23 For a claim that Boris Yeltsin was born in Basmanovo and not Butka, see Natal’ya Zenova, “Mesto rozhdeniya prezidenta izmenit’ nel’zya” (You cannot change a president’s place of birth), Obshchaya gazeta, April 30, 1997. Yeltsin hotly denied it and said he had “all the documentation” to prove he was born in Butka. Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2002).
24 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 18. This volume was published in English as Against the Grain. A relative said sixty years afterward (Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 15) that the story about the font is apocryphal and Yeltsin was baptized at home, the Butka church having been closed. Yeltsin’s report that the church was being made to serve the surrounding villages, and that baptisms were being held there only one day a month, suggests the closing of places of worship was under way. His description educes a long-standing Russian image of the intoxicated rural clergyman, going back at least as far as Vasilii Perov’s 1861 painting Easter Procession in a Village.
25 Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi,” reports incorrectly that Yeltsin’s birthplace was demolished some time ago. Stanislav Glebov gave me the address in 2005, and several residents of the street confirmed that this was the place. The household took in Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin, their four sons, the wives of the three oldest sons, and, it seems, three grandchildren. Ignatii’s daughter, Mariya, had married one Yakov Gomzikov in the early 1920s and remained in Basmanovo.
26 Leonid Brezhnev, Vospominaniya (Memoirs) (Moscow: Politizdat, 1983), 27. There were more than 1,300 peasant uprisings and mass protests in the Soviet Union in 1929 and the early 1930s. Fifty-two occurred in the Urals in only the first three months of 1930. I. S. Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala s drevneishikh vremën do nashikh dnei (History of the Urals from ancient times to our day) (Yekaterinburg: Sokrat, 2003), 346.
27 T. I. Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka na Urale, 1930–1936 (The banishment of the kulaks in the Urals, 1930–36) (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995), 33; Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 348.
28 The bell tower fell to the ground at one point. After communism, in 1993, the church was reconsecrated; a temporary tower was built in the yard and five bells purchased. Boris Yeltsin as president (personally or via a government grant, it is not clear) made a contribution to restoration (Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi”). A gutting and reconstruction funded by local businessmen began in 2005. The church in Basmanovo, dating from 1860, was torn down in the 1930s and never replaced. The location is still a debris-strewn vacant lot. Orthodox services are held in the village in a home chapel.
29 On cannibalism, Pëtr Porotnikov, a regional official who grew up in Butka, interview with the author (September 10, 2004). See the reference to the phenomenon in Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 347.
30 Raskulachivaniye (dekulakization) was a pre-existing Russian word adapted to a new purpose. Derived from kulak, whose original meaning was “fist,” it denoted the relaxing of the fingers in a clenched fist. In the context of Stalinist class warfare, it signified the draining away of the wealth of the village elite, the heartless kulaks.
31 References to Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 18–19, 20, 26, 144.
32 Andrei Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin: svet i teni (Boris Yeltsin: light and shadows), 2 vols. (Sverdlovsk: Klip, 1991), 1:5–6.
33 See John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991), 32–33; Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 116–18; Timothy J. Colton, “Boris Yeltsin: Russia’s All-Thumbs Democrat,” in Colton and Robert C. Tucker, eds., Patterns in Post-Soviet Leadership (Boulder: Westview, 1995), 50–51, 71; Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 49–51; and Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), chap. 1, which has rather more up-to-date information than the others about Nikolai Yeltsin. Mikheyev mistakenly refers (51) to Yeltsin’s childhood as “difficult but devoid of atrocities and destruction.”
34 For background, see Golfo Alexopolous, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). In the cities, the disenfranchised were denied ration cards, which did not apply in the countryside.
35 A. I. Bedel’ and T. I. Slavko, eds., Sud’ba raskulachennykh spetspereselentsev na Urale, 1930–1936 gg. (The fate of the dekulakized special migrants in the Urals, 1930–36) (Yekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1994), 14.
36 Gomzikova interview. Serafima Gomzikova, who was a young girl in 1930, recalled the scene. Her parents’ house was confiscated and local communists demanded that her father divorce her mother, Mariya (Ignatii’s only daughter), which he refused to do. If Anna Yeltsina’s name has been left out of previous accounts, the very existence of Mariya, who died in the 1950s, has not registered. Serafima is her surviving daughter.
37 Statistics in Viktor Danilov et al., eds., Tragediya sovetskoi derevni: kollektivizatsiya i raskulachivaniye; dokumenty i materialy, 1927–1939 (The tragedy of the Soviet village: collectivization and dekulakization; documents and materials, 1927–39), 5 vols. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), 2:745; and Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 73. The peak number, about 484,000, was reached in early 1932; by a year from then, it was down to 366,000, mostly because of deaths (33,000) and flight (97,000). For perspective, see James R. Harris, “The Growth of the Gulag: Forced Labor in the Urals Region, 1929–31,” Russian Review 56 (April 1997), 265–80; Judith Pallot, “Russia’s Penal Peripheries: Space, Place, and Penalty in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (March 2005), 98–112; and Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). As Viola shows, the regional administration was originally against central efforts to make the Urals the prime locale for deportees from all over the Soviet Union.
38 The Basmanovo council’s report on the family to the police in Kazan, in connection with the case against Ignatii’s son Nikolai, said Yeltsin senior was “on the run” (v begakh). The report was sent in February 1934. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 29.
39 The age limit is noted in Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 64.
40 Family details taken from Yumasheva communication. The severity of the restrictions suggests some unusual police animus toward the Yeltsins. Second-category kulaks were supposed to get shipment of thirty poods (about a half-ton) of baggage per family member. Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 80.
41 Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 340.
42 Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 94–95.
43 The town took its name when founded in the 1890s from Nadezhda (Hope) Polovtsova, the owner of the local iron mine and the wife of a personal aide to the tsar. From 1934 to 1937, it was called Kabakovsk, after Ivan Kabakov, the first secretary of the Communist Party committee of Sverdlovsk province—the job to be held by Boris Yeltsin from 1976 to 1985. When Kabakov was purged in 1937, Kabakovsk reverted to Nadezhdinsk. In 1939 it was named after Anatolii Serov, a Soviet aviator and hero of the Spanish Civil War.