmash. They graduated from there to a single room in a two-room apartment owned by the plant and in 1958, after Yelena was born, to a two-room apartment of their own—twenty-eight square meters (300 square feet), with the bathtub in the kitchen, and not far from Vtorchermet, a scrap-iron plant. There they shared a tiny icebox with their next-door neighbors. On Sundays they cooked Boris’s favorite dishes, pel’meni (Siberian dumplings stuffed with ground meat), blinchiki (fritters), and walnut cake, with them and sang folk music. The Yeltsins were among the first in their building to acquire an electric washing machine. A UPI comrade of theirs lived up the stairwell, and the two families used the machine alternate weeks, toting it back and forth. In 1959 Yeltsin’s job as head engineer of SU-13 got him a company car and driver. In 1960, having been issued another two-room apartment in the settlement of Yuzhnyi, closer to his work, they bought their first family refrigerator.⁴⁹

As was the woman’s lot in the USSR, Naina balanced a job—hers was in Vodokanalproyekt, a bureau that drafted blueprints for water and drainage utilities, where she was promoted to head engineer—with running a household and raising children without much husbandly assistance. Nor, unlike umpteen Soviet mothers, could she fall back on a live-in babushka, a grandmother who would hold the fort as she worked: Grandma Girina was in Orenburg and grandma Yeltsina back home in Berezniki and then, beginning in 1962, in Butka. Boris was relieved to delegate money and the care of belongings to his wife: “Never in his life did Boris Nikolayevich concern himself with the family budget, and he had no idea what I was spending the money on. When I ironed his suit, I always put some cash in the pocket, because every respectable man should have cash in his pocket…. He never tried to control me and he purchased nothing on his own but books.”⁵⁰

Boris was largely an absentee father, although when his daughters were teenagers he did review their grades on the weekend and, if they were less than a 5, he would zing the underachiever’s school diary across the living room of the apartment. Of their childhood he writes, “I must honestly admit I do not remember the details—when they took their baby steps, when they started to talk, or the rare moments when I tried to help raise them—since I worked almost without a break and we would meet only on Sunday afternoons.”⁵¹ Naina was as candid about the imbalance between the spouses in a press interview in retirement: “If a woman marries and has children, she has to make sacrifices…. You can rarely expect the husband to sacrifice anything on behalf of the family. For the man, the big thing is work. I always tried to make things go smoothly in the family.” She acknowledged in the 1990s that she, too, made less time for the children than she should have and was caught between opposing demands. Friends accused her of negligence, while “at work they chuckled, ‘Here you are guiding them across the street on the telephone.’”⁵² When Yeltsin’s work demanded it, the family’s comfort suffered. Having briefly lived in their first three-room apartment in the south of the city after Tatyana’s birth, they moved to a smaller flat, of two rooms only, around 1965, so he could be handier to the construction sites where he was needed. They transferred several years after that to a sunlit three-room apartment on Voyevodin Street, in the city center. In the first eleven or twelve years of their marriage, Boris and Naina had called seven different places home.⁵³

Romantic gifts and festivities were primarily how Yeltsin expressed affection and salved a guilty conscience. Naina, he wrote, “loves my surprises.” As examples he cited the nosegay and several verses of poetry he sent to the maternity home where she had Yelena in 1957—in Berezniki, where his mother could help with the diapers—and his daughters “squealing from joy” when he picked them up at eleven one night to go a friend’s birthday party.⁵⁴ They all would have loved to see him in the home more. When Yelena and Tatyana were young, the couple took summer holidays at one of the Soviet Union’s Caucasus resorts, dropping the girls off with Yeltsin’s parents and grandparents in Butka. The village was bigger and a little more prosperous than they had left it in the 1930s, although it lost the status of district seat in 1962 and was put under the town of Talitsa. A carpet manufactory, a creamery, and starch mill had opened in the 1950s, and the kolkhoz specialized in breeding hogs. Returning to pick the children up, Boris and Naina would remain in Butka for up to a week to bring in the hay and pick berries and mushrooms.⁵⁵

