Yeltsin

The investigation and summary trial were a travesty, a paranoid era in microcosm. It is plain from Aleksei Litvin’s sleuthing, though, that the defendants had “an ill-concealed dissatisfaction with conditions at the construction site.”⁵⁷ This provided the OGPU with ammunition for prosecution as a deterrent to their coworkers. The six, the formal indictment alleged, had underhandedly preyed on “the actual difficulties” with food and supplies at the factory. They grumbled about scarcity of their rationed provisions, soup made from rancid meat, a ban on solemnizing Orthodox Easter, and deductions from their pay packets for state bonds and to make donations to communists imprisoned in Austria. OGPU interrogators trolled for more political articulations, dragooning a laborer from Basmanovo, Sergei Kudrinskii, into testifying under oath to the Yeltsins’ kulak origins and to the twenty-two-year-old Andrian having said the people would be better off if a war broke out and the Soviet government was toppled. For Nikolai Yeltsin, no such words were hit upon, although his and Klavdiya’s bedroom in the tumbledown Barracks No. 8 was where the most inculpating conversations were said to have taken place. The canard that most occupied the inquisitors was offered by Maksim Otletayev, a Tatar carpenter, who gave information that Nikolai had prevented the workers from reading Soviet newspapers out loud at the Aviastroi site. The dossier shows the presiding officer staging an in-person meeting between Nikolai and Otletayev and peppering Yeltsin with queries on this and other venial offenses:

INTERROGATOR: Did you tell Otletayev not to read the newspaper and that he would not find anything in it anyway, and then tear it away from him?

YELTSIN: To say that there was nothing in the newspaper—I did not say that. As far as ripping the newspaper out of Otletayev’s hands is concerned, I did that unintentionally.

INTERROGATOR: Did you say we do not need to help workers who are rotting in prisons in capitalist countries?

YELTSIN: I don’t exactly remember. But I guess I said that because I am a simpleton.

INTERROGATOR: And with respect to the dining arrangements, [did you complain] when the dinner was bad?

YELTSIN: We discussed this in our crew when the food was lousy.⁵⁸

These equivocations and a steadfast denial of any lawbreaking, recorded in his signature on the indictment, were the best Nikolai Yeltsin could do in the OGPU snake pit. That he felt disaffection with the Soviet regime in 1934 is beyond question. It was anchored in the ravages of collectivization and forced-draft urbanization and in the lot of the Yeltsin and Starygin families. But it was his grousing about Aviastroi that got him into the police’s bad books. He faulted the newspaper readings mostly as a drag on productivity, as tallies with his crusty personality.⁵⁹ He and his brother, unlike many Soviets in Stalin’s time, begged off collusion with the police. When the OGPU approached them, the reed they grabbed was the same artifice of peasant simple-mindedness that Nikolai had pleaded in his interrogation. The OGPU papers sent to the camp specified they were “not subject to recruitment” as stool pigeons and were to be watched with special vigilance.⁶⁰

Boris Yeltsin cried himself to sleep the night his father was taken into custody. He was too young to follow it but “could see my mother was sobbing and how petrified she was.”⁶¹ The two were imperiled when the Aviastroi barracks prepared to kick them out after Nikolai’s sentencing. A Good Samaritan—Vasilii Petrov, a sixty-year-old medical orderly and World War I veteran who was Nikolai’s cell mate as they awaited trial—took pity on them and asked his wife, Yelizaveta, and young daughter, Nina, to help out. Help they did. They came upon mother and child crouched in the hallway, locked out of their room, and gave them sanctuary in the Petrov cottage on Sixth Union Street. Klavdiya Vasil’evna would scrape by, working as a seamstress at a Kazan garment factory, where she learned to read and write in an evening class, and as a baker’s helper at Bread Factory No. 2. The boy, Nina said in the 1990s, was “skinny, calm, and obedient.” “When his mama would say to him, ‘I’m going to work, sit here quietly,’ he did not fuss. . . . The only toy he had was a doll. He wasn’t to touch it, only to look at it. But kids will be kids. Borya played with little pyramids he made out of pieces of wood. In the winter he and I loved to go on toboggan rides.”⁶² In 1936–37 Boris attended a kindergarten in Kazan, perhaps one attached to the bakery.⁶³