Yeltsin

Whatever the pretext, what came next was a long journey in convoy to the verge of nowhere: the uninviting and unfarmable environs of Nadezhdinsk, an ironworking center in the far north of Sverdlovsk province (1939 population 65,000), on the Kakva River 400 miles below the Arctic Circle. The Yeltsins and the ten or twelve other households removed with them could each bring only several sacks of belongings; tools and most of their cash and clothing, peasants’ sheepskin coats (tulupy) included, were taken away.⁴⁰ In the special settlements, exiles worked under police oversight and had 15 percent of their wages garnisheed to maintain the guard force. The outstations used people up: “The [housing] . . . was unfit for habitation. The lack of food and medical care consigned people to malnourishment and wasting away. Unsanitary conditions spread infections and epidemics of typhus, scarlet fever, and scurvy. All of this led to high mortality rates among the settlers.”⁴¹ In the worst years, 1932 and 1933, peasants in some remote northern places had to eat fallen draft animals, moss, and birch leaves.⁴²

Nadezhdinsk, which in a cruel jest means City of Hope in Russian (it was assigned the name Serov in 1939), held out not an iota of hope to the Yeltsins.⁴³ The outcasts subsisted in a dugout (zemlyanka), a concavity scooped out in the earth, with a wood coal fire for heat and a twig blind against the elements. The only organized industries in the virgin land around Nadezhdinsk were forestry and mining, which Ignatii was too old and arthritic to do. By grace of the police, he was given a few trips back to Butka to fix farm machinery for the kolkhoz. That was his only comfort. Destitute and distraught, he lost his sight and went into mental collapse. Ignatii Yekimovich died a broken man in 1936, at the age of sixty-one, far short of ninety. His widow was let out of the area in 1936 and moved to Berezniki to live with her eldest son, Ivan, and died there before her time in 1941.⁴⁴

The story did not end with the deaths of Ignatii and Anna. The gruesome truth is that all four of Yeltsin’s grandparents were victims in their own way of the terror. Vasilii Starygin had hired workmen in his homebuilding business, which was enough for him, too, to be dekulakized and deposited in Butka in 1930. In 1934, the same year the Yeltsins were transported north, the OGPU (the appellation of the Soviet political police in the first half of the 1930s) marooned Vasilii and Afanasiya Starygin in the selfsame subarctic precinct. At Nadezhdinsk/Serov they eked out a threadbare existence for eleven years. They apparently had some contact with the elder Yeltsins in the two years Ignatii and Anna spent in the area. A little younger and in better health, the Starygins were more adaptable than their relations by marriage. Vasilii built himself and his wife an above-ground cabin. He kept his sanity and kept afloat economically by making furniture and cabinets and selling them locally.⁴⁵ Boris Yeltsin and his mother, he was to say in an interview, paid calls on the grandparents in the summertime and helped out with the gardening.⁴⁶

The riddle of how the grandfather could die in the 1930s and miraculously reappear in the 1940s is thus solved: The first grandfather in Yeltsin’s transcription is his father’s father, Ignatii Yeltsin; the second is his mother’s father, Vasilii Starygin. Starygin was the master carpenter, not the blacksmith and mill owner, which would explain why his opinion would have been so treasured by Boris Yeltsin as he pondered going into construction and why Starygin would have wanted his grandson to prove himself with the steambath project. Dekulakized peasants and many administrative deportees in the Soviet Union were allowed out of their places of servitude after the war, especially if a close relative had fought in it; the rest were to be freed after Stalin breathed his last in 1953.⁴⁷ Possibly since several family members had been in the army, the Starygins, both of them still spry, were discharged in 1945. Nikolai and Klavdiya Yeltsin fetched her parents in Serov and brought them to Berezniki to share quarters with them and their children. They were to live to the ripe old age of ninety-one (for Vasilii Yegorovich, who would die in 1968) and eighty-nine (for Afanasiya Kirillovna, who died in 1970). From the same peasant stock and locale as Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin, they outlasted them by three decades.⁴⁸