44 No one can be sure today, but the likely trigger for Ignatii’s blindness was a stroke. His son Nikolai, Boris’s father, was to die of stroke in the 1970s.
45 Yumasheva communication. Taibbi, in his unpublished “Butka,” is the only analyst to have suggested that Yeltsin’s maternal grandfather was sent to the north. He tracked down no other details.
46 Second Yeltsin interview. The only way to reach Serov, just 130 miles northeast of Berezniki as the crow flies, was a laborious U-shaped train route, taking two days of travel.
47 About 70,000 banished peasants in the Urals were called up into the army during the war and qualified for release that way. Others were allowed to leave in dribs and drabs before the war. By January 1946 the number of peasant exiles in the Urals was down to 138,000 and by January 1954 it was less than 10,000. By that last date, though, the total number of banished people in all categories in the Soviet Union as a whole was still very high—2,720,000. Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka, 145–46.
48 Details again from Yumasheva communication.
49 Neverov, “Otets prezidenta.”
50 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 18–19, describes Nikolai as present for his baptism. He could not possibly have remembered who attended, but it is a fair guess that Klavdiya would have let it be known if Nikolai had missed the event. A Spanish journalist heard from Yeltsin relations in 1991 that Nikolai around this time worked on the construction of the Butka-Talitsa road (Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 16), but the project went on from 1934 to 1936, so the timing seems off. It is possible that another one of the brothers worked on the road.
51 Klavdiya Yeltsina told an American visitor in 1991 that the three of them did exactly that (she used the name Serov for their destination). Gwendolyn Elizabeth Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT: Democratization, Suverenizatsiia, and Boris Yeltsin in the Breakup of the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995), 78–79.
52 Eventually known as the Gorbunov Works, the plant was over the years to make reconnaissance planes, Blackjack strategic bombers, and civil airliners. The nearby Kazan Helicopter Works built the Mi-8 helicopter that Boris Yeltsin flew as president of post-Soviet Russia.
53 This was his claim in his 1950s autobiography: Neverov, “Otets prezidenta.”
54 This is by later assertion of Klavdiya Yeltsina (Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:5). The trips ended, she said, when her brother-in-law Ivan left Butka for Berezniki, which was in 1935.
55 Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 26. Litvin dug out Nikolai’s OGPU file from the Kazan archive of the KGB and gave it to Boris Yeltsin, who included excerpts in his second book of memoirs. The file also provided information on the dekulakization of Ignatii. English-language readers can find some details in Boris Yeltsin, The Struggle for Russia, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Times Books, 1994), 94–98, which translates Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 121–25.
56 The secret police arrested 4,721 people in Tatariya in 1931 and shot 252 of them. None of the 887 arrested in 1934 was shot. In the last four months of 1937, some 4,750 individuals were arrested and 2,510 of them shot. Altogether, from 1929 through 1938 more than 20,000 were arrested in the republic and about 4,000 were executed. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 18, 47, 49–50.
57 Ibid., 27.
58 Ibid., 38.
59 This is also the take of Boris Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Yumasheva, who perused the OGPU dossier in 1993. “He was not expressing insolent ideas,” she said of her grandfather. “He never spoke that way. He was simply trying to get them [his crewmen] to work, and they wanted to react for themselves.” Remarks by Yumasheva during second Yeltsin interview.
60 Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 45.
61 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 124.
62 Rimma Akhmirova, “Prezidenta nyanchil tovarishch Sukhov” (Comrade Sukhov took care of the president), Komsomol’skaya pravda, September 4, 1999; and, for Klavdiya’s literacy class, Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT,” 79.
63 The only public reference Yeltsin ever made to kindergarten in Kazan was on his last visit there, in 2006. Vera Postnova, “Yel’tsin nazval Shaimiyeva samymsamym” (Yeltsin called Shaimiyev the best of the best), Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 26, 2006. But family members say he spoke of the kindergarten with them as well.
64 Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 88.
65 Ibid., 55.
66 His autobiographical statement from the 1950s (in Neverov, “Otets prezidenta”) said that in 1936 or 1937 he was discharged from work “and left the third year of the tekhnikum by my own wish.” But the statement did not mention his arrest or time served in Gulag, so this information is of questionable value.
67 Akhmirova, “Prezidenta nyanchil tovarishch Sukhov”; and Yevgenii Ukhov, “Imennaya ‘dvushka’” (An inscribed “two-roomer”), Trud, April 25, 2007.
68 Historical sketch of the city at http://www.berezniki.ru/topic/gorod. The Gulag directorate allocated 4,000 convicts to the Berezniki camp in 1929. The writer Varlam Shalamov, one of the prisoners, said in his memoirs it had 10,000 workers in 1930. Vladimir Mikhailyuk, Ne odin pud soli: Berezniki v sud’be Rossii (Not one pood of salt: Berezniki in the fate of Russia) (Perm: Pushka, 1997), 238–40. The Vishera camp itself began as a branch of the detention camp at Solovki monastery, on an island in the White Sea, set up in 1921. It peaked at 37,800 inmates in 1931 and was closed in July 1934. A lumbering camp was opened at Nyrob, on a branch of the Kama north of Vishera, in 1945 and held 24,800 prisoners as of 1952.
69 The family details here come from Tatyana Yumasheva. On Nikolai Yeltsin’s rehabilitation (and Andrian’s, also posthumously), see Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani, 60.
70 Yeltsin’s handwritten self-description when he was admitted to the party, in 1961, said he moved with his parents to Kazan in 1935 and to Berezniki in 1937. It is reproduced in Grigorii Kaëta, Boris Yel’tsin: Ural’skii period zhizni (Boris Yeltsin: the Urals period of his life) (Yekaterinburg: TsDOOSO, 1996), 32. Later essays in the archive gave other dates but always referred to Kazan.
71 Valentin Yumashev, who as a journalist helped Yeltsin edit tape recordings into the first volume (and later volumes) of his memoirs, was not aware that the family had lived in Kazan, although he doubts Yeltsin (who became his father-in-law in 2001) made a conscious effort to suppress this fact. In Ispoved’, 19, Yeltsin said the family went straight from Butka to Berezniki when his father heard there was work at the potash combine, and that they took a horse and cart to the train station, disposing of surplus belongings as they went. Either he was being mendacious—and I cannot begin to think why he would—or his memory was playing tricks on him. The family moved to Berezniki from Kazan, not from Butka, and Kazan is a large city with its own station. It is highly unlikely Yeltsin was describing their departure from Butka to Kazan in 1932, when he was twenty-two months old.
72 Sixty years later, Yeltsin still wanted to prove (Zapiski, 123) that his father was not a bad hat in Kazan: “By the way, the [OGPU] file contains no especially pointed statements on my father’s part. His brother and the other ‘participants’ did most of the talking.” In his second interview with me, he stressed that Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin, before being expropriated in 1930, were in accordance with the law because they did not hire wage labor. “They were hard workers. They walked behind the wood plow and the metal plow, they did the work themselves, without hired laborers, they worked on their own in the village, as a family.”