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.
5 A partial list of evacuated plants may be found at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/faculty/harrison/vpk/history/part1/list.txt.
6 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “A Closed City and Its Secret Archives: Notes on a Journey to the Urals,” Journal of Modern History 62 (December 1990), 776.
7 The American Jewish Handbook for 1980 was to estimate the Jewish population of Sverdlovsk that year to be 40,000. The 1989 census officially recorded 14,300 persons of Jewish nationality in Sverdlovsk oblast, fifth place in the Russian republic of the USSR. (Jewish was listed as nationality—that is, ethnicity—on Soviet passports.) Due mostly to emigration, the number declined to 6,900 in 2002, when it was fourth in the country.
8 The institute began as part of the new Urals State University in 1920 and for most of the time from 1925 to 1948 was called the Urals Industrial Institute. Its construction division, formed in 1929, functioned as a separate institute from 1934 to 1948. UPI was to be renamed Urals State Technical University (UGTU) in 1992 and now has 23,000 students.
9 Stroitel’nyi fakul’tet UGTU–UPI: istoriya, sovremennost’ (The construction division of UGTU–UPI: history and current situation) (Yekaterinburg: Real-Media, 2004), 12–20.
10 Yakov Ol’kov, interview with the author (September 12, 2004). In Sverdlovsk Germans built a firemen’s school, the central stadium, and housing, paved roads, and refaced city hall. The last prisoners were returned in 1955.
11 The claim about reading German with a dictionary is in “Lichnyi listok po uchëtu kadrov” (Personal certificate for the register of cadres) for Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, dated June 16, 1975; in TsDOOSO (Documentation Center for the Public Organizations of Sverdlovsk Oblast, Yekaterinburg), fund (fond) 4, register (opis’) 116, file (delo) 283, 4. The Documentation Center is the official title of the Sverdlovsk archive of the CPSU. According to a usually reliable source, a Russian journalist who covered him as president in the 1990s, Yeltsin was unable to distinguish the languages at that time. See Boris Grishchenko, Postoronnyi v Kremle: reportazhi iz “osoboi zony” (A stranger in the Kremlin: reportage from “the special zone”) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2004), 159–60.
12 Lidiya Solomoniya, interview with the author (September 11, 2004); Aleksandr Yuzefovich, Komanda molodosti nashei: zapiski stroitelya (Team of our youth: notes of a builder) (Perm: Fond podderzhki pervogo Prezidenta Rossii, 1997), 35, 49. Yakov Sverdlov, who died in 1919, was Jewish, but officials never got around to changing the name of the city in the late Stalin period. It persisted until September 1991, when Sverdlovsk reverted to the original Yekaterinburg; the province is still called Sverdlovsk oblast. In July 1957 three Sverdlovskers, already expelled from the party, were arrested for distributing anti-Semitic letters; they were released in 1964. One of their proposals was that the city be renamed. See V. A. Kozlov and S. V. Mironenko, eds., 58-10: nadzornyye proizvodstva Prokuratury SSSR po delam ob antisovetskoi agitatsii i propagande (Mart 1953–1991), annotirovannyi katalog (Article 58, section 10: the supervisory files of the USSR Procuracy about cases of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda [March 1953–1991], an annotated catalogue) (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiya,” 1999), 345.