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.”
73 Glebov interview.
74 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 124; second Yeltsin interview.
75 As already indicated, the statement (in Neverov, “Otets prezidenta”) had him spending 1930 to 1932 in Nadezhdinsk and 1932 to 1936 in Kazan, carpentering at Works No. 124 and studying in the tekhnikum. It then has him departing for Berezniki in 1937, leaving only one year unaccounted for.
76 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:5.
77 Second Yeltsin interview.
78 This sentence appears only in the English-language edition of the memoir (Yeltsin, Struggle for Russia, 98), not in the Russian original.
79 Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 354, where it is noted that, of the 8 million residents of the Urals, 900,000 were convicted of crimes in the 1930s, many of them of a political nature. Stalinist fears of sedition from without were not entirely based on fantasy. There were in fact attempts by émigrés and others to smuggle anti-Soviet materials into the country, the main effect of which was to intensify police attacks on real and imagined oppositionists.
80 Source: the Perm branch of the Memorial Society. See http://www.pmem.ru/index.php?mode=rpm&exmod=rpm/12, which has a list of the 6,553 known victims.
CHAPTER TWO
1 Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko, Kama i Ural (ocherki i vpechatleniya) (The Kama and the Urals [Essays and impressions]) (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya A. S. Suvorina, 1890), 170–71.
2 Figure on blood diseases from Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 101. Chemical-weapons making and pollution in Berezniki are documented at http://www.pollutedplaces.org/region/e_europe/russia/berez.shtml; http://www.ourplanet.com/imgversn/86/sakan.html; http://neespi.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/NEESPI_SP_chapters/SB_Appendix_Ch_3.pdf; and http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/kfile/russiaenviro.pdf.
3 M. M. Zagorul’ko, ed., Voyennoplennyye v SSSR, 1939–1956: dokumenty i materialy (Prisoners of war in the USSR, 1939–56: documents and materials) (Moscow: Logos, 2000), 104, 112; Obshchestvo “Memorial” and Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, 1923–1940: spravochnik (The USSR’s system of corrective-labor camps, 1923–40: a reference book) (Moscow: Zven’ya: 1998), 275–76, 291–92, 451–52, 456–57, 491–92, 493–94, 514. A detailed map of Gulag in the Perm area is available at http://pmem.ru/rpm/map/Rus06.htm. Gulag inmates in the Urals totaled 330,000 in 1938, excluding the 530,000 exiles in special settlements and not confined to camps. At war’s end, there were about 300,000 German POWs in camps in Sverdlovsk province alone.
4 In Molotov province as a whole in 1940–41, convict crews came to 30 percent of the total industrial labor force. Ol’ga Malova, “Gulag Permskoi oblasti” (The Gulag of Perm oblast), http://perm.psu.ru/school136/1945/antifashist/newspaper/malova.htm. But Gulag labor was concentrated in the Berezniki and Vishera areas, where its proportion was considerably higher.