Yeltsin, as workaholics will do, suffered from health issues of his own. Only expert medical intervention, some sources say, was to help him overcome symptoms of rheumatic valvular heart disease and acute angina in the mid-1960s.50 Before Moscow he had fainting spells from hypertension and from labored breathing in airless rooms. He was deaf on the right side, the result of a middle-ear infection that grew out of an untreated head cold. The arches in his feet had fallen and he had lower back pain from volleyball and other insults. And he had been operated on for an intestinal ailment. In 1977 Yeltsin visited Hospital No. 2 for a bad infection of the second toe in his right foot. The swollen foot would not fit into his shoe—but Ivan Kapitonov of the Central Committee Secretariat was arriving at Kol’tsovo for an inspection tour. Yeltsin took a scalpel from the surgeon, made two slits in the leather, and limped off to his limousine.51 With his selection to the Central Committee in 1981, Yeltsin’s health was in the charge of the “Kremlin hospitals” of the Fourth Chief Directorate of the Ministry of Health. He told friends that a Gypsy fortune-teller predicted he would die at age fifty-three. In 1984, the year he was fifty-three, he lost weight and muscle tone; a medical exam in Moscow came up dry, and he put it out of his mind.52 He would go to outlandish lengths, and not always successful ones, to cloak infirmities. One time, an otolaryngologist performed a small surgical procedure on him and he was groggy from the anesthetic. Rather than appear unsteady, Yeltsin had the orderlies roll him through the waiting room on a gurney, shrouded head to toe in a white sheet. The ruse backfired, and for days, it was rumored in Sverdlovsk that he had died.53
The vicissitudes of the younger generation ensured that Boris and Naina Yeltsin would rarely be alone in their spacious apartment. Their daughter Yelena enrolled in civil engineering at UPI after high school. Early in the course, and against her parents’ wishes, she married a school friend, Aleksei Fefelov. They parted and divorced shortly after the birth of daughter Yekaterina in 1979, and she and Yekaterina moved back in with Boris and Naina. Her father, nervous that Yelena’s problems might sully his reputation, sought the advice of Pavel Simonov, the subdepartment head for the Urals in the Central Committee Secretariat. Simonov calmed him down: For his CPSU superiors in Moscow, such things were personal, but, just in case, Simonov would brief them. “If Boris Nikolayevich had known at the time about the murky relationships within many other leadership families, he would not have worried. [He] never mentioned the topic again.”54 Several years later, Yelena married an Aeroflot pilot, Valerii Okulov; their daughter Mariya was born in 1983.
Then there was Tatyana Yeltsina, who was to be a political player after communism. As a girl, she was “a dreamer” who wanted to become a sea captain, and learned Morse code in preparation, but girls were not taken into the Nakhimov schools (for naval cadets). She then, like her father in the 1940s, longed to be a shipbuilder, and she figure skated and inherited his love for volleyball. Teachers and schoolmates have testified that she was weighed down by high expectations and illness. Graduating from School No. 9 in 1977, she announced to her parents that she planned to study in faroff Moscow. She did not want to repeat the experience of her sister, whose 5s at UPI, she said, were unjustly devalued as having been awarded po blatu—as part of the Soviet web of reciprocal favors: “I wanted to go away, to where no one knew my father.” He overruled Naina, and Tatyana went off to study computer science and cybernetics at Moscow State University. There she married fellow student Vilen Khairullin, an ethnic Tatar, in 1980 and had a son, Boris, in 1981. This union, too, failed, and she spent the year after the birth with her parents in Sverdlovsk before returning to Moscow to finish her diploma.55 Boris Nikolayevich at last had a male offspring. He was exhilarated that his grandson bore the legal name Boris Yeltsin.56
Professionally, Yeltsin was every inch the boss he had told his mother he would become. He savored the chief apparatchik’s role. His time as Sverdlovsk first secretary, he was to say in 1989, brought him “the best years of my life” up to then.57 Receipt of the Order of Lenin upon his fiftieth birthday in 1981, with a crimson flag, crimson star, and hammer-and-sickle surrounding a disc portrait of Lenin in platinum, rounded out his set of official awards. It came with an ode to “services rendered to the Communist Party and the Soviet state” and was presented in the Moscow Kremlin. Yeltsin’s personal records in the Sverdlovsk archive of the CPSU show him receiving one award while in the construction industry—his Badge of Honor in 1966—and nine as a party official. These included medals honoring the Lenin centenary in 1970, the thirtieth anniversary of victory over Germany in 1975, the centenary of Felix Dzerzhinsky (the founder of the Soviet secret police) in 1977, and the sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet Army in 1978; Orders of the Red Banner of Labor in 1971 and 1974; the Order of Lenin in 1981; a gold medal for his contribution to the Soviet economy in 1981; and a certificate of thanks from the obkom upon his departure in April 1985. Yeltsin held onto these medals after 1991, still proud of having earned them. They were stored in his home study and put on display at his wake in 2007.58
The boss Yeltsin of the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s must be evaluated in the context of the political and social order of the day. Roving far from the approved path was not in the choice set for the proconsul of the Soviet empire in a strategic province. The Ipat’ev House decision underlines the point. Yeltsin “could not imagine” balking at the Kremlin’s order. Had he, he “would have been fired” and whoever replaced him would have knocked down the building.59
A picture that incorporated nothing but orthodoxy, however, would overlook traits that differentiated Yeltsin from the typical CPSU secretary of his generation. There were signs of him holding back from the tedium of rites and routines. In television footage, he never wears his gold stars and medallions or busses dignitaries Brezhnev-style, although he does give out backslapping bear hugs. He seems more attentive than most to his wardrobe. His hair is suspiciously long for a member in good standing of the nomenklatura, and every few minutes he brushes a hank of it from his forehead. Ennui plays on his face as he drones on at conferences and sits through commemorations.
Substantively, Yeltsin nibbled at the edges of what was admissible in late Soviet conditions and presaged what he was to do in the reform era. He was a compliant activist—accepting of the system and ready to put body and soul into making it work, and yet able to make judicious intrasystemic innovations and accommodations.60
As the Soviet economy went downhill after 1975, Yeltsin repulsed calls to strangle what little Stalin had left of free markets in the USSR. When irate Sverdlovskers agitated in 1982 for caps on the prices of meat and fruit in the farmers’ bazaars, he branded them economic nonsense and lauded competition and self-sufficiency. “Prices in the marketplaces,” he said, “depend on supply and demand. In order to lower them, we mostly have to move more farm products to the bazaars and to develop the personal gardens of the province’s residents. Then… prices will fall.”61 In the state sector, Yeltsin adopted a device called the “complex brigade,” which decentralized some economic operations to small labor collectives and let them qualify for wage premiums. The formula, found here and there in the provinces since the 1960s, was “the closest approximation to entrepreneurial initiative the official Soviet economy ever tolerated.”62