Nikolai and Klavdiya, she said in 1991, two years before her death, agreed that it was a big job “raising a good person who does not run around the streets like a waif or come into bad company.”15 None of the siblings smoked, played cards or dice, used smutty language, or touched liquor. Any trespass on this code would have been condemned in the classroom as well as in the home. Teachers at the schoolhouse where Boris studied after the war would order the pupils to shun for an entire month any pupil with the odor of tobacco on his or her breath; for the smell of alcohol, the penalty was a one-week suspension from classes and a stern note to the parents. At the age of sixteen, Yeltsin intercepted another adolescent in the act of buying a glassful of vodka at a roadside stand; he prudishly poured the liquid on the sidewalk, paid the vendor for it, and walked off. Unlike cigarettes, gambling, and swearing, drinking was one thing in which he would indulge in later life. His old classmate Sergei Molchanov, who lived in Berezniki until his death in 2006, was sure that the first alcohol that Yeltsin ever touched was the glass of champagne he was given to sip at his secondary-school graduation party in 1949.16
The growing boy had his mother’s square physiognomy. To her, whom he had all to himself during Nikolai’s interlude in the Gulag and then frequent stays at construction jobs, were his warmest attachments. “My mother,” he said in a judgment echoed by everyone who knew her, “was a very kind woman, tender and caressing.” “I . . . loved her considerably more than my father,” he added.17 In disposition, Boris Yeltsin always stressed how much he took after the man of the house: “My father’s character was gruff [krutoi], like my grandfather’s, and I suppose this was passed on to me.” The context indicates the grandfather referred to here is Ignatii Yeltsin (Nikolai’s father), but Vasilii Starygin (Klavdiya’s father), whom Boris Yeltsin knew far longer and better, did not give up much to Ignatii in the gruffness department. In the late 1940s, he was “an imposing codger with a long beard and an original mind,” Yeltsin wrote, and as “unregenerate and obstinate” as they come.18 In a press interview on turning seventy-five in 2006, Boris Yeltsin attributed “my emotionalism and explosive character” to Starygin: “This was inborn. It was handed on to me from my grandfather [Starygin]. My grandmother was afraid to cross him.”19
Between father and son, Nikolai and Boris, bullheadedness on both sides and a rivalry for Klavdiya’s affection, aggravated by Nikolai’s absences, by his binge drinking, and by the wide spacing of the children, made for a fraught relationship. In his first memoir volume, Yeltsin tells of Nikolai strapping him with a leather belt and of the arguments this kicked up between his parents. He would endure it mutely—and his father for his part would also say nothing—until his mother, “my constant protector,” came to the rescue and shooed Nikolai away.20 In one theory about the beatings, Yeltsin’s submission is said to point to masochism in his makeup.21 It is a cockamamie theory: Russian peasant boys took corporal punishment without a murmur; girls could cry, but not boys. Yeltsin took no joy in it and finally pushed back. At fourteen or fifteen, he demanded that Nikolai refrain from pummeling him and leave him in charge of his own character formation. “We are not in the time of the tsars,” Klavdiya remembered him saying to his father, “when it was all right to thrash people with birch rods.” It was then that Nikolai stopped the beatings.22 There is no way to know how often these whippings were administered or at what age they began. Boris Yeltsin’s account says his father brought him into the bedroom, closed the door, and laid him on the bed as he pulled out the strap. This would have had to be in the family house, built in 1944, since in the barracks they had only one room. One might infer from this that the punishment did not begin until the boy was around the age of puberty and did not last more than a year or two.
While the nurturing Klavdiya Vasil’evna took his side against her husband, she should not be turned into a cardboard saint. A boyhood friend, Vladimir Zhdanov, told a reporter in 2001 that Auntie Klava, as the local children called her, had teeth beneath the smile and did not coddle her son: “She was very strong-willed and strict. . . . [He] could not disobey her on anything. If she said, ‘Do your lessons,’ he sat right down and did them.”23 The mature Boris was to take a similar stance toward non–family members subordinate to him.
Nor did everything with Nikolai Ignat’evich have a sharp edge. There was an imaginative side to him, which Boris admired. Here is how he puts it in Confession:
My father was always trying to invent something. One of his dreams was to come up with an automated machine that would lay bricks. He would sketch it out, do drawings, think it over, make calculations, and then produce another set of drawings. It was a kind of phantom for him. Alas, no one has ever invented such a gizmo, although even now whole research institutes rack their brains over it. He would describe to me what his machine would be like and how it would work: how it would mix the mortar, put down the bricks, clean off the excess, and move along. He had worked it all out in his head and had drawn the general plan for it, but never realized the idea in metal.24
Nikolai bequeathed to his son this restlessness, his work ethic, a knowledge of carpentry, and the art of the folk percussion instrument, the wood spoons (lozhki), played by slapping one spoon against another and against the bended knee. He also handed the boy a love of the banya, the wet steambath that alternates sweating with cooling in fresh water or a pool and cleanses the skin, relaxes the mind, and, as Russians see it, strengthens the organism and prepares the bather for life’s trials. The bath is often taken in single-sex groups and in the culture can be conducive to male bonding, as it was at various times for Boris 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