The other departure in Yeltsin’s life had bigger implications. In March 1960 he applied for and was granted probationary membership in the CPSU; he was made a full member, with Card No. 03823301, on March 17, 1961. The Khrushchev thaw had made it permissible for the relatives of former political prisoners and deportees to enter the ranks of the party, subject themselves to its discipline, and be certified as model citizens. Yeltsin was to state in his autobiography in 1990 that he “sincerely believed in the ideals of justice the party espoused and enlisted in the party with equal sincerity.” This sentence stressed attentiveness to duty and ideals and the ideal he as a politician made his signature issue in the 1980s—justice for all and the elimination of privileges. He also tried to impart in the memoir that not all communists, even then, were as sincere as he. At the meeting that formalized his membership in 1961, the head bookkeeper of SU-13, with whom he had professional differences, asked a pharisaical question about the exact volume and page in Marx’s Das Kapital where a certain doctrinal problem was discussed. Yeltsin made up a flippant reference, which was accepted. The insinuation was that party doctrine was already being perverted for contemptible ends.⁵⁶

Interviewed in 2002, though, Yeltsin stated that his decision about the party was half-hearted, ideals were of secondary moment, and it came down to a career calculus:

These revised words are more consonant than his memoirs with the fact that, while a young Yeltsin had soaked up mainstream Soviet values, he had not bought into the party qua organization. Unlike his wife, whose father (an official in railroad security) and many relatives in Orenburg were communists, none of the Yeltsins or Starygins was a member of the party. Yeltsin was thirty years of age when he received his party card, significantly older than the mean for that rite of passage. Roughly 10 percent of the adult population, but about 50 percent of all men with a higher education, were CPSU members in the late decades of the Soviet regime. Those bound for work in administration usually enrolled in their mid-twenties, and Gorbachev was twenty-one when admitted as a student.⁵⁸ The description of Yeltsin’s standoffishness from the party and of his commonsensical decision to join it also comports with the chronology. He filed the application two months after his designation as head engineer of SU-13; he was promoted to SU-13 chief eleven months after his party admission. Unlike Gorbachev, who was a delegate to the Twenty-Second CPSU Congress in Moscow in 1961 (Yeltsin did not go to any congress until 1981), Yeltsin makes no memoir reference to the political headlines of the 1950s and 1960s: the death of Stalin in 1953, the attack on the Stalin cult at the Twentieth CPSU Congress in 1956, Khrushchev’s overthrow by Brezhnev in 1964. Having left Urals Polytechnic in 1955, he had missed the outbreak of student unrest in post-secondary institutions in Sverdlovsk and other Soviet cities in 1956, after the Twentieth Congress.⁵⁹ It is of interest that his brother, Mikhail, a construction worker and UPI dropout, never belonged to the party and said that people only took out cards for selfish reasons. Mikhail, wrote Andrei Goryun in 1991 after getting to know him, “does not conceal his critical attitude toward the communists and asserts that most members whom he knows use their membership in the CPSU for mercenary purposes. He acknowledges he has never discussed these problems with Boris. The brothers have generally avoided conversations on touchy political themes, assuming, it would seem, that their views are too divergent.”⁶⁰ If they had talked politics in depth, they might in fact have agreed on some matters. Naina Yeltsina entered the party only in 1972, at age forty, for the same reasons that Boris entered in 1961. She served as secretary of the party bureau in her firm, which she described to me as tedious work.

