There was some political dissent in Sverdlovsk in the Brezhnev years, by individuals and, rarely, by very small organizations. A memo sent to the Central Committee Secretariat by Yurii Andropov on June 12, 1970, detailed the arrests in Sverdlovsk of seven members of a Party of Free Russia, later renamed the Revolutionary Workers Party. In 1969 they had run off 700 anti-Soviet pamphlets, stuck some to walls, and pelted 200 of them, from a viaduct over Cosmonauts Prospect, onto the official parade during the November 7 festivities. Student A. V. Avakov was jailed in 1975 for distributing 300 leaflets at Urals State University and reading out a speech made by Leon Trotsky in the 1920s. Around the same time, a League for the Liberation of the Urals put out flyers calling for a popular referendum on “autonomy of the Urals.” No culprits were found. In February 1979, during the election campaign for the USSR Supreme Soviet, an unnamed Sverdlovsk group called on citizens to vote against the official nominees: “Comrades, let us cross out the names of the sellout candidates. They will forget about us right after the election. It doesn’t bother them that the party has put itself above the people and above the law, that prices are rising and the stores are empty.” This, too, went into the cold-case file.39
Yeltsin would have been within eyeshot of the 1969 protest and would have heard about some of these incidents through party channels. After November 1976, as first secretary, he was more fully informed and had to invest in the cultural domination and ideological hygiene that engross all authoritarian regimes. As came with the job description, his reports to CPSU meetings were now flecked with paeans to political conformity and harangues against Western imperialism. In September 1977 he carried out a Politburo directive to raze the building on Karl Liebknecht Street in whose cellar Tsar Nicholas II, his family, and four of their retainers were killed after the Bolshevik Revolution by a firing squad. Ipat’ev House was the two-story mansion of Nikolai Ipat’ev, a Urals merchant; the Romanovs lived in it as captives from April 1918, when they were brought there by horse and carriage from Tobol’sk, until the execution the night of July 17–18.40 It was in connection with this place that Yeltsin came to the attention of Andropov, the leading Kremlin hawk on demolition. An Andropov letter to the Politburo is dated July 26, 1975; the bureau’s resolution assigning the Sverdlovsk obkom to tear the house down, and present it as part of “the planned reconstruction of the city,” is dated August 4. Since 1918 the building had been variously an anti-religious museum, dormitory, and storehouse. Andropov noted that it had attracted unwanted curiosity from Soviets and foreigners. Other sources say there was fear it would become an anti-communist shrine or a cause célèbre abroad, and that there might be trouble in 1976, the eightieth anniversary of Nicholas’s coronation.41 Why the act waited two years, and waited until Yeltsin replaced Ryabov, is uncertain, but scholars of the city and region told me in 2004 that local conservationists prevailed upon Ryabov to temporize. Brezhnev, says Viktor Manyukhin, sent a note to Yeltsin in 1977 telling him to go ahead, as a United Nations committee was planning to discuss conservation of the home. Yeltsin was away on vacation when the destruction occurred.42 The foundation was filled with gravel and asphalted over.
The fifteen months Andropov was Soviet leader in 1982–84 were to bring out greater verbal rigor in Yeltsin. He huffed and puffed about imported films and pop music and about “duplicitous Januses” who debauched Urals youth with foreign culture and ideas. Yeltsin had subordinates detain in conversation party members who in the past wrote recommendations for Jewish acquaintances who later tried to emigrate to Israel. The hard-shell culture department of the obkom prevented one theater from staging a Russian play and banned six non-Soviet movies from local cinemas, while the department of propaganda and agitation stiffened controls over photocopiers.43 In May 1983 a hue and cry in the Central Committee apparatus led Yeltsin to haul on the carpet the editor of Ural magazine, Valentin Luk’yanin, whose infraction had been to publish “Old Man’s Mountain,” a novella by Sverdlovsk writer Nikolai Nikonov about social decay in the Russian countryside. The work was already bowdlerized, having been worked over by the Sverdlovsk branch of Glavlit, the Soviet censorship agency, but even in that form it was too close to the bone for the apparat. Yeltsin forced Luk’yanin to own up to wrongdoing before the obkom bureau but left him in the editorship. At the July 1983 plenum of the oblast party committee, Yeltsin also denounced Valerian Morozov, an engineer from Nizhnii Tagil committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1982 for writing political letters to officials (in one to the Soviet procurator general he called the CPSU “a careerist mafia that has usurped power”) and for trying to send a manifesto abroad. Morozov, Yeltsin pointed out sternly, composed “a plump revisionist manuscript” and went to the city of Gorky to try to meet with “the not unknown anti-Soviet element [antisovetchik] Sakharov.”44 Andrei Sakharov, the father of the USSR’s hydrogen bomb, human rights advocate, and 1975 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, had been exiled to Gorky in 1980 for protesting the invasion of Afghanistan. Luk’yanin later painted Yeltsin’s doublespeak at conclaves such as these as typical of the man: “He always knew in advance what decision needed to be taken and moved toward it like a tractor or tank…. He spoke very authoritatively and unconditionally…. This was the essence of the party’s policy. He was a glorious executor of it.”45
A quarter-century after graduating from Urals Polytechnic, Yeltsin had achieved levels of status and prosperity in excess of what he could have envisaged. And he had experienced the personal passages, sweet and sour, that midlife brings. Vasilii Starygin passed away in Butka in 1968. Yeltsin’s last surviving grandparent, Afanasiya Starygina, lost her bearings and tried several times to make her way back to her birthplace, Basmanovo. She died after wandering off in 1970; the body was never found.46 In 1973 Nikolai Yeltsin suffered a stroke. He and Klavdiya moved from the Butka house to Sverdlovsk to live with their divorced and childless son, Mikhail, in his apartment on Zhukov Street. Nikolai died in May 1977. Between Boris and Mikhail, a construction foreman, there were hard feelings about parental care and other family business, and Boris averted the appearance of favoritism. He is said to have commented to a colleague, “I earned everything in life on my own, so let him do the same.”47 Their sister completed her studies at UPI in the late 1960s, moved home to Berezniki, and, as Valentina Golovacheva, worked as an engineer and raised two children. She was to divorce her husband and migrate to Moscow in 1995 to work in a low-level Kremlin position, when Boris was president of Russia,48 but Mikhail took early retirement and did not leave Sverdlovsk. Naina Yeltsina’s widowed mother, Mariya Girina, was also in Sverdlovsk, having moved from Orenburg. After the deaths of her father, Iosif, and two of her five siblings in road accidents, Naina developed a claustrophobic fear of cars and airplanes.49