Yeltsin

In wider context, Soviet society swaddled its members, young and old, and taught them to put collective over individual needs. Not to do so was to woo disaster. Boris Yeltsin cites his father as his role model in dutifulness. Fragmentary remarks and body language implied that Nikolai Yeltsin had no use for those who had inflicted such pain on him and his. As Boris pictured it in an interview, choosing his words with care:

He never was close to the communists and he never was a communist. This mirrored his conviction that communism was not the line Russia should take. . . . In general, it was not customary in our family to have conversations . . . about the Soviet regime, about the communists. But we did talk in a restrained way, in a very restrained way. In this connection, my father was more guided by principle [than my mother] and had a greater influence on me. He had his opinion, his point of view, and he defended it. And he taught me about being principled, for sure. He taught me a lot.³⁷

For the father, then, being “principled” meant, on the one hand, never praising those who had done you wrong. On the other hand, it meant bearing one’s cross stoically, a moral he had set aside in Kazan. And it meant abiding by the established rules and giving society and the Soviet behemoth their due. Nikolai Yeltsin did not wear a soldier’s uniform in the war; he most likely was needed more in Berezniki. His brother, Boris’s uncle Andrian, did serve and was killed at the front; brother Dmitrii was invalided home to Berezniki with an amputated leg and died of complications in the 1950s. Hard feelings from some of these events lingered for decades. Andrian’s son (Boris Andrianovich Yeltsin), who has spent all his life in Berezniki, said to a journalist shortly before Boris Nikolayevich’s death that Nikolai “used tricks to get out of going to the front, at the same time as my father died in battle.” Because they were ashamed, he claimed, Nikolai and his family turned their back on Andrian’s widow and son afterward.³⁸ Despite the strikes against him politically, Nikolai, the inventor manqué, did not back down in work-related disagreements. In the early 1940s, he paid from his own wages for specialists to take the train from Moscow to check a factory design he said was unsound; the outsiders bore him out. “He held his ground. . . . He risked his neck, even though, in the case of success, he had nothing to gain.”³⁹ At the construction site, he was a taskmaster, intolerant of the unproductive and the unpunctual, though never profane or screaming.⁴⁰

Boris Yeltsin knew about the iniquities of communism, which might in principle have turned him away from the Soviet dictatorship in toto. Asked in retirement about whether this was so, he said point-blank that it was not:

In those early years, when I was in school, I was not yet conscious of [the system]. I hardly could have been. It may be that awareness was forming subconsciously [podspudno], but I did not formulate it for myself, or I did not formulate it with any clarity. I was not that conscious of the perniciousness of Soviet power or of the communist regime. . . . Propaganda and ideology were everywhere. They took a person down one and the same track. There was no chance for him to deviate to the left or the right.⁴¹

Far from bucking the system, the adolescent Yeltsin was an amenable cog in it. He enlisted in the red-scarved Young Pioneers, the official Soviet organization for building character in young children, in 1939 or 1940, and in the Komsomol, the Communist Youth League, after his fourteenth birthday in 1945. He participated energetically in Pioneer and Komsomol assemblies and hobby circles, without taking a leadership position in either organization.⁴² When war broke out, he and his buddies “wanted to go to the front but, of course, we were not allowed.” So they played soldier games, making faux pistols, rifles, and cannon to act out their patriotic fantasies.⁴³