Yeltsin

Nikolai Ignat’evich did his time at the Dmitrov camp on the Moscow-Volga Canal, the Suez-size dig to open up the capital to Volga water and shipping, which was the most pharaonic project in Stalin’s Gulag. The work, as a bearer and carpenter, was backbreaking and hellishly unsafe. Death rates among the canal’s almost 200,000 inmates were high. One in six was claimed by exposure, accidents, and disease in 1933 alone, so Nikolai’s chances of making it through three years were maybe fifty-fifty.⁶⁴ He did make it, however, and was released seven months early. Aleksei Litvin is convinced there was an explicit deal for him to do post-Gulag work duty in Berezniki, and his discharge form from the Dmitrov camp did say he was bound for Berezniki.⁶⁵ This, though, would not explain why Nikolai did not go there directly.

In October 1936 Nikolai Ignat’evich was restored to his wife and son at the Petrovs’ in Kazan. His registration papers said he was unemployed, that is, not formally signed up at a state workplace, in 1936–37. He must have found some work in the informal sector to put bread on the table. He may also have re-enrolled at the construction tekhnikum where he had taken classes before his arrest.⁶⁶ Further reason to tarry in Kazan was Klavdiya’s pregnancy with their second child. Mikhail Yeltsin was born in July 1937. The six-year-old Boris was godfather at his christening. Right after, on July 31, the four pulled up stakes for Berezniki and the Urals, trundling their every possession in a wood laminate trunk. Vasilii Petrov was released from captivity and died in late 1937; his wife lived until 1966 and Nina until 2002. Klavdiya Yeltsina and the Petrovs corresponded and then lost track of one another during the war. As a mark of gratitude, Boris Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, bought Nina and her family a two-room apartment in Kazan in 1999, using Yeltsin’s book royalties; in 2006, on a visit to the city, she laid flowers on Nina’s grave.⁶⁷

The Yeltsins’ destination in 1937 was on the upper Kama River, some 400 miles northeast of Kazan (which is near where the Kama, flowing south, empties into the Volga) and 100 miles north of the major city of Perm. Berezniki lay over the proverbial Russian salt mines. First at the mouth of the small Zyryanka River on the left bank and later in the right-bank town of Usol’e, the Stroganovs, a monied merchant family from Novgorod, had begun in the sixteenth century to extricate unpurified sodium chloride out of the ground and refine it through desiccation and boiling. The saltworks went into decline in the eighteenth century, undersold by product from the Volga basin. In the nineteenth century, admixtures of calcium and magnesium chlorides were discovered in the local brine; these could be separated out through ammonia treatment and used as ingredients for fertilizers, industrial chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. The Belgian company Solvay and a Russian shipbuilder, Ivan Lyubimov, constructed a soda plant in the village of Churtan in 1883. Communist planners were taken with the area’s potential after 1917, and opened Russia’s first radium mill there in the 1920s. In the first five-year plan, they made it the epicenter of the Soviet chemical industry—a “republic of chemistry,” in a shibboleth of the day. The municipality of Berezniki was formed in March 1932 as an amalgamation of Churtan, the other four villages over the salt beds on the left bank of the Kama, and Usol’e, which was to be severed from it in 1940.

As a sign of the times, the city had its own penal colony, an arm of the camp complex at the conflux of the Kama and the Vishera, the first Gulag outpost in the Urals. The encampment on Adamova Hill, assigned in May 1929 to build the Berezniki Potash Combine on log piles driven into a bog, had as many as ten thousand workers in the early 1930s. Convicts were needed because free laborers did not want to go to Berezniki, which was short of housing and food and had had an outbreak of typhus in 1930. As the OGPU (renamed the NKVD in 1934) reassigned the prisoners to new building sites, other workers, many of them former inmates or indigent deportees under police restrictions, took their place. “The mass of the builders of the city were exiles and resettled people—dekulakized peasants from central Russia, Tatariya, and Ukraine, politically unreliable elements, counterrevolutionaries, intellectuals, and so forth. Later [during World War II] they would be joined by [deported] Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, et cetera.”⁶⁸ Berezniki was a venue for the dregs of society, as those who ruled Soviet society defined it.