59 “Istoriya shkoly No. 1,” 9.
60 Aleksandr Abramov, the current Pushkin headmaster, showed me the 1948 directive in my interview with him (September 8, 2005). The class photograph and notes about future occupations are in the archive of the Berezniki Museum of History and Art.
61 Second Yeltsin interview.
62 Marietta Chudakova, interview with the author (April 14, 2003).
63 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 21–26. His book dates most of these incidents, but not the one with the grenades, where the source is Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:8.
64 Second Yeltsin interview; Molchanov interview. The bath was of the “black” variety, in which smoke from the fire escapes the steam room through a hole in the ceiling. (In a Russian “white” steambath, such as Boris Yeltsin built in his family’s yard, smoke exits through a stovepipe.) In Ispoved’, 24, Yeltsin mentions long rural hikes and a climb up the Denezhkin Stone, a scenic Urals massif north of Berezniki.
65 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 22.
66 Alya Tanachëva, interview with the author (June 22, 2004).
67 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 22–23.
68 Ibid., 25. When he fought the school’s decision on tenth-grade registration, he repeated the cycle: “The path was already familiar.” He was by then known to some city officials because of his success as an athlete.
69 Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.”
70 Interviews with Abramov (jump out of the window) and Pashikhina (needles on the teacher’s chair).
71 Molchanov interview. Molchanov was an unusually reliable source, since, he said, he never read Yeltsin’s published account. In his memoirs, Yeltsin’s memories of his years at the Pushkin School are generally clearer than those of School No. 95. His studies at Pushkin were less remote in time and the school is still a going concern, whereas School No. 95 was converted into a trade school in 1964 and shut down in 1971 (a fragment of the building remains). Yeltsin, by this time Communist Party boss of Sverdlovsk province, sent a sculpture of semiprecious Urals stone for the fiftieth anniversary of the Pushkin School in 1982. He had planned to attend the celebration but could not because his opposite number in Perm, Boris Konoplëv, would not make the time to accompany him, as protocol required. His gift for the sixtieth anniversary in 1992, on display in the school museum in 2005, was a book inscribed “With thanks for the foundation.” In the 1990s Yeltsin had discretionary funds from the president’s office donated to the schools for repairs and renovations. His foundation also provided assistance to the school after his retirement.
72 His school-leaving certificate dates his entry to the school in 1945, without giving the month.
73 Zhdanov remembers nothing about pupils being required to collect scraps for the teacher’s pig or about Yeltsin attacking her at a public ceremony. When he read these things in Yeltsin’s memoirs, “I even wanted to phone him up and ask, ‘Where did you come up with that?’” Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.” Conversion of the three secondary schools in town into single-sex schools was completed only in 1946, but in 1945, when Yeltsin transferred, the Pushkin School was already the only one to admit boys.
74 Interviews with Stanislav Glebov (September 11, 2005) and Abramov. Yarns pop up every now and then about Yeltsin doing some dastardly deed around this time. One of the silliest is to the effect that in the hand-grenade incident he threw the weapon at a group of his friends and killed two of them. It can be found in Yurii Mukhin’s screed Kod Yel’tsina (The Yeltsin code) (Moscow: Yauza, 2005), 51.
75 The family’s pain is undeniable. Gorbachev did not speak about it publicly until 1990. Both of his grandfathers were arrested in the 1930s, his paternal grandfather (who joined the kolkhoz only in 1935) spent a year in Siberia, and several relatives died in the collectivization-induced famine. Grandfather Gopkalo, arrested in 1937, was released in 1938 and restored as a party member and as head of the kolkhoz. Raisa Gorbacheva’s maternal grandfather was shot in 1937. See Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:31–58.
76 The essay is not mentioned in Gorbachev’s memoirs but came out in a discussion in the Politburo in 1986. Gorbachev told his colleagues (including Yeltsin) that he preferred to have someone else meet with Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who had defected to the West in 1967, returned to the USSR in 1984, and now sought permission to leave again (which she eventually received). Offended by letters in which she criticized her father, Gorbachev said, “If you ask me, it is necessary to place a high value on Stalin, Stalingrad, et cetera. I myself am from such a family. My uncle wrecked his health [building the kolkhoz]. My mother and her four sisters were from an impoverished family. I received a medal for a composition on the theme, ‘Stalin Is Our Glory, Stalin Is the Delight of Our Youth.’” Politburo transcript for March 20, 1986, in Volkogonov Archive (Project on Cold War Studies, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University), 41. “Stalin Is Our Glory, Stalin Is the Delight of Our Youth” was the title of a prewar song by Matvei Blanter and Aleksei Surkov.
77 Interviewed by a journalist in 2000 (see http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/gor0int-1), Gorbachev recalled that “the party’s slogans appealed to me, they made quite an impression on me. It was very seductive, very attractive, and I took it all on faith.”
78 Molchanov interview.
79 Arnold M. Ludwig, King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 448. Thirty-two percent of the leaders in Ludwig’s sample were outgoing in the group and 29 percent were solitary. Again, Yeltsin manifested both of these traits at different times. Yeltsin’s avid readership of books was shared by 39 percent of Ludwig’s subjects, but his athletic skills by only 15 percent, his very close relationship with his mother by 11 percent, and his at times hostile relationship with his father by 21 percent.
80 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 155.
81 Quotations from Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 26; and Tanachëva interview.
CHAPTER THREE
1 A mining institute opened in Molotov (Perm) in 1953 and was upgraded to a polytechnic in 1960. According to a passage in Yeltsin’s first memoir book not printed in the Russian edition, he saw the new campus of Moscow State University on the Lenin Hills while on his first visit to Moscow in the summer of 1953, shortly after Gulag laborers completed it. He was taken by the magnificence of the buildings and regretted that he had not applied for admission in 1949. But then he thought to himself he probably would have failed the entrance test and, as the Russian proverb goes, “Better a sparrow in the hand than a blue titmouse in the sky.” Nikolai Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin: raznyye zhizni (Boris Yeltsin: various lives), 2 vols. (Moscow: OLMA, 2001), 1:27–28 (quoting from the Norwegian-language edition of Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu).
2 Perm was founded in the same year as Yekaterinburg, 1723, but was the only large Russian city other than St. Petersburg to be laid out rectilinearly. It had more cultural and educational institutions than Yekaterinburg and was made capital of the Urals region in 1781. During the revolution and civil war, Perm was more supportive of the White forces.
3 James R. Harris, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
4 Leonid Brezhnev, Vospominaniya (Memoirs) (Moscow: Politizdat, 1983), 29.