5 This was so even in the largest Soviet cities. See David L. Hoffman, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
6 Larisa Korzhavkina, Berezniki (Berezniki) (Perm: Permskoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 2002), 76–77.
7 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 20. Yeltsin told an interviewer in the 1990s that a sixth person, a male Kazakh worker, shared the barracks room with them for some time during the war. Den’ v sem’e prezidenta (A day in the president’s family), interviews of the Yeltsin family by El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, April 20, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya). Polya’s name is not given in Yeltsin’s memoirs, but his mother mentioned it to acquaintances later.
8 Klavdiya Pashikhina, interview with the author (September 7, 2005). House, barracks, and fields were located just west and just east of where today’s Berezniki Street meets Five-Year-Plan Street.
9 Details on the house from author’s second interview with Naina Yeltsina (September 18, 2007). She says conversations in the 1950s suggested that the family had lived in a small rented house for a short time before moving into their private home.
10 Igor Neverov, “Otets prezidenta” (The president’s father), fragment of an unpublished manuscript by Neverov, “Nikomu ne otdam svoyu biografiyu” (We won’t give anyone our biography), 1998 (copy given to the author in September 2005 by the Museum of History and Art, Berezniki); and Naina Yeltsina, personal communication to the author, July 29, 2007. Mrs. Yeltsin checked the particulars with Boris Yeltsin’s brother and sister.
11 Igor Neverov, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi (The president of all Russia), documentary film by Yevgenii Kiselëv, 1999–2000 (copy supplied by Kiselëv), 4 parts, part 1.
12 Tatyana Yumasheva, personal communication to the author, March 4, 2005. In Butka Nikolai was to supplement his pension by working part-time for a Talitsabased building organization. One of his projects was to supervise construction of a new village school.
13 The quotation and the description of Klavdiya’s hidden icon are from Muzhskoi razgovor (Male conversation), interview of Yeltsin by El’dar Ryazanov on REN-TV, November 7, 1993 (videotape supplied by Irena Lesnevskaya). Other details from the author’s interviews.
14 Yeltsin said shamefacedly in 1993 (Muzhskoi razgovor) that he chided his mother for praying in the 1960s, after he joined the Communist Party, but she ignored him.
15 Izabella Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov ot Belogo doma” (Thousands of kilometers from the White House), Vechernyaya Moskva, October 2, 1991.
16 Details from ibid., and my interviews with Sergei Molchanov (September 8, 2005) and Klavdiya Pashikhina.
17 Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2002).
18 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 20, 26.
19 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya khotel, chtoby lyudi byli svobodny” (Boris Yeltsin: I wanted people to be free), Izvestiya, February 1, 2006.
20 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 20. The drinking was a delicate subject in the family. One relative who knew Nikolai well in Butka in the 1960s said in an interview that he hid bottles of vodka from his wife in the cellar of their house.
21 “In a way they were a match: if the father was a sadist, then the son showed an early masochistic bent.” Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 120; also 128–29, where it is claimed he showed the same attitude at college in Sverdlovsk. Cf. Oleg Davydov, “Prezidentskii kolovorot” (Presidential brace), in A. N. Starkov, ed., Rossiiskaya elita: psikhologicheskiye portrety (The Russian elite: psychological portraits) (Moscow: Ladomir, 2000), 81–92, for an Oedipal interpretation.
22 Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov.”
23 Oksana Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody Borisa Yel’tsina” (The school years of Boris Yeltsin), http://www.aif.ru/online/sv/1181/11_01.
24 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 20. This picture is supported by workmates. See in particular Neverov, “Otets prezidenta,” which mentions Nikolai trying to invent a machine for unloading railroad freight cars.
25 Yeltsina communication.
26 Zhdanov does mention (Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody Borisa Yel’tsina”) a friendship at School No. 95 with one Svetlana Zhemchuzhnikova, an evacuee from Leningrad, “very pretty” and somewhat of a tomboy. When she broke her leg in an accident, Boris talked his pals into visiting her at home.
27 Stalin made most Soviet schools single-sex schools during and after the war; they reverted to coeducation in 1954.
28 See Michael Ellman and S. Maksudov, “Soviets Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note,” Europe-Asia Studies 46 (July 1994), 671–80; and more generally on gender roles Lynne Attwood, The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
29 Quotation from Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 155.
30 I use scripts in the sense that some biographers use phrases such as inner myths and private self-concepts. See James E. Veninga, “Biography: Self and Sacred Canopy,” in Veninga, ed., The Biographer’s Gift: Life Histories and Humanism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983), 59–79; and Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographia (New York: Norton, 1984), 159–73.
31 Bartsits, “Shkol’nyye gody.” Details about the schools come from my interviews with Sergei Molchanov and with Viktor Tsipushtanov (September 8, 2005).
32 Indicative are the food supplies allocated to the town of Solikamsk, just up the Kama, for the year 1938. For each resident, they provided 1.1 kilograms of meat (less than 2½ pounds), 2.4 kilos of sausage, 3.9 kilos of fish, one jar of preserves, 100 grams of cheese, and 2.6 kilos of macaroni. The worst years were 1932–33, when rationing was in effect and the Urals norms for urban laborers were a pound of bread or bread surrogate, a pound of potatoes, and a glass of milk per day. 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), 341.
33 Andrei Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin: svet i teni (Boris Yeltsin: light and shadows), 2 vols. (Sverdlovsk: Klip, 1991), 1:8. Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana does not find the story of the siblings being sent to the restaurant a credible one, and surmises that Goryun misunderstood Klavdiya Yeltsina in their interview. Tatyana heard many stories about hardship from her grandparents but never this one. Asking neighbors for help would have been much more acceptable conduct. Tatyana Yumasheva, second interview with the author (September 11, 2006). Since Valentina Yeltsina was born only in 1944, she could not have been active in the search for food during the war years.
34 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 21. The hay mowing was one of many behavioral ties to village life. Fifty years later, as president of Russia, Yeltsin still owned two scythes (Den’ v sem’e prezidenta).
35 Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov.”