45 Second Yeltsina interview. Yeltsin’s career moves are conveniently summarized in handwriting in his “Lichnyi listok,” 4.
46 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 269.
47 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 74. Yeltsin was so sure their second child would be a boy that he had already purchased a blue blanket and a toy truck. “Yelena Yel’tsina chut’ ne zadushila sestru v koryte” (Yelena Yeltsina almost smothered her sister in the trough), http://www.allrus.info/obj/main.php?ID=217454&arc_new=1.
48 Second Yeltsina interview and author’s third interview with Tatyana Yumasheva (January 25, 2007).
49 Most details about housing are taken from ibid. The point about the shared washing machine is from an interview with Lyudmila Chinyakova in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 2.
50 Interview on Ekho Moskvy radio, March 1, 1997, http://echo.msk.ru/guests/1775. In several other interviews, Naina said she always knotted Boris’s necktie and that he never learned how to do it himself. This was an overstatement. Boris may have preferred to let his wife knot his tie at breakfast, but he knew how to do so himself.
51 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 74. The story of the school diaries, attributed to Naina Yeltsina, is in Vladimir Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy” (Entourage), part 3, Rabochaya tribuna, March 28, 1995.
52 “Naina Yel’tsina: Boris Nikolayevich na menya vorchit, a mne nravitsya…” (Naina Yeltsina: Boris Nikolayevich grumbles, but that is fine with me), Komsomol’skaya pravda, February 2, 2006; and “Naina Yel’tsina: ya nikogda ne vmeshivalas’ v dela svoyego muzha” (Naina Yeltsina: I never interfered in my husband’s business), Izvestiya, June 28, 1996.
53 Third Yumasheva interview.
54 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 251.
55 Al’bert Tsioma, a Butka neighbor of the neighbors, interview with the author (September 11, 2005). Butka’s population got to about 3,500 in the 1970s and about 4,000 today. Basmanovo leveled out at less than 2,000.
56 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 40–41.
57 Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2002).
58 A good control group would be the 115 regional CPSU leaders selected full or candidate members of the party Central Committee with Yeltsin in 1981. Their average age of admission to the CPSU was 24.5. Specialists in ideological and control functions had joined earlier (at an average age of 22.5), but even among those whose careers were mostly in the economic realm, like Yeltsin, the average was 25.6. Only four of the 115 were admitted at an older age than he—two who were thirty-one and two who were thirty-two. Calculated from biographies in the 1981 yearbook of the Bol’shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya (Great Soviet encyclopedia).
59 “In 1956 the party authorities were shaken by the bold statements by students in a number of Sverdlovsk institutions, demanding ‘freedom to criticize,’ ‘free speech,’ and democracy. Harsh measures were taken against them.” Several were put on trial and sent off to labor camps or psychiatric prisons. A Sverdlovsk group favoring an anti-communist revolution, headed by factory technician L. G. Shefer, was broken up in April 1963. A. D. Kirillov and N. N. Popov, Uraclass="underline" vek dvadtsatyi (The Urals: the twentieth century) (Yekaterinburg: Ural’skii rabochii, 2000), 175–76; Kozlov and Mironenko, 58-10, 631.
60 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:6.
61 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 43.
62 Leon Aron, who interviewed some coworkers, goes into informative detail on such practices (Yeltsin, chap. 2). See also Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT,” 87–95.
63 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:11.
64 Svetlana Zinov’eva, quoted in Vadim Lipatnikov, “Boris Yel’tsin i DSK” (Boris Yeltsin and the DSK), http://www.ural-yeltsin.ru/knigi/knigi_elcina/document639.
65 On the model brigade, see Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:11; Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 42–43; and Zen’kovich, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:40. Aron (Yeltsin, 36–37) views the incident in a more favorable light.
66 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 43.
67 Aron, Yeltsin, 40.
68 The fullest account is in Yakov Ryabov, Moi XX vek: zapiski byvshego sekretarya TsK KPSS (My 20th century: notes of a former secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU) (Moscow: Russkii biograficheskii institut, 2000), 33. The reprimand is at TsDOOSO, fund 161, register 39, file 9, 22–24.
69 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 32.
70 See Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 1:11.
71 Third Yumasheva interview. It must be said that for all of Yeltsin’s life some people saw him in such terms as well.
72 Andrei Karaulov, Vokrug Kremlya: kniga politicheskikh dialogov (Around the Kremlin: a book of political dialogues) (Moscow: Novosti, 1990), 98.
73 Yakov Ryabov, interview in files of Central Committee Interview Project, University of Glasgow (transcript supplied by Stephen White). He recalled discussing the need to replace Nikolayev with Brezhnev and Ivan Kapitonov of the Secretariat, but did not mention Kirilenko.
74 Oleg Podberëzin, formerly a Sverdlovsk party worker, interview with the author (September 9, 2004). Ryabov had been appointed party secretary of the turbine works in 1958 and of a district of Sverdlovsk city in 1960. He was active in Komsomol affairs from 1946 to the mid-1950s.
75 TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 116, file 283, 14.
76 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 44. As documented in the archive, he was “elected” to the Chkalov district soviet in 1963, the Sverdlovsk city soviet in 1965, and the city committee of the party in 1966. Once on the obkom staff, he joined the soviet and party committee of the oblast.
77 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 34–35.
78 Ibid., 35.
79 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 44.
80 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 253.
81 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 41.
82 Oleg Lobov, interview with the author (May 29, 2002).
83 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 35.
84 Aron, Yeltsin, 43–44.
85 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 38.
86 Details on motivations here from Ryabov interview (University of Glasgow).
87 Ryabov, Moi XX vek, 40.
88 In ibid., 40–41, Ryabov reprints a five-point summary from his diary of a conversation in June 1976 in which he let into Yeltsin for sharply worded instructions, superciliousness, disrespect for fellow communists (“including members of the bureau of the obkom”), and taking criticism as an insult. Every time they had such a conversation, Ryabov says, Yeltsin protested that his rudeness was only out of zeal to get the job done and promised to be more correct in future. “This way Boris won me over and calmed me.”
89 Ryabov interview (University of Glasgow).
90 I heard about Ponomarëv’s attempt from a then member of the bureau who wishes to go unnamed. Confirmation of the Bobykin-Yeltsin rivalry may be found in the memoir by Viktor Manyukhin, a contemporary of Yeltsin’s in the Sverdlovsk party apparatus: Pryzhok nazad: o Yel’tsine i o drugikh (Backward leap: about Yeltsin and others) (Yekaterinburg: Pakrus, 2002), 34–35. Some bureau members certainly preferred Yeltsin. Ryabov (interview, University of Glasgow) identifies Korovin, secretary N. M. Dudkin, the commander of the local military district, and the tradeunion chief as in favor and says that even in 1975 “several secretaries” preferred that Yeltsin be made second secretary, over Korovin’s head.