Yeltsin

Another bolt of lightning hit Boris Yeltsin’s parents. Nikolai, while admitted to the Butka kolkhoz, was looking even before his son’s birth for something better. This search led him to Nadezhdinsk, of all places, the little town near which his parents were to land in 1934. There he joined the great wave of peasants in quest of work in the new factories burgeoning in the Soviet Union’s first five-year plan. His 1950s autobiography tells us he “worked from 1930 to 1932 as a foreman” in Nadezhdinsk, presumably in the construction of a factory there.⁴⁹ His presence in Nadezhdinsk could not have been continuous. He was in Basmanovo to father Boris Nikolayevich in May or June of 1930, he was in Butka for the baptism in February or March of 1931, and he was attached to the Butka kolkhoz after Boris’s birth.⁵⁰ Spotty evidence suggests that Nikolai, Klavdiya, and their newborn spent the winter of 1931–32 in Nadezhdinsk and returned to the village after that.⁵¹ In December 1932 the kolkhoz chairman let Nikolai and his kid brother, Andrian, go somewhere else. The train they boarded was not to Nadezhdinsk or to Berezniki, as Yeltsin’s first book of memoirs says, but to Kazan, the polyglot capital of the republic of Tatariya, on the Volga River equidistant from Sverdlovsk and Moscow.

Ivan the Terrible conquered the Volga Tatar khanate at Kazan in 1552, annexed its territories, and opened it to Russian settlers and to Orthodoxy (the Tatars are Sunni Muslims). Lenin lived there for a few months in 1887 and was expelled from the local university for revolutionary activity. The population was a quarter million in 1932. The Yeltsin men signed on as woodworkers in Aviastroi, the syndicate constructing Works No. 124, an aviation plant, at the hamlet of Karavayevo, five miles north of the Kazan kremlin. The works was going to produce gleaming military aircraft designed by the illustrious aeronautical engineer Andrei Tupolev.⁵² Those who put it up were limited to pick and shovel, flatbed trucks, and hand tools. Nikolai was promoted to leader of a crew that built housing, an equipment depot, and a workshop in the assembly hangar. He also, it would seem, studied in the evenings in a technical school (tekhnikum) for construction personnel.⁵³ Klavdiya and her toddler lived with him in Barracks No. 8 in the settlement of Sukhaya River. A Russian “barracks” (barak) is a ramshackle wood shack, either unpartitioned or ranging bedrooms off of a long corridor; the Sukhaya River building had the latter plan. Nikolai and his wife and son had an unadorned family room to themselves; Andrian’s bachelor room was one door down. “Like nomads,” Klavdiya and Boris again flitted to Butka in the spring and back to Kazan when the snow flew. They kept up their shuttling between village and city, which was commonplace in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia, for several years.⁵⁴

On April 27, 1934—not in 1937—the young family’s world was turned topsy-turvy. OGPU officers, let in by the barracks commandant, collared Nikolai and Andrian Yeltsin and took them off in a “black crow” paddy wagon to the Kazan political prison. The arrest report said all their rooms contained were sticks of furniture and a smattering of letters and identification papers.⁵⁵ Six Aviastroi workers from Urals and Volga farm families had been under observation since January 1934. In conspiratorial mode, the OGPU gave them the code name Odnosel’chane, Countrymen, implying that they were from the same village or district. But they were not. Besides the two Yeltsins, there were Prokofii Gavrilov and his son Ivan, ethnic Russians from another part of the Urals, plus Vasilii Vakhrushev, whose nationality was Udmurt, a Finno-Ugric minority, and who was from Udmurtiya, and Ivan Sokolov, a Russian from Tatariya. The file bulged with materials from their home villages and the Kazan workforce. Three weeks of bullyragging led to accusations of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” a crime under the infamous Article 58, Section 10 of the Russian penal code. On May 23 an OGPU tribunal, ruling on Case No. 5644, found them guilty as charged and sentenced five of the six (the Yeltsins, the Gavrilovs, and Vakhrushev) to three years in a forced-labor camp, minus one month for time served; Sokolov, fingered as the inciter, got five years. If they had come into the police’s clutches in 1930 or 1931 or after 1935, they would have been much more liable to be tortured or put to death.⁵⁶