Yeltsin

Debarking in 1937, the family found lodgings for several months in Usol’e, from where Nikolai commuted to work by ferry (there was no bridge over the Kama until the 1950s). After about a year shoehorned with three other households into a scruffy timber cottage in Berezniki, they were given one of the twenty rooms in a new two-story wood barracks, in the adjacent Zhdanovo Fields section of town. It had outdoor plumbing (privies and a well) and was so leaky and drafty that the children huddled on winter nights with a nanny goat. The animal, Polya, was also a source of fresh milk. In Confession on an Assigned Theme, Yeltsin fastened on the auditory porousness of the thin walls. Were any tenant to mark a name day, birthday, or wedding, someone would put on the windup gramophone “and the whole barracks would be singing. . . . Quarrels, conversations, scandals, secrets, mirth—the entire barracks could hear, everyone knew everything. It could be that is why I still remember the barracks with such revulsion.”⁷ Across the street was the city’s only public bathhouse, where a weekly soaping and soaking could be had for pennies. Next to it was the bustling farmers’ bazaar, one of the thousands in Soviet towns where peasants since 1935 had been allowed to sell, at unregulated prices, food they grew in plots behind their homes. On another side were sheds for the barracks dwellers’ goats, chickens, and geese, while cattle grazed in the unbuilt portion of Zhdanovo Fields. The log house and the barracks have long since been torn down.⁸

In 1944, in anticipation of Valentina’s birth, Nikolai used his construction skills and tools and, it may be hazarded, his connections with materials suppliers to erect a private house, as was permissible under Soviet legislation. It was in brick and stood on a parcel of land known as the Seventh Block, facing First Pond, the water reservoir for the old Stroganov mine. The home’s four rooms and a kitchen were enough to accommodate the Starygins comfortably when they arrived from Serov in 1945. Boris Yeltsin did not note this change of circumstances in his autobiography, saying only that they lived in the Berezniki barracks for ten years (the actual figure was about six) and passing over how they were housed after that. More than likely, he feared some readers would impute the family’s acquisition of such an asset to greed or privilege. A private house (but not the land beneath it, which was owned by the state) was a valuable nest egg, and protection against the inflation that ate into cash savings.⁹

A decade and a half after dekulakization, the Yeltsin house, which is still in use, was palpable betterment, and it spoke well of the esteem Nikolai was earning in the urban world. Ironically, it also re-created the rural ambience the family had lost and felt the need of. Grandfather and grandmother Starygin having moved in, the three generations cohabited, much as they would have in the Russian village, where they would have shared a house or lived within walking distance. Out in the yard were a woodpile, a vegetable garden, some poultry—and the small steambath Boris built for Vasilii Starygin in 1949. But the village continued to tug at the family’s heartstrings. In 1955 Nikolai was asked to act as chairman of a Urals collective farm—in the village of Urol, Molotov oblast—during an all-USSR campaign to recruit urban specialists for positions in the agrarian economy. He accepted, but the experiment failed, and he took back his technical job in the Sevuraltyazhstroi construction trust in two months.¹⁰ In 1959 he was sent to represent the trust at the USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements, the trade fair and amusement park in Moscow lorded over by Vera Mukhina’s steel statue of a brawny male worker and a peasant woman holding aloft a hammer and a sickle. When he received the invitation to the capital, which he had never laid eyes on, he could not believe his good fortune: “He read it out, grabbed his head, and bounded off to the office [to check it], although by the standards of those years he cut a figure that corresponded [to the honor].”¹¹ But the bright lights were not really for him. In 1962 Nikolai was to take a pension and, after a thirty-year absence, to repatriate to Butka with his wife, turning the wheel full circle. Klavdiya’s aging parents made the move with them. The sale of the Berezniki home allowed them to purchase a cozy cabin at 1 Korotkii Lane with cash.¹²