General Secretary Brezhnev, who had worked as an agricultural functionary in the Sverdlovsk region from 1929 to 1931, at the time of collectivization and dekulakization, took no particular interest in Sverdlovsk or the Urals. The one time he scheduled a visit to the city when Yeltsin was first secretary was the night of March 29–30, 1978, en route to Siberia. The local leadership, waiting with bouquets in hand at the main railroad station, looked like dolts when his train whizzed through the junction with the blinds drawn, no excuses offered. Behind closed doors, Yeltsin was contemptuous of Brezhnev’s vanity and sloth, and he professes to have foiled a suggestion from Moscow to create a Brezhnev museum in Sverdlovsk premises where he once had an office.24 For public consumption, he played along with the Brezhnev personality cult, although he was less rhapsodic than some of the provincial potentates and toadied less over time.25 But as Brezhnev’s seventy-fifth birthday, in December 1981, neared, Yeltsin ordered that words about Brezhnev as a leader “of genius” (genial’nyi) be folded into the obkom salutation. He later agreed to suggestions from the scribes to tone down the language, aware that blarney could be overdone. Sverdlovsk’s gift for the birthday was a kitschy likeness of Brezhnev in full regalia, done in semiprecious Urals stones. Craftsmen had to be flown to Moscow to update it when the Politburo padded out his chestful of medals before the mosaic could be presented.26
It has been intimated that Yeltsin’s attitude to the perks of office at the start of his career was one of indifference.27 Perhaps this was so, but that attitude was soon inoperative. He was permitted what corresponding members of the nomenklatura had in other parts of the USSR. Soon after he went to the obkom apparatus in 1968, the Yeltsins were allotted a four-room apartment, their largest yet, in a shiny new building on downtown Mamin-Sibiryak Street. Yelena and Tatyana studied at the close-by School No. 9, the best in Sverdlovsk, where the program was heavy in mathematics and science. For summers and weekends, they had use of a two-family dacha, their first, in Istok, east of Sverdlovsk.
As oblast party secretary, Yeltsin in 1975 was given four rooms in the House of Old Bolsheviks at 2 Eighth of March Street, built for revolutionaries from the Urals and Siberia, many of whom during Stalin’s purges were led off from their apartments to the Gulag or death. Better-appointed digs in the building were assigned in 1977. In 1979 the family moved into a highceilinged, five-room apartment (living room, dining room, study, and two bedrooms) in a sepulchral new VIP edifice at 1 Working Youth Embankment—palatial for the Soviet Union. The house gave out onto the Town Pond and 1905 Square, the promenade where the Sverdlovsk leadership reviewed the May 1, May 9, and November 7 parades.28 The household had no domestic help: Naina Yeltsina cooked, took out the trash to a bin in the courtyard, and ironed Boris’s shirts and pants. The shabbily built House of Soviets, the twenty-four-story party and government tower on Ninth of January Street, begun by Ryabov and opened in 1982, was a stroll away. Here was Yeltsin’s first office with air conditioning, which was exotica in the Urals.29 Without leaving the building he could place orders for foods unavailable in local stores or have himself fitted for clothing chargeable to his personal allowance. A stone’s throw from Yeltsin’s front door, the secluded Hospital No. 2, infested with KGB bugs, ministered to several thousand elite clients.30
A twenty-minute ride north of Ninth of January Street would take Yeltsin to the obkom bureau’s dacha hideout at Baltym, to which he was admitted in 1975. Dacha No. 1, just inside the gatehouse, was booked for him in 1976. In earshot of a growling highway, its charms again were not lush: three sleeping rooms, a parlor, a kitchen and eating area with a fireplace, and a billiards hall. Other families were put up two to a dacha, sharing latrines and kitchens. Outside lay a swimming pool, a volleyball court, and a canteen. In the temperate months, Yeltsin had the cottagers and their wives don gym togs for Wednesday evening and Sunday volleyball matches. Volleyball facilities figured large in obkom resolutions about mass athletics and fitness.31 In winter, there were cross-country ski runs and volleyball in a Sverdlovsk gym. Indoors at Dacha No. 1, there was billiards, with the first secretary showing off behind-the-back and left-handed shots. Yeltsin was a crabby loser in these contests. After his side was outpointed in several hard-fought volleyball matches, he sulked and made ready to depart. Oleg Lobov, captain of the opposing team, defused the situation by inviting Yeltsin to join him as a twosome against a full six. They won the rematch—with some help from their opponents—and Yeltsin went to the showers with his dignity unharmed.32
Over time, Yeltsin indulged in a more baronial taste—for hunting. As deputy chairman of the oblast government, his former guardian angel in the party apparatus, Fëdor Morshchakov, an avid marksman, organized the shooting of ducks in the spring and fall and wild elk in the winter. Yeltsin had a collection of guns, preferring a Czechoslovak-made Ceská Zbrojovka carbine—bought for him as a gift by obkom staff in Prague in 1977—and gave chase in a UAZ all-terrain vehicle fitted out with racks and heaters.33 He went over the guest list name by name, saw to the bird limit of five per person, and began the pleasantries at mealtime. It is not small-minded to agree with Viktor Manyukhin that the bonhomie likely had an ulterior political motive as welclass="underline" “The tactic of keeping all under vigil… helped Boris Nikolayevich know everything about his colleagues [and]… see for himself that there were no groupings against him.”34
Liquor flowed at these events, especially when a session in the steambath was part of it for the males in the company. It was imbibed in the dressing room before and after and in the cooling-off intervals during the bath. The effects of alcohol are felt quickly in such heat. Yeltsin’s temperance had given way to drinking at or above the average level within the party elite. Thursday and Friday evenings were often taken up with banquets for “delegations” from Moscow or other provinces. It not infrequently fell to Yeltsin to act as tamada, toastmaster. He had high tolerance and a formidable capacity. The cosmonaut Vitalii Sevast’yanov, a native of Sverdlovsk oblast, once told of Yeltsin, on a stressful trip to Moscow in this period, knocking back three water tumblers of vodka, which might have held a cup of fluid each, to start off a repast at Sevast’yanov’s apartment.35 But Manyukhin, no yes-man for Yeltsin, portrays his conduct as unimpeachable:
Did Yeltsin drink when he worked in the Urals? Yes, he drank, like all normal people, and perhaps a mite more. With his expansive nature and character, on festive occasions Boris Nikolayevich loved to sit down to a good table with friends and comrades. Sometimes this would happen when he was out hunting, as is the practice with hunters. Yet, even after a “blowout,” Boris Nikolayevich, healthy and youthful as he was, was fresh and cheerful the next morning and made it to work on time.36
There were exceptions. Ryabov noted in his diary in February 1976, when Yeltsin was still obkom secretary for construction, that he had been flat on his back in bed for a couple of days after “a tempestuous celebration of his [forty-fifth] birthday.”37 A deputy chairman of KGB central, Gelii Ageyev, was apoplectic when Yeltsin diverted him to interminable receptions and dinners after he landed at Sverdlovsk’s Kol’tsovo airport during the 1979 anthrax crisis. Local notables hypothesized this was his way to prevent Ageyev from obstructing and from holding Yeltsin accountable for the outbreak. The general considered a written report to Brezhnev on Yeltsin’s conduct but backed off the idea.38 To larger questions, the drinking was tangential. Yeltsin had no pity for office drunks, as Manyukhin points out, and fired several factory directors for inebriation.