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
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
About male child Yeltsin and the received wisdom, the most that can be said is that he was youthfully inquisitive and entertained half-formed representations of abuse. He purchased at a bookstore and borrowed from the Berezniki town library volumes out of the collected papers of Lenin—of whom there was (and is) a life-sized statue in the courtyard of the Pushkin School—so as to understand for himself the revolution of 1917. He had found the answers in the textbooks unsatisfying and was thrown by citations in Lenin of revolutionaries who were nonpersons under Stalin. He did not read the sterilized, Stalin-edited Short Course of party history: “I understood I would not find the answers there. I wanted to get an answer from Lenin.” He gave his notebooks to brother Mikhail when he left for college.44 Boris’s concern with Lenin fit with the general style of a Stalinist political education, which “was based on devotion not so much to ideas as to specific leaders who were identified with them.”45