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.
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.”