Yeltsin

Nikolai Yeltsin’s older brother, Ivan, was already in Berezniki, having been sent to involuntary labor there in 1935 for “subverting” grain procurement in Butka (he could not meet his quota despite selling all he had to make up the difference); he checked in with the NKVD but was not in lockup. Before 1936 was out, Nikolai and Ivan’s bereaved mother, Anna, had come to be with Ivan after burying her husband at Nadezhdinsk. Dmitrii and Andrian Yeltsin were soon to join them from Butka and Dmitrov. Nikolai got work in 1937 at Sevuraltyazhstroi, the North Urals Heavy Industry Construction Trust, and was assigned to the potash combine project. As an ex-convict, he would be banned until the mid-1950s from residing in Perm, Sverdlovsk, and the USSR’s principal cities and from membership in the Communist Party. Within those limits, he and his family lived a humdrum Soviet life unmolested. Only on July 15, 1989, was he to be exonerated of the 1934 charges, twelve years after his death, by a Gorbachevera commission.⁶⁹

Boris Yeltsin’s reaction to this palimpsest of misery is more important to his development than the raw facts are. Until the glasnost’ of the 1980s, censorship and political conformism bottled up many neuralgic truths about the Soviet past. The removal of restraints on the exterior did not do away with restraints on the interior. Klavdiya Yeltsina, replying to Andrei Goryun at the highwater mark of revelations about Soviet history, clammed up about the detention of her husband and their sojourn in Kazan. More astounding, she did not mention her parents’ loss or their stolen decade at Nadezhdinsk/ Serov. The years may have dulled an old woman’s memory; it is hard to believe that she did not remember the plight of, and her separation from, her mother and father. Boris Yeltsin cannot be blamed a half-century later for mistaking his age upon the jailing of his father for six rather than three. But a person could not as easily forget that the parent’s sentence, and time out of the nest, was measured in years and not in months. Yeltsin did not say anything about Kazan in Confession on an Assigned Theme; in autobiographical forms dating from the 1960s and 1970s, stored in the Communist Party archive, he had listed it as a place of residence.⁷⁰ Later, in the second volume of his memoirs, Notes of a President, and in visits to the city in the 1990s and in retirement, he was to recount having lived there.⁷¹ He had only fuzzy memories of Ignatii Yekimovich, although he did know Anna Dmitriyevna, who died in Berezniki when he was ten. Whatever he retained about his paternal grandparents, he knew that his maternal grandparents had been uprooted from Basmanovo and Butka and languished in the penumbra of the Gulag until moving to Berezniki and into his parents’ house in 1945. Yeltsin skirted the subject in Confession even though the book was rushed into print in time for his campaign for a seat in the Russian parliament in 1990 and word of his family would have been electorally useful. He still shied away from making known his grandparents’ fate in Notes of a President, which went to press in post-Soviet 1994. (Volume three, Presidential Marathon, was all about the 1990s.) For him, as for his mother, recall was selective and not only blurred.