What made the party pursue Yeltsin were his production accomplishments. In remembrances of the building industry, he credited them to a grueling schedule and ramrod organizational techniques. He was, he says, “exacting” (trebovatel’nyi): “I required people to keep strict discipline and to stick to their word. Since I never used profanity and… did my best not to raise my loud and piercing voice in front of people, my arguments in the fight for discipline were my own dedication to the job, my unflagging high standards and checking on the work done, plus people’s trust in the fairness of what I was doing. Whoever worked better would live better.”⁶¹ There is a truth to this chesty self-description. Eyewitnesses are in agreement that Yeltsin worked marathon days (and six of them a week), ran a tight ship, and stayed away from the swear words that sprinkled workplace communication in the industry. He was unfailingly punctual and levied fines for truancy and malingering. He accepted criticism, so long as it was made to his face. And he valued effort: He gave morning pep talks that singled out productive employees, dispensed yearly incentive pay, and, after his promotion in 1965, issued workers overalls lettered with “DSK,” the Cyrillic initials for House-Building Combine.⁶² At the combine, which because of its importance was staffed by older engineers and foremen, “At first no one perceived Yeltsin as a serious person—he was ‘a young whippersnapper.’ But, by demonstrating his competency, he very soon compelled people to take notice of him. Many listened to him more and more.”⁶³ This regard was as common below as at the top: “Yes, he was feared, but we respected him for his fairness and attention toward people. He knew every crew leader by name. He demanded discipline from all and forced each to put his shoulder to the wheel, while sparing no effort himself.”⁶⁴

Yeltsin’s rise was meritocratic, made without the windfall of a well-connected parent, spouse, or friend. The measure of merit was performance within the Soviet administrative system. For all managers in the USSR, the motto was “Fulfill the Plan!”—which meant “Fulfill the Plan or Else!” Fulfillment was computed in inelastic physical indicators—for housing, it was square meters completed—while quality, durability, and monetary cost were subsidiary. Leaders who met their targets were recompensed and promoted; those who did not were penalized or demoted. In the construction sector, the visibility of the product, unpredictable weather, and a lackadaisical labor force made for a notoriously campaign-driven work ethos. Two pieces of Soviet slang express the culture of the industry: shturmovshchina or “storming” to complete a project on time; and avral, a hard-to-translate term for “all hands on deck” or “hurry up and finish.” Thirty to forty percent of the entire annual housing plan in Sverdlovsk was completed in December.

Given what is known of his behavior as a student and athlete, Yeltsin was well suited by character to the frenetic aspect of the Soviet construction business. One afternoon in 1959, about to commission a worsted-wool mill, he discovered that SU-13 had not built a fifty-yard tunnel between two buildings and had mislaid the drawings. By six the next morning, he and his charges redid the drawings, excavated the passageway, and poured the concrete. In 1962–63 Yeltsin formed a model brigade (work crew) consisting of about one tenth of SU-13’s personnel. He opened up a cache of scarce construction supplies to the workers and enabled the brigade to shine and to set a USSR record by doubling its rate of completion. It was another feather in Yeltsin’s cap: As much a tutelary as a production feat, it got him and the brigade accolades in the Sverdlovsk press.⁶⁵

The pattern continued in the house-building combine from 1963 to 1968. Yeltsin himself writes of the mad dash to finish the plan and of how he was in his element in it: “The hardest part of building housing came at the end of the year and at the end of a quarter, when we had to work practically twenty-four hours. Often, especially on the night shifts, I visited the work crews, mostly the female ones.”⁶⁶ Without self-consciousness, he discloses that as head engineer he sponsored a successful “experiment” to slap up a five-story apartment house in five days flat. The building yard was equipped with three cranes, a network of transport rails, and large stocks of pre-positioned materials; it was the “industrial equivalent of street theater.”⁶⁷ In March 1966, in his first year as director, a five-story building being completed by the DSK on Moscow Street keeled over. A slipshod subcontractor had not correctly gauged the time needed to allow the foundation to set in the winter months. There was a criminal probe; no charges were laid and Yeltsin was not held culpable. But plans to give him an Order of Lenin for his work were scrubbed, and in April the Sverdlovsk party committee hit him with a formal reprimand. The combine hauled off the detritus and did the building a second time. It was known from then on as the desyatietazhka—Ten-Story House.⁶⁸

Yeltsin’s evolving relationships within the layer of CPSU appointees, or nomenklatura, of the post-Stalin Soviet system brought him advantage and vulnerability both. In no time, he learned how to deploy and manipulate incentives. Yakov Ryabov, the first secretary of the party gorkom (city committee) since 1963, was impressed at how he jawboned Sverdlovsk factory directors into lending hundreds of workers to the combine every year to help it meet its housing plan. The Soviet rules required that the resource quotas for any apartments not finished by December 31 be deleted from the coming year’s plan. Yeltsin cagily made the directors see they would be better off assigning the labor and getting housing in exchange. They received their apartments; Yeltsin and his employees met their plans and pocketed year-end bonuses.⁶⁹

