Yeltsin

The sleepy community of Butka nestles just inside the southern and the eastern, Asiatic, margin of the middle Urals in undulating countryside mantled in birch, larch, red pine, and poplar. It lies at 56° 43’ north, the same line of latitude as the Alaska panhandle and Dundee, Scotland, and at 63° 46’ east, the approximate longitude of Herat, Afghanistan. It is 1,100 miles (two time zones) to the east of Moscow, 170 miles east of the continental divide, and 150 miles east of the largest Urals city, Yekaterinburg, known from 1924 to 1991 as Sverdlovsk. Butka is not as well-endowed agriculturally as many corners of the Urals, and there are few minerals nearby. The name means “porridge” in the languages of the Tatars and Bashkirs, the Turkic groups whose tribes, before their subjugation to the Russian crown, held sway in the swath of territory straddling the southern and central Urals. The reference is to the swampiness of the site, on the Belyakovka River.¹ The shallow and silty Belyakovka, less than fifty miles in length, curls southwest to northeast through Butka, where it was fifty feet wide in 1900; it is twenty or thirty feet wide there today. Through the Pyshma, it drains lazily into the Tobol, Irtysh, and Ob Rivers in west Siberia (the Irtysh and Ob form the world’s fourth longest river system) and on to tidewater at the Arctic 700 miles away.

Legend has it that the Russians who initially settled at Butka were deserters from the host of Yermak Timofeyevich, the Cossack buccaneer who carried Ivan the Terrible’s writ over the Urals in the 1580s. Be that as it may, we know from the state chronicle that on November 1, 1676, the governor of Tobol’sk, the Russian fort at the junction of the Tobol and the Irtysh, granted a petition by the peasants Ivashka Sylvenets and Tereshka Ivanov for leave to found a sloboda, a government-chartered village, at Butka. They were to survey the spot, construct a palisade against raiders, and “invite free and unattached people” to move there.² Built to secure Russia’s borderlands, villages of this type offered peasants arable land, tax exemptions, and a measure of self-government. Butka had expanded bit by bit to a hundred souls when the German naturalist and explorer Johann Georg Gmelin came upon it in 1746, and to 825 in the imperial census of 1897. The nearest towns of any size were Shadrinsk, the district seat, fifty miles to the south on the Iset River, and Talitsa, on the Pyshma, twenty miles north of Butka and astride the highway and railroad to Siberia. Transport to and from the village was either by water or, if by land, along a horse trail to Talitsa, which it took ten or eleven hours to cover most seasons of the year and twice as long during the vernal and autumnal muddy seasons.³

Unpretentious Butka in 1900 shared much with the habitat of most of the tsar’s subjects. It was now a regular village (selo), a category for a relatively large settlement with a parish church and some government offices. There was no trace of the palisade. One-story wood cabins, thatched and with hand-carved window frames, and heated by tiled clay stoves, hugged several main streets and the rutted byways that meandered off from them. Everyone kept a dairy cow and tilled the fields rimming the village and the potato and vegetable patches out their back doors. The average growing season in Butka being 150 days and the soil being saline, seldom did the surfeit for the market amount to much. The young and strong cut timber or worked in the sawmill opened in 1914, which had 100 employees. Handicraftsmen made barrels, pottery, coal-tar soap, boots, and fur hats and put together sledges, carts, and spinning wheels. Amenities were sparse. The Orthodox Church of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, built in stone around 1800, had a wood attic and a belfry adjacent. Water was taken from wells and roadside pumps, and women did their laundry by hand in the river. There was a small library as of 1908 but no school and no doctor. A few clerks were the only representation from government.