30 Viktor Shenderovich, Kukly (Puppets) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 35–36.
31 Frank Vandiver’s term, from “Biography as an Agent of Humanism,” 16.
CHAPTER ONE
1 A. K. Matveyev, Geograficheskiye nazvaniya Urala (Geographic names of the Urals) (Sverdlovsk: Sredne-Ural’skoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 1980), 49–50. It has also been suggested that the name comes from budka, the term for a sentry box such as European settlers in the area would have set up, and slang for toilet stall. There is an eponymous Butka Lake southeast of the village of Butka and a Butka River (a creek, really) that flows into the Belyakovka from the right. But the lake is not connected to either river, and the conflux of the Butka and Belyakovka rivers is about twelve miles downstream of the village on the Belyakovka.
2 I. Butakov, “Butke—300 let” (Butka is 300 years old), Ural’skii rabochii, November 3, 1976.
3 See A. A. Kondrashenkov, Krest’yane Zaural’ya v XVII–XVIII vekakh (The peasants of the Trans-Urals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) (Chelyabinsk: Yuzhno-Ural’skoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 1966), 30, 53; “Iz istorii Butki” (From Butka’s history), http://rx9cfs.narod.ru/butka/7.html; and “Rodnomy selu Yel’tsina ispolnilos’ 325 let” (Yeltsin’s native village is 325 years old), http:/txt.newsru.com/russia/03nov2001/butka.html.
4 See on this point Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). Eighty percent of rural dwellers in the Urals on the eve of emancipation were state peasants. There were urban serfs in the Urals, attached to mines and factories.
5 Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko, Kama i Ural (ocherki i vpechatleniya) (The Kama and the Urals [Essays and impressions]) (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya A. S. Suvorina, 1890), 551.
6 V. P. Semënov-Tyan-Shyanskii, Rossiya: polnoye geograficheskoye opisaniye nashego otechestva (Russia: a complete geographic description of our fatherland), 11 vols. (St. Petersburg: Devrien, 1899–1914), 5:170.
7 Michael Cherniavsky, “The Old Believers and the New Religion,” Slavic Review 25 (March 1966), 24. See also Roy R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995); and Georg Bernhard Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Most Old Believers lived deep in the interior, but there were also concentrations, particularly of merchants, in the big cities. One-third of the population of Yekaterinburg in the mid-eighteenth century was Old Believer. The rural sectarians tended to be more radical in their beliefs than the urban, who were usually willing to say prayers for the tsar.
8 The Russian historian Rudol’f Pikhoya, quoted in Pilar Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya: Boris Yel’tsin, provintsial v Kremle” (The impossible Russia: Boris Yeltsin, a provincial in the Kremlin), Ural, April 1994, 15. This valuable study was first published in Spanish as La Rusia Imposible: Boris Yeltsin, un provinciano en el Kremlin (Madrid: El Paìs, S.A./Aguilar, S.A., 1994).
9 Ocherki istorii staroobryadchestva Urala i sopredel’nykh territorii (Essays on the history of the Old Believers of the Urals and abutting territories) (Yekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2000), 85. The 1897 census (which I consulted in the original) counted 23,762 Old Believers in Shadrinsk district, or 8 percent of the population. Experts have generally felt that official statistics underestimated the number of Old Believers.
10 The census of 1897 said 780 of the 825 lawful residents of Butka were Orthodox. Most of the remaining forty-five would have been Old Believers, and undoubtedly quite a few of the 780 had mixed beliefs. Seventeen residents of Basmanovo and 105 in Talitsa were unaccounted for in the same way. In Butkinskoozërskaya village, at the terminus of the Butka River, the census recorded 162 of 914 persons as Old Believers.
11 Irina Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi, yemu vidnei” (Boris is a big shot, he knows better), Moskovskii komsomolets, January 31, 2007, reports that approximately 1,000 people bearing the name live in today’s Sverdlovsk and Perm provinces.
12 Students of twentieth-century cinema will recognize the name from the characters Aleksei and Fëdor Basmanov in Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet film classic, Ivan the Terrible, released in parts in 1944 and 1958. Aleksei is a lieutenant of Tsar Ivan. His only son, Fëdor, is the bloodthirsty founder of the Oprichnina, Ivan’s palace guard.
13 D. A. Panov, Opyt pokolennoi rospisi roda Yel’tsinykh (An experiment in doing a genealogy of the Yeltsin clan) (Perm: Assotsiatsiya genealogov-lyubitelei, 1992), and Panov’s work at http://www.vgd.ru/Ye, give years of birth and death for all male heads of the Yeltsin family prior to Yekim, and only a year of birth for him. At that point, the well runs dry because of changes in record keeping under the Soviet regime.
14 Ivan Yeltsin (1794–1825) was a nephew of Savva. He returned to Basmanovo from the army and fathered two children. After his death, his widow, Marfa, had seven more sons and daughters by another man.
15 For Boris Yeltsin’s grandparents on both sides, I rely on a personal communication from his daughter Tatyana Yumasheva dated March 4, 2005, which collated information from family sources, and on interviews with Stanislav Glebov, a distant cousin, in Butka and Serafima Gomzikova, Boris’s first cousin, in Basmanovo (both on September 11, 2005). Yumasheva appears in the pages of this book mostly as Tatyana Dyachenko, her married name when her father was president. The family has no record of Anna Dmitreyevna’s maiden name. Dmitrii Panov was unable to find even her given name and patronymic for his genealogy. Ignatii is sometimes referred to as Ignat Yeltsin.
16 Pilar Bonet and Rudol’f Pikhoya have speculated about Yeltsin’s Old Believer roots. Klavdiya Yeltsina, his mother, spoke of them before her death in 1993: Alya Tanachëva, a Sverdlovsk political activist who befriended her, interview with the author (June 22, 2004). Surviving members of the family cannot confirm Klavdiya’s assertion and say that, if there were Old Believer roots, they were deep in the family’s past.
17 Klavdiya Yeltsina in the 1950s, as recalled by Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007).
18 Yumasheva communication; police file on Nikolai Yeltsin compiled before his arrest in 1934, as given in A. L. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani (The Yeltsins in Kazan) (Kazan: Aibat, 2004), 28–29.
19 Excerpted in Igor Neverov, “Otets prezidenta” (The president’s father), fragment of an unpublished manuscript by Neverov, Nikomu ne otdam svoyu biografiyu (We won’t give anyone our biography), 1998; copy provided to the author in September 2005 by the Museum of History and Art, Berezniki, Russia.
20 Or so local residents told a foreign correspondent in the 1990s: Matt Taibbi, “Butka: Boris Yeltsin, Revisited,” http://exile.ru/105/yeltsin. Nikolai and Taisiya Bersenëva romanced before her marriage and resumed the relationship after five years.
21 Izabella Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov ot Belogo doma” (Thousands of kilometers from the White House), Vechernyaya Moskva, October 2, 1991.
22 Yumasheva communication. The phrase about the Yeltsins’ golden hands is in Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov,” and was repeated in my interview with Serafima Gomzikova. Klavdiya’s ancestors up to her parents’ generation can be located at www.vgd.ru/S.