At the same time, Yeltsin raised hackles. He scrapped tirelessly with Nikolai Sitnikov, his boss in SU-13, who had ordered him to give up volleyball coaching. They stayed at the feud when Sitnikov went on to higher things and Yeltsin succeeded him in the directorate. Ryabov and his second secretary, Fëdor Morshchakov, the official behind the creation of the DSK, were sympathetic to Yeltsin, seeing him as a diamond in the rough. They did not write him off when he received his party reprimand in 1966. Ryabov saw to it that Yeltsin was put on the list to be granted a Badge of Honor, his first state award.

Yeltsin needed a mentor. He was on good terms with the head of the construction department of the party gorkom, Boris Kiselëv, a former UPI classmate. Kiselëv saw promise in Yeltsin and introduced him to the party apparatus.⁷⁰ But the crucial patron was Ryabov. Born in 1928 in the province of Penza, Ryabov labored at the bench in the Urals Turbine Works, assembling diesel engines for tanks, and took his UPI diploma in mechanical engineering by correspondence. Bantam-sized, he was as much of a go-getter as Yeltsin but had a loutish edge. The teenaged Tatyana Yeltsina saw him as one of the more unpleasant of her father’s associates and was slightly afraid of him.⁷¹ Ryabov was drawn into work in the CPSU apparatus in 1960 by Andrei Kirilenko, an outsider from the Ukrainian party machine who had been first secretary of the Sverdlovsk obkom—oblast committee of the party—since 1955. Kirilenko drew praise from Nikita Khrushchev for sharply increasing shipments of meat to the central authorities. He did so by ordering the slaughter of calves, lambs, and piglets, which then depressed production in the region for a decade. Yeltsin would later describe Kirilenko’s part in the meat scam as shameful. “Kirilenko is still known for this. People have forgotten any good things he did [in Sverdlovsk], but this kind of thing is not forgotten.”⁷²

Khrushchev and his then deputy, Leonid Brezhnev, brought Kirilenko back to Moscow in 1962 for a position in the Central Committee Secretariat. His replacement in Sverdlovsk, on Kirilenko’s recommendation, was Konstantin Nikolayev, a local who graduated from the UPI construction division in the 1930s and was secretary of the institute’s party committee during the war. Nikolayev, a 300-pound diabetic, depended heavily on Ryabov because of his disabilities and promoted him in 1966 to second secretary of the obkom. In January 1971 Nikolayev retired and Ryabov took over as first secretary; Nikolayev died several months later. Kirilenko, as a member of the Politburo, seems not to have figured in the decision, although he kept a hand in Sverdlovsk politics until 1982. Ryabov was happy Moscow accepted the need for an industrial expert and Urals man to have the job and not to repeat the experience of sending in a varyag (Viking) like Kirilenko.⁷³

You would never know Yeltsin’s dependence on Ryabov from the Yeltsin memoirs, which hardly mention him. Yeltsin was not one to concede indebtedness to another, and this feeling was strengthened in Ryabov’s case by their rupture of relations in 1987, when Ryabov took part in the attack on Yeltsin as Mikhail Gorbachev pushed him out of his high position.

