56 When the boy was born, Boris Nikolayevich pressed Khairullin to have him bear the Yeltsin surname. Khairullin has said in press interviews that he agreed with reluctance but on the understanding that a second child would have his family name.
57 Andrei Karaulov, Vokrug Kremlya: kniga politicheskikh dialogov (Around the Kremlin: a book of political dialogues) (Moscow: Novosti, 1990), 103.
58 Naina Yeltsina, personal communication to the author (July 29, 2007).
59 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 331.
60 The idiom “compliant activism” was struck to describe aspects of grassroots politics in the Brezhnev era. See Donna Bahry, “Politics, Generations, and Change in the USSR,” in James R. Millar, ed., Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 76–84.
61 TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 101, file 105, 73. At the same time, Yeltsin took a firm line against forms of private enterprise that contravened Soviet laws and mores. For example, he condemned the informal sale of radio receivers and spare parts, which might allow citizens to listen to foreign broadcasters like the BBC or Voice of America (with the local favorite, Willis Conover’s jazz hour).
62 Aron, Yeltsin, 66.
63 B. N. Yel’tsin, Srednii Uraclass="underline" rubezhi sozidaniya (The middle Urals: milestones of creation) (Sverdlovsk: Sredne-Ural’skoye knizhnoye izdatel’stsvo, 1981), 83, mentions Uralmash, the Kalinin Works, and others making washing machines, kitchen dishware, lightbulbs, vacuum cleaners, and baby carriages. The obkom drew 600 factories into a plan to increase output of consumer goods in the province by 50 percent in the 1981–85 five-year plan.
64 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 251.
65 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 30, 85.
66 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002); and Yurii Petrov, second interview (February 1, 2002). According to Naina Yeltsina (second interview with the author, September 18, 2007), Boris already owned a considerable number of books when they married in 1955, and they installed a bookshelf before having the chance to acquire any furniture. He did more reading when in construction than when in the party apparatus, but the reading never stopped. Visitors to the Yeltsins in Moscow in the late 1980s were taken with his collection, which sat in the entrance hall to their apartment on the same unpainted plank shelves as in Sverdlovsk.
67 Third Yeltsin interview and comments by Naina Yeltsina during the interview.
68 Goryun, Boris Yel’tsin, 2:20–21. Goryun dates the trip in 1968, after Yeltsin transferred to party work. Yeltsin, in his CPSU membership file (TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 116, file 283, 5, 300), says it was in May 1966, when he was still director of the housing combine. The file shows him taking ten foreign trips before his transfer to Moscow in 1985. Four of these were vacations and six were on business. Six of the ten trips were to Soviet-bloc countries (Bulgaria twice, Czechoslovakia twice, Rumania, and Cuba) and four were to Western countries (France in 1966 and 1974, Sweden and Finland in 1971, and West Germany in 1984). Altogether he had spent three to four weeks in the West.
69 Transcript of interview with Mike Wallace for CBS News’s 60 Minutes show of October 6, 2000 (made available by Jonathan Sanders); this piece was not broadcast. In Zapiski, 250–51, Yeltsin mentions Naina bringing him news about shortages from conversations at the office and visits to the food market.
70 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 64.
71 Lidiya Solomoniya, interview with the author (September 11, 2004).
72 Lobov interview.
73 Vladimir Polozhentsev, “Privet, pribaltiitsy!” (Greetings, people from the Baltic), http://podolsk-news.ru/stat/elcin.php. This interview was given in July 1988 but never published. The Russian is idiomatic and not the easiest to translate: brezhnevskaya sistema postoyanno sverbela v mozgu, i vnutri ya vsegda nës kakoi-to vnutrennii uprëk.
74 Karaulov, Vokrug Kremlya, 111.
75 Sergei Ryzhenkov and Galina Lyukhterkhandt-Mikhaleva, Politika i kul’tura v rossiiskoi provintsii: Novgorodskaya, Voronezhskaya, Saratovskaya, Sverdlovskaya oblasti (Politics and culture in the Russian provinces: Novgorod, Voronezh, Saratov, and Sverdlovsk oblasts) (Moscow: Letnii sad, 2001), 160. On the UPI group, see Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 123. After the singer Yulii Kim gave an unauthorized concert at UPI in the late 1970s, a music club at the institute was closed and the teacher who invited him was fired. See also Anita Seth, “Molodëzh’ i politika: vozmozhnosti i predely studencheskoi samodeyatel’nosti na vostoke Rossii (1961–1991 gg.) (Youth and politics: the possibilities and limits of student amateurism in the east of Russia [1961–91]), Kritika 7 (Winter 2006), 153–57.
76 TsDOOSO, fund 4, register 100, file 116, 119.
77 Sverdlovsk’s was the fifth subway to be started in the USSR’s Russian republic. Yeltsin’s conversation with Brezhnev is described in Ispoved’, 54. But Kirilenko played a key role before then in getting the Soviet railways minister, Ivan Pavlovskii, to agree in a single telephone conversation. Although he misnamed the project—calling it the metr (meter) rather than metro (subway)—Uncle Andrei came through for Sverdlovsk. Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 130.
78 Second Petrov interview. Overcentralization was also rampant within the CPSU. Lobov, Yeltsin’s second secretary from 1982 to 1985, had to ask the Central Committee to let him add a cleaning lady to his staff chart (Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 41).
79 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 395.
80 Second Yeltsin interview.
81 Comments by Naina Yeltsina during third Yeltsin interview.
82 Second Petrov interview. On the pursuit of regional autonomy, see James R. Harris, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Yoshiko M. Herrera, Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
83 See on this point Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 54–59.
84 There is film of the ceremony in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 1.
85 Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 78.
86 Rossel, interviewed in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 1. According to what Yeltsin told Rossel, he and Brezhnev met on work matters on Yeltsin’s birthday—it would 4 have had to be February 1, 1977, his forty-sixth—and an aide informed the general secretary of the birthday. Brezhnev gave him the watch at that point. The funny thing is that Brezhnev had a reputation among foreign diplomats for asking if he could trade their watches for one of his, usually a mass-produced Soviet model.
87 Second Yeltsina interview.
88 Kaëta interview.
89 Manyukhin, Pryzhok, 50.
90 Kaëta interview. Beside the public-relations and morale-building side of these forays, Yeltsin could have a soft heart for those in need. Kaëta remembered an episode in the town of Severoural’sk when Yeltsin was approached by a female construction worker with four children, who said she was unable to feed her family on her wages. Yeltsin volunteered in front of the group to give her 100 rubles a month from his own salary. Kaëta doubted the woman ever received any of this cash, but suspected that Yeltsin found some other way to help her out.