Yeltsin

Yeltsin’s exegesis of the years in Berezniki is the most novelistic section of his memoirs, yet it skimps on details and is not always reliable. Two years, 1937 to 1939, were inactive, a respite from education, at home with his mother and baby brother, after the kindergarten in Kazan.²⁵ Six years, 1939 to 1945, were passed at Railway School No. 95, an elementary school operated by the transport ministry (Yeltsin does not name the school), and four, 1945 through 1949, at the municipal Secondary School No. 1, or the Pushkin School (this one he does name), which offered ten years of instruction. The company Boris kept was almost exclusively male. Many of his friends in the first school were the sons of army officers stationed at a military college moved to safety in Berezniki from Leningrad.²⁶ The Pushkin School, under Soviet policy, was converted to an all-boys school in 1946, his second year there.²⁷ Above him, though, at school as at home—and more widely in a society where tens of millions of able-bodied men were in military service or had given their lives in it—those in authority were often female. Of 26 to 27 million Soviet deaths in the war, about 20 million were male. In 1946 women in their twenties outnumbered men by about 50 percent. Two million soldiers from the Urals served in the war and more than 600,000 died.²⁸

Yeltsin as memoirist vouched for the importance to him of the formative phase of his life—of “childhood, out of which come all the models that the person assimilates firmly and forever.”²⁹ It is at this labile time that we find him evincing what I think of as his personal scripts, characteristic bunches of attitudes and behaviors that recur in his adult life.³⁰ He acted out five of them, turning on survival, duty, success, testing of his powers, and rebellion.

Grinding poverty, acquaintance with oppression, and a punitory father all dictated that Boris Yeltsin take care of brute survival and the basics of life. From the outbreak of war with Germany in 1941 until 1947, Berezniki schools had no central heating, only stoves fed with firewood, and the inkwells froze in the winter months. Like the other pupils, Yeltsin frequently wrote his lessons on scissored-up paper wrappings. The family “made ends meet as best they could,” his friend Zhdanov remembers.³¹ The phasing out of food rationing in the mid-1930s went with a slight improvement in supply in Berezniki, although to levels below the experience of most Westerners.³² Rationing was reimposed during the war. His mother would say much later:

Hunger returned to us in the first winter of the war [1941–42]. Borya would come home from school, sit in the corner of the room, and begin to moan inconsolably, “I’m h-u-n-g-r-y, I c-a-n-’-t take it.” At moments like this, my heart would bleed because I had nothing to feed him with, not even a stale crust. All foodstuffs were being distributed through ration cards, and they were calculated at a minimal level. The daily norm for bread, practically the only thing they gave out, was 800 grams [about two pounds] for [manual] workers and 400 grams for their dependents. On the black market, they asked one-quarter of a month’s pay for a baguette. From time to time, I had to send the children to the restaurant in our neighborhood so they would be fed out of kindness. . . . The children and I had to swallow no small amount of pride because of this.³³

One can see how every drop of Polya’s warm milk was precious to the Yeltsins. Boris and his mother mowed hay in the summers, sold their half of the harvest to whoever wanted it, and bought bread with the proceeds. The year he was twelve, he herded sheep on a local farm. He carried pails of water, cooked, and darned his own socks and underwear. “My childhood went by rather cheerlessly,” he says in summary. “There weren’t delights or delicacies, nothing like that. We just wanted to survive, survive, and survive.”³⁴

The second, closely related script the boy lived by revolved around duties. In the family setting, he was a devoted son, especially in relation to his mother. A half-century after the fact, Klavdiya Yeltsina was to tell a journalist about the thirteen-year-old Boris—not Nikolai—coming to see her in the maternity ward after she gave birth to Valentina, bringing her tasty meals and embroidering a rug with a goldfish theme for her homecoming. When they planted their family garden with potatoes, “My older son would go to hill it and hoe it, without ever having to be reminded.”³⁵ Yeltsin also provided protection to his mother in the home. As he and his mother withheld from the published accounts, Nikolai, who beat Boris, also struck Klavdiya Yeltsina. When his mother was the victim, it was Boris’s turn to stand guard over her. He precociously took moral responsibility for a parent, following a pattern detectable in the younger years of many leading individuals.³⁶