Ryabov made up his mind in April 1968 to recruit Yeltsin into the regional party apparatus. He wanted to turn a page in the obkom’s department for construction, which had been run for years by the ineffective Aleksei Guseletov. When Ryabov raised Yeltsin as a potential head, some functionaries, aware of the belatedness of his admittance into the CPSU and of his past noninvolvement in Komsomol and party activity, were dumbfounded. The least Yeltsin could do, they thought, was earn his party spurs at the factory or district level, as Ryabov had.⁷⁴ They may not have known that he had paid his dues the past five years on nominally elected “soviets” (legislative councils) and local party committees or that a 1966 review of his work appreciated him as “politically literate” (politicheski gramotnyi), taking part in public service, and “having authority” in the collective.⁷⁵ In his memoir account, Yeltsin specifically links his 1968 appointment to his political activities: “I was not especially surprised to receive this offer, since I had been engaged constantly in public service.”⁷⁶ Partocrats consulted by Ryabov objected that Yeltsin was headstrong and abrasive. Ryabov would not leave it at that. “I asked, ‘And how do you assess him from a work perspective?’ They gave it some thought and answered, ‘Here there are no problems. He… will carry out what the leadership assigns him to do.’” No powderpuff himself, Ryabov swore he would get the most out of Yeltsin and, “if he were ‘to kick off the traces,’ would put him in his place.”⁷⁷ He was not the last to think he could domesticate Yeltsin and harness him for his purposes.

Ryabov ran the appointment by Nikolayev and made the overture to Yeltsin. “To be objective about it, he was not dying to have this job,” writes Ryabov, “but after our chat he gave his agreement.”⁷⁸ Yeltsin says parsimoniously that he consented for no better reason than he “felt like taking a new step.”⁷⁹ But he did not do it on a lark. He knew full well that it was a wise career move—onward to fresh experiences and upward in the pyramid of power. “I became not merely a boss but a man of power. I threw myself into a party career as I had once thrown myself into hitting the volleyball.”⁸⁰

Sverdlovsk oblast’s party committee and regional government were in a lowslung building on Lenin Prospect, across the Town Pond from where Vasilii Tatishchev established his ironworks in the eighteenth century. An Orthodox cathedral was demolished to make way for it in the 1930s. The six-man construction department was one of several offices the obkom, as in other provincial capitals, had for palliating the numberless frictions and contradictions built into the Soviet planned economy. It acted as a watchdog on personnel, oversaw the logistics for mundane and showcase projects, and encouraged “socialist competition” among work units to outdo one another in attaining output targets. Yeltsin considered this meddling in line management unexceptionable. By hook or by crook, “with the aid of pumped-up resolutions, reproofs, and whatnot,” the party organs would take care of nuts-and-bolts problems. “This was the gist of the existing system, and it raised no questions.”⁸¹

The first half of the 1970s were the last time the economy of the Soviet Union, buoyed by high world oil prices, met its growth norms. The fledgling party worker met his in spades. Yeltsin prided himself, as in SU-13 and the DSK, on an orderly work environment. Making a sales pitch to a young engineer, Oleg Lobov, to sign on as his deputy in 1972, he called the department “a structure in which discipline has been maintained,” not disguising that he viewed it as wilting elsewhere.⁸² Yeltsin would work nonstop as a troubleshooter, as he did in 1973 during completion of a cold-rolling mill (a mill for reprocessing plate and sheet metal to make it thinner and harder) at the Upper Iset Works. For this exploit, which involved 15,000 workers and intercessions with head offices in Moscow, he won an Order of the Red Banner of Labor, his second. Yeltsin “worked conscientiously and responsibly,” Ryabov was to relate—no mean encomium in a book written a decade after the two fell out.⁸³

Yeltsin also had a nose for publicity. In 1970 he had builders retread his earlier experiment of putting up an apartment house in five days, and went one better by organizing a national conference on “the scientific organization of labor” around the project.⁸⁴ He butted into projects to be commissioned and was at Nikolayev’s or Ryabov’s side when the ribbon was cut. Yeltsin even listened to advice from Ryabov on softening his manner. “He changed tactics in his bearing and started to foster sociable ties with his colleagues in the obkom [staff] and to put out feelers to the members of the bureau, the obkom secretaries, the oblast executive panel, and other well-placed cadres.”⁸⁵ Yeltsin was not on a particularly fast track. He occupied the same departmental position in the obkom apparatus for seven years, which was as long as it took him to progress from foreman to chief of SU-13.

