13 Kozlov and Mironenko, 58-10, 41. Okulov was arrested on March 5, 1953, as Stalin lay dying in Moscow.
14 A. Ye. Pavlova, a Yeltsin classmate, is quoted in a recent book of reminiscences: “We were inculcated with faith in Stalin. We deified him from afar. When he spoke on the radio, we would run to listen—on our own, no one had to force us to do it. And, when he died, we cried out loud. It seemed to us that all was lost and nothing good would happen in future.” Vladimir Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii” (Boris Yeltsin and UPI), http://www.ural-yeltsin.ru/knigi/knigi_elcina/document427.
15 Details from Andrei Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin: svet i teni (Boris Yeltsin: light and shadows), 2 vols. (Sverdlovsk: Klip, 1991), 1:8–10; Irina Bobrova, “Yel’tsiny tozhe plachut” (The Yeltsins also cry), Moskovskii komsomolets, February 18, 2000; and Ol’kov and Solomoniya interviews.
16 Anatolii Yuzhaninov, quoted in Anna Veligzhanina, “Pervaya lyubov’ Borisa Yel’tsina” (Boris Yeltsin’s first love), Komsomol’skaya pravda, April 26, 2007. Yerina and Ustinov moved back to Berezniki and soon divorced.
17 Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.”
18 Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007); Bobrova, “Yel’tsiny tozhe plachut.” Naina was born in the village of Titovka, outside Orenburg, but grew up in the city. She also spent some of her childhood in Kazakhstan, the nearest republic in Central Asia.
19 Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.”
20 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 252. The dance lessons are described in Natal’ya Konstantinova, Zhenskii vzglyad na kremlëvskuyu zhizn’ (A woman’s view of Kremlin life) (Moscow: Geleos, 1999), 105.
21 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:9.
22 Interview with Ol’kov, who also described Yeltsin participating in polite petitions to the rectorate about students’ workload. On the petitions, see also Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 127–28.
23 “Otduvalsya v dekanate za Borisa tozhe” (I answered at the dean’s office for Boris, too), http://gazeta.ru/politics/yeltsin/1621092.shtml.
24 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 29; Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.” Rogitskii headed the department until 1965. The official history of the construction division (Stroitel’nyi fakul’tet UGTU–UPI, 21) describes him as a gifted engineer and a humane teacher, but also absent-minded.
25 On the UPI Komsomol committee, Galina Stepanova of the Sverdlovsk/ Yekaterinburg Communist Party archive, interview with the author (September 7, 2004). In his second interview with me (February 9, 2002), Yeltsin volunteered that he avoided participation: “In general I was a leader, a guide. But not in the Pioneers and Komsomol. I was little concerned with that.”
26 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 23.
27 Ol’kov interview. Even in Berezniki, Yeltsin had the best spike on his school team.
28 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 29–30; Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.”
29 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 29.
30 The principal’s order discharging Yeltsin is dated March 27, 1952; he applied for re-admission on August 30; the request was granted in mid-September. See Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 17.
31 Ol’kov interview.
32 Ibid.; Stroitel’nyi fakul’tet UGTU–UPI, 21.
33 Ol’kov interview.
34 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 27. In 2006, while on a visit to Kazan, Yeltsin referred to one such incident. He said it happened in Kazan and he told the police he was going to see his aunt; he spent some time in the brig. Anna Akhmadeyeva, “Boris Yel’tsin priznalsya v lyubvi k Kazani” (Boris Yeltsin professed his love for Kazan), http://www.viperson.ru/wind.php?ID=276299&soch=1.
35 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 29. The Norwegian version of the memoir recounts further risky ventures in Moscow, including a party with female students and a brawl with criminals. See Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:27–30.
36 Aleksandr Kil’chevskii, 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. Yeltsin in retirement referred to a similar-sounding incident with the team in Kazan. He said he “fell in love with some paintings” at an exhibition, missed the train, and then got to Tbilisi in a freight train. Akhmadeyeva, “Boris Yel’tsin.”
37 Quotation from Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 29 (italics added). Coach Kil’chevskii, though, interviewed by Kiselëv almost forty years later, still remembered Yeltsin’s summer outing with deep disapproval.
38 N. A. Vilesova, quoted in Sutyrin, “Boris Yel’tsin i Ural’skii politekhnicheskii.”
39 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 30. The certificate for the diploma project, dating his defense on June 20, 1955, was on exhibit in the school’s museum when I was there in 2005, and the description shows it was a design for a bucket line. Next to the document in the display case was a wood abacus of the kind a UPI student in the 1950s would have used to do the math.
40 Three schemes that Yeltsin drew for the bucket line towers are stored in the institute’s archive (copy shared with the author by Sergei Skrobov of Yekaterinburg). One of them is an ink sketch of a lattice steel pylon, 325 feet high, that bears some likeness to a tower for a television transmitter. It is possible that while dictating his memoirs Yeltsin was forgetful of the original project, saw a copy of the sketch, and mistook it for a television tower.
41 Local mountaineers began to scale the tower’s exterior wall with their climbing gear, which could take hours or even days. Several people staged parachute jumps from the platform. After two accidental deaths and one suicide, city workers in 1998 cut off the outside ladder and welded the entrance door shut. See http://tau.ur.ru/tower/etower.asp.
42 See, for example, Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:36; and Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka” (Sverdlovsk upstart), part 2, Politicheskii klass, March 2006, 85.
43 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 35.
44 Blair A. Ruble, “From Khrushchëby to Korobki,” in William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble, eds., Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 232–70.