Yeltsin

Why the amnesia? A misplaced shame about trouble with the powers-thatbe, implanted in the Yeltsins by Soviet education and propaganda, was surely part of it.⁷² A sense of proportion, a mental barometer of sorrow, was also involved. For Klavdiya Yeltsina, having let Goryun in on her father-in-law’s wretched death, it would have been indecent to speak in the same breath about her parents, who got through their purgatory alive. Another dampener, symptomatic of the times, was a conspiracy of silence inside the nuclear family. A nephew of Nikolai and Klavdiya’s from Butka who boarded with them in Berezniki for two years in the late 1950s never heard them refer to Nikolai’s arrest, and in an interview with me in 2005, in Butka, swore that it was a fiction.⁷³ About the incarceration, Yeltsin wrote in Notes: “My father never spoke with me about it. He erased this piece of his life from his memory as if it had never been. The family was forbidden to talk about the subject.” When I asked him about it, he repeated these words almost verbatim.⁷⁴ The autobiographical note Nikolai wrote in Berezniki did not mention the OGPU and the Gulag.⁷⁵ Klavdiya Yeltsina was more loquacious and more agitated. Goryun concludes on the basis of his contact with her that she “felt herself innocently wronged” and “could not have failed to tell her children . . . about the tragic occurrences of the 1930s.”⁷⁶ To my question in 2002 about whether his mother was more unforgiving of the family’s pain than her husband, Yeltsin nodded yes but did not go into detail. And he indicated his familiarity with the Yeltsins and Starygins having been pauperized and stigmatized: “I did not approve of dekulakization, I did not support it. I was hurt for my grandfather [Starygin], whom I loved, and for my father and mother.”⁷⁷ But being hurt and verbalizing the source of the hurt were two different responses.

We can take Yeltsin at his word that until he held Nikolai Yeltsin’s OGPU interrogation file in his hand in the 1990s he was uninformed about many details of the victimization of his family. He also says in Notes that, if he had come by this information earlier, he would have understood the “banal horror” of Stalinism and his life might have “taken a different turn.”⁷⁸ This is more problematic, in that Yeltsin was not unaware of the police state and knew generally how it had impinged on his kin. A different political turn in the Soviet 1930s or 1940s would have been impossible. The Urals, like Russia and the USSR as a whole, were bombarded with word of the misdeeds of saboteurs and spies. The Urals party leadership under Ivan Kabakov was purged by Stalin in 1937 as a “right-wing and Trotskyite center,” and officials, intellectuals, and factory directors were arrested by the thousands. Agitprop encouraged citizens to pass on to the police anonymous tips about loose talk. “People had to answer for it if they made remiss statements about Soviet reality or maintained relations with friends or relatives who had been condemned as ‘enemies of the people.’”⁷⁹ In 1937 and the first nine months of 1938, when the Perm area was still part of Sverdlovsk region, most political prisoners under sentence of death were convoyed to the provincial capital for execution. At a killing field just west of Sverdlovsk, some seven thousand men and women from places like Perm and Berezniki were shot in those twenty-one months, an average of eleven a day. A memorial cross was put up there in the 1990s.⁸⁰

For those who came of age in the shadow of such barbarism, Yeltsin among them, putting a lid on the recapitulation of terror was a psychological defense mechanism and insurance against repercussions from babbling about it. The trouble was that over the years and the decades the repression fed on itself. The later the sufferings of the elders were owned up to, the more the silence had to be explained, which in turn raised the cost of making a clean breast of it and finally moving on.

CHAPTER TWO

Scripts

Nikolai and Klavdiya Yeltsin, their vagabondage over, settled down in Berezniki, as did Nikolai’s three brothers. Boris lived with his parents there until he headed for Sverdlovsk and a higher education in 1949.

Berezniki was the second city of Perm oblast’, the principal Soviet term for province after 1929. At 59° 24’ north, it is set in taiga of spruce, silver fir, and the spindly birches that lend it its name (bereznik or bereznyak is birch wood), and has only 100 to 110 frost-free days a year. In population, it was 65,000 in 1939, not counting internees, and maybe 80,000 in 1950. The Perm area, having been part of a region centered in Sverdlovsk since 1923, was made an oblast in 1938, the last section of the Urals freed from the control of Sverdlovsk. From 1940 to 1957, it and its capital would bear the name Molotov, after Stalin henchman Vyacheslav Molotov.