Here a providential event interceded. In the spring of 1975 Eduard Shevardnadze, the party boss in the Caucasus republic of Georgia, asked for and received the Politburo’s permission to hire away Gennadii Kolbin, the second secretary in Sverdlovsk and heir presumptive to Ryabov, as his second-ranking secretary in Tbilisi. Ryabov’s preferred candidate for second secretary, Vyacheslav Bayev, the head of the obkom’s machine-building department, was happy where he was and not tempted by the offer. Ryabov then approached Yevgenii Korovin, the secretary for industry, a diffident and sickly official from Kamensk-Ural’skii, who recommended Yeltsin—a mere department head—for the position. “He told me he could not handle it, it would be hard on him, but Boris Nikolayevich was high-powered and assertive, and I would be good in a secondary role.” Ryabov thought Yeltsin lacked the experience, and accepted a compromise recommended by Kolbin: that Korovin be made second secretary and Yeltsin be made one of the five obkom secretaries. Yeltsin may have expected more, but accepted. His new portfolio took in the forest and pulp-and-paper industries as well as construction, and he was given a seat on the bureau, the obkom board comprising ten to twelve party and state officials.⁸⁶

Speculation was rampant that Ryabov himself was going to graduate to other duties. Yeltsin smelled an opportunity for the taking. Ryabov shuddered when he described the situation twenty-five years later:

There is something disingenuous to Ryabov’s imputation of malevolence. In a hierarchical political order, the only way to gain traction was to carry out one’s superior’s wishes, as officials at all levels in the USSR strove to do and as Ryabov himself was no stranger to. Had Yeltsin held fast to the illiberal path Ryabov favored, Ryabov would not have characterized his behavior with such odium.

In real time, Ryabov, enjoining Yeltsin to be more collegial,⁸⁸ groomed him to be his successor. Ryabov got his big promotion out of Sverdlovsk in October 1976, when he was selected for the post of secretary supervising the Soviet defense industry in the Central Committee Secretariat in Moscow. To fill the vacancy, Ryabov saw Korovin and Yeltsin as the main alternatives and did not doubt which one he preferred. “Korovin,” he said, “was very diligent and finicky, and he had a lot of knowledge, but he did not have an iron grip, and the leader of such an organization has to have an iron grip and has to be strong of will. I consulted with my comrades and with the other secretaries, and with people from other provinces, and decided to recommend Yeltsin.”⁸⁹ There was some opposition at home. The obkom secretary for ideological questions, Leonid Ponomarëv, had had it with Yeltsin’s two-fisted approach and convoked the obkom bureau off-the-record. Ryabov was in Moscow for the plenum of the Central Committee (which confirmed him in the Secretariat position on October 25) and Yeltsin, by chance, was there for a month-long training course at the party’s Academy of Social Sciences. Ponomarëv moved that the bureau speak out against Yeltsin and endorse Leonid Bobykin, the first secretary of the city party committee. It reached no consensus and would have had a hard time of it had it voiced an opinion different from the outgoing first secretary’s, especially once it was clear that Yeltsin had support in the Kremlin.⁹⁰

Ryabov won General Secretary Brezhnev over to the candidacy, subject to vetting by party elders and forty minutes of chin-wagging between Brezhnev and Yeltsin. The central secretary for personnel questions, Ivan Kapitonov, had wanted Korovin as first secretary, and Brezhnev at first protested that “we in the Central Committee do not know [Yeltsin].” Brezhnev gave his seal of approval in their interview on October 31. “Even though I had always felt deep down that such a conversation might take place,” Yeltsin says, “I had tried not to dwell on it.” Brezhnev warned him that he would carry “additional responsibility” before the party because he had leapfrogged over Korovin.⁹¹

On November 2, 1976, a plenum of the Sverdlovsk obkom was convened to discuss “the organizational question.” “Everything went as planned,” Yeltsin remembered. Yevgenii Razumov, the apparatchik sent by Moscow to represent the Central Committee, moved on its behalf that Yeltsin be chosen first secretary. “As always, the vote was unanimous.” Yeltsin had written out a short speech, “feeling that it was necessary to do this,” and read it out to the obkom, which listened and adjourned